Posts Tagged ‘police shootings’

Denver police shoot, kill young woman

Posted: January 27, 2015 by gamegetterII in Police state USSA
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DENVER (Reuters) – A young woman suspected of driving a stolen car filled with teenage passengers was shot dead by Denver police on Monday after she struck an officer with the vehicle as he approached on foot, authorities said.

Denver Police Chief Robert White told reporters that there were five very young people inside the car when the shooting occurred, and the person who was fatally shot “appeared to be a teenager.”

Her name and age were not immediately released.

White said the incident began when an officer responded to reports of a suspicious vehicle in an alley in the city’s Park Hill neighborhood.

The first officer on scene ran the plates on the car and was told it was stolen and called for back-up, White said. A second officer then arrived and when the pair approached the vehicle, the driver hit one of the officers with the car.

“Both officers fired several shots” at the driver, White said, and the person who was shot was later pronounced dead at a local hospital. The chief said the officer who was struck suffered a possible broken leg and was expected to recover.

http://news.yahoo.com/denver-police-shoot-kill-young-woman-struck-officer-224221994.html

USA!USA!USA!

officer-safety-pew-pew-pew-complete-power

Albuquerque police officer shot by fellow officer during drug bust

Posted: January 11, 2015 by gamegetterII in Police state USSA
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That’s what happens when the local police have all kinds of tacticool shit and no effin clue how to use it. There’s a huge lack of training for SWAT teams all over the USA-that’s why they do dumb assed shit like raid the wrong house,shoot a 5# dog because it was “acting aggressive” towards them,or shoot-often killing- innocent people in their own homes-innocent people who have committed no crime.

They get shot,the stormtroopers kill their Labradoodle,or toy poodle,or mini schnauzer, because it was being so mean to them that they were in fear for their life.

We need to ban these special snowflake SWAT teams,and these stormtroopers need to be held accountable when they raid the wrong home,shoot innocent people at said wrong home,and when they kill the family dog at the wrong home. When they shoot each other-who cares-one less stormtrooper to shoot your wife,your kid,and your dog,kick in your door,break windows to toss flashbangs in the hole where the glass used to be, toss a flashbang into the baby’s crib,break doors all through your home,ruin your carpeting,and tear all your belongings up and toss them all over the floors.

And cops wonder why so many people despise them??????

Here’s what the guys with the tacticool gear and no clue how to use it did this time…

“ALBUQUERQUE (Reuters) – An Albuquerque police officer shot and critically wounded a fellow officer during an undercover narcotics bust at a fast food franchise parking lot at around mid-day on Friday, police said.

Police would not release additional details of the shooting or of the nature of the officer’s injuries.

“Both officers involved were working in a plain clothes, undercover capacity and have been with the department for many years,” said Albuquerque Police Department spokeswoman Celina Espinoza said, adding that two suspects were arrested.

The incident comes after a federal investigation concluded the police department in the mid-sized U.S. city in New Mexico used excessive, even deadly, force against passive civilians.

In October of last year, Albuquerque and the U.S. Justice Department announced an agreement for the city’s police department to undergo reform and be monitored for use of excessive force.

Another police officer was shot during a traffic stop on Jan. 3. On Dec. 15, an Albuquerque police officer accidentally shot a bystander when his weapon discharged as he climbed through a window during a burglary investigation.

The officer in Friday’s underwent surgery at University of New Mexico Hospital, Espinoza said. A second undercover officer was treated and released from the hospital with minor injuries. She said she did not know the cause of the injuries.

Wallace Anderson, who was inside the restaurant at the time of the shooting, told broadcaster KOB 4 he saw two unmarked cars pull up.

“They surrounded this vehicle so it couldn’t back up and escape. At that point, the shots happened and a guy was dragged to the pavement,” Anderson said.”

http://news.yahoo.com/albuquerque-police-officer-shot-fellow-officer-during-drug-055419976.html

A drug informant lied, SWAT pounced, a man died

Posted: January 4, 2015 by gamegetterII in Police state USSA
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By Radley Balko December 31, 2014
Back in July, we looked at the case of Jason Wescott, a Florida man shot and killed by a police SWAT team during a drug raid over an alleged sale of $200 worth of pot to a police informant. The tragedy was exacerbated by the fact that according to friends and relatives, Wescott had been previously threatened by a man who had broken into his home. When he reported the threat to police they apparently told him, “If anyone breaks into this house, grab your gun and shoot to kill.” Officers from the very same police agency then raided Wescott over some pot. When he grabbed his gun, they killed him.All that would be appalling in and of itself. But a new report from the Tampa Bay Times shows that it’s actually quite a bit worse. The paper was able to obtain the identity of the informant that led to the raid on Wescott’s home, Ronnie “Bodie” Coogle. And he has a lot to say.

A 50-year-old felon and drug addict, Coogle was the principal Tampa Police Department informer against at least five suspects this year. He conducted nine undercover operations. In their probable-cause affidavits, his handlers called him reliable. Even Tampa’s police chief praised his “track record.”

Coogle said they were all wrong. He said he repeatedly lied about suspects, stole drugs he bought on the public’s dime and conspired to falsify drug deals.

One of those he lied about, he said, was Jason Westcott, a young man with no criminal convictions whom a SWAT team killed during a drug raid that found just $2 worth of marijuana. Critics from across the country condemned the Police Department’s handling of the case as an example of the drug war’s lethal excesses.

“They’re making statements that are lies, that are absolute untruths, that are based on shady facts,” Coogle said of Tampa police. “Everything they’re saying is based on the informant. And I was the informant.”

Coogle said he decided to step forward, exposing his identity and risking retribution from drug dealers, because of his remorse over Westcott’s death. “I’ve got morals, and I feel compassion for this guy’s family and for his boyfriend,” he said. “It didn’t have to happen this way.”

Coogle is nobody’s idea of a righteous whistle-blower. The only constant in his story is his own dishonesty; even when he confesses to lying you don’t know if he’s telling the truth.

Much of what he says can be neither proved nor disproved, in large part because of the Police Department’s minimal supervision of his work. But Coogle’s allegations against the cops who paid him, and even his own admissions of double-dealing, aren’t necessarily what’s most disturbing about his account.

Most unsettling of all might be what nobody disputes — that police officers were willing to trust somebody like him in the first place.

When you’re trying to gauge the honesty of statements from a habitually dishonest person, it’s helpful to look at motives. Coogle had plenty of motive to lie to police about drug investigations. He got paid for his tips. I’m not sure what motive he’d have to lie here. What he told the paper will almost certainly end his gig as an informant, and, as the except points out, will likely put him in the crosshairs of the people he has reported to the police. Here’s how his lies got Jason Wescott killed.

Westcott and Reyes didn’t know much about the ingratiating junkie who slept in their neighbors’ tool shed. He showed up at their house almost daily last winter, eating their pizza and smoking their pot. As a token of friendship he once gave them a vacuum cleaner he had stolen from Walmart.

“You could tell he wasn’t the greatest of people or whatever,” Reyes said. “Jason, he kind of befriended everybody, you know what I’m saying? And that’s where we went wrong.”

One day he asked if they could get him heroin. “I’m like, ‘I don’t even know what heroin looks like,’” Reyes recalled.

The shed-dweller was Coogle, of course, fresh out of jail and staying with his in-laws. And when he asked for heroin he wasn’t asking for himself.

Coogle said his police handlers had urged him to seek heroin from Westcott and Reyes, but Westcott rebuffed him. We’re not involved in any s— like that. We’re pot smokers, Coogle remembered him saying.

But Coogle said he didn’t think his bosses would like the truth, so he told them the couple was connected to a heroin supplier in New York. He said he picked the state simply because he knew Westcott was born there.

“It was a bull—- story,” he said.

He then says the police started to lie themselves.

On the night of April 8, Coogle said, he stepped into an unmarked truck waiting for him on Knollwood Street with bad news: Westcott had no pot to sell. But as he started to explain, he said, the detective in the driver’s seat glared and cut him off.

“He said, ‘No, you got a gram, right?’ ” Coogle recalled. “You could tell with the body language and the way he was talking that he didn’t want to drive away from there without doing a buy.”

Back at the rally point where other undercover officers had gathered — the parking lot of a Bravo Supermarket on Sligh Avenue — he said he and his handler sat in the parked truck and talked, the detective’s pen poised over a report to which Coogle would eventually sign his name.

“It was almost like he was reading me the Riot Act,” Coogle said. “He’s like, ‘Listen, we’ve got too much manpower out here tonight for us to come up dry.’ And after him saying that in a couple of different ways but saying the same thing, I caught on to what he was saying. And I said, ‘Yeah, I bought the gram.’ “

Police reports indicate Coogle bought $20 worth of marijuana from Westcott that night.

Coogle said it was one of two times he swore to buying drugs when a target he approached actually had none to sell. The second was a falsified $50 crack-cocaine purchase from the Sulphur Springs suspect, he said.

In both cases, he said, Tampa detectives assured him they weren’t doing anything wrong — just guaranteeing the arrests of people they knew were dealers. “Once they determine that there’s criminal activity,” he said, “after that nothing else counts.”

Coogle also says that police distorted his story about Wescott’s gun, the apparent reason for the decision to use the SWAT team to apprehend him. If you’ll remember back to the first post, there’s another reason to believe that Coogle is telling the truth, here. The police also initially claimed that the tip about Westcott’s drug dealing came from neighbors, not a drug addicted confidential informant. That is, until the Tampa Bay paper interviewed those neighbors and discovered they had said no such thing. The police then “revised” their story. (Incidentally, all of these stories were reported by the Tampa Bay Times’ Peter Jamison. He deserves a ton of credit for his tenacity on this story.)

Read more @

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/12/31/a-drug-informant-lied-swat-pounced-a-man-died/

Military hardware still flowing to local police after Ferguson

Posted: January 1, 2015 by gamegetterII in Police state USSA
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By Stephen Dinan – The Washington Times – Tuesday, December 30, 2014

The federal government shipped nearly 4,000 more assault rifles to local law enforcement agencies in the three months following the Ferguson riots, marking a huge surge in the amount of lethal firearms being doled out to police and sheriff’s offices.

The Ferguson riots drew attention and criticism to the massive firepower state and local police are now able to bring to bear on their citizens, and earned scrutiny for the Pentagon project, known as the 1033 program, that helps arm many of those agencies by making surplus military equipment available to them.

Sure to Improve Public Opinion of Police…Autopsy shows three L.A. police bullets hit unarmed black man

Posted: December 30, 2014 by gamegetterII in Police state USSA
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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – An unarmed 25-year-old black man slain by Los Angeles police officers in August suffered three gunshot wounds, including one to his back, a long-awaited autopsy report showed on Monday.

Police have said two officers shot and killed Ezell Ford, described by a family lawyer as mentally challenged, after he struggled with one of them and tried to grab the officer’s gun during an Aug. 11 scuffle in a poor neighborhood of Los Angeles.

The autopsy conducted by medical examiners for the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office showed that Ford suffered gunshot wounds to the arm, back and right flank. The wounds to his back and flank were fatal, it said.

Toxicology tests showed Ford had marijuana in his system at the time of his death.

http://news.yahoo.com/unarmed-black-man-slain-l-police-hit-3-215431751.html

Because everyone deserves to be executed on the spot  by police death squads,we don’t needs judges and juries any more,right?

Places such as a courtroom,which is the proper venue to introduce the man’s state of mental health into evidence for a jury to consider.

Nah,the stormtroopers are all powerful,mere citizens must bow down to their superior force.

And people wonder why cops are gettin shot?!

Police Execute Mentally Ill Man In Saginaw,Michigan

Posted: December 28, 2014 by gamegetterII in Police state USSA
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Police step up security at two Brooklyn stationhouses after reports of being targeted by Baltimore gang

Posted: December 24, 2014 by gamegetterII in Police state USSA
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Police have stepped up security at two Brooklyn stationhouses after a report of a threat that they are being targeted by a notorious Baltimore gang, police sources said.

Police have stepped up security at two Brooklyn stationhouses after a report they are being targeted by a notorious Baltimore gang, police sources and the Sergeants Benevolent Association said Tuesday night.

A police source said that Emergency Service Unit cops were sent to the 79th and 81st precinct stationhouses in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville after an informant reported the threat, but it had not yet been validated.

An NYPD spokesman would not confirm the threat or if security was heightened at either station.

But a Daily News reporter witnessed two ESU trucks parked in front of the 79th precinct and four SWAT members standing in the building’s lobby with rifles in hand.

At the 81st precinct, two SWAT members guarded the lobby along with three officers, with a couple more SWAT officers around the corner.

“My wife, she’s actually at home crying right now. It’s tough,” said one of the SWAT members.

http://newsnyork.com/police-step-up-security-at-two-brooklyn-stationhouses-after-reports-of-being-targeted-by-baltimore-gang/

Here’s an idea for police everywhere-stop acting like stormtroopers,stop treating citizens as the enemy,stop seizing peoples legally owned property in the failed war on drugs,stop seizing legally earned cash and property from citizens during traffic stops,stop having drug sniffing dogs falsely “alert”on cars so you can search them,stop violently taking citizens to the ground,tazing and pepper spraying them for not “obeying” your “commands”,remember-shiny badges do NOT grant special rights!

Officer kills armed 18-year-old near Ferguson

Posted: December 24, 2014 by gamegetterII in Police state USSA
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BERKELEY, Mo. (AP) — Violent protests broke out in suburban St. Louis after another black 18-year-old was fatally shot by a white police officer.

St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said the officer was questioning the 18-year-old and another man about a theft late Tuesday at a convenience store in Berkeley when the young man pulled a 9mm handgun on him. The officer stumbled backward but fired three shots, one of which struck the victim, Belmar said

Berkeley is just a few miles from Ferguson, Missouri, where a white police officer fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, on Aug. 9. Brown’s death sparked weeks of sometimes violent demonstrations and a grand jury’s decision to not charge Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting has spurred a nationwide movement to protest police brutality.

Belmar declined to name the 18-year-old killed in Berkeley, but a woman at the scene told reporters she was his mother and identified him as Antonio Martin. Belmar said he was 18 years old and black.

The 34-year-old white police officer, a six-year veteran of the Berkeley Police Department, is on administrative leave pending an investigation, Belmar said.

“He will carry the weight of this for the rest of his life, certainly for the rest of his career,” Belmar said. “So there are no winners here.”

Police released surveillance video from the parking lot outside the store. The nearly two-minute clip shows two young men leaving the store at about the time a police car rolls up. The officer gets out and speaks with them. About a minute-and-a-half later, the video appears to show one of the men raising his arm, though what he is holding is difficult to see because they were several feet from the camera. Belmar said it was a 9mm handgun.

The other man ran away, and police are searching for him.

It was the third fatal shooting of a black suspect by a white police officer in the St. Louis area since Brown was killed. Kajaime Powell, 25, was killed Aug. 9 after approaching St. Louis officers with a knife. Vonderrit Myers Jr., 18, was fatally shot Oct. 8 after allegedly shooting at a St. Louis officer.

Each shooting has been met by protests, and a crowd quickly gathered late Tuesday and early Wednesday in Berkeley. The demonstration involving up to 300 people turned violent.

More than 50 police officers, some in riot gear, responded. Video showed some wrestling with protesters. Belmar said officers used pepper spray but not tear gas. Four people were arrested on charges of assaulting officers.

Belmar said three explosive devices, possibly fireworks, were tossed near gas pumps. Some protesters threw rocks and bricks. One officer was hit by a brick and treated for facial cuts. Another was treated for a leg injury sustained as he tried to get away from one of the explosives.

The protest spilled to a neighboring convenience store where a man in a hoodie set a fire inside the store. The fire was quickly put out, but the glass door was shattered.

Orlando Brown, 36, of nearby St. Charles was among the protesters.

“I understand police officers have a job and have an obligation to go home to their families at the end of the night,” he said. “But do you have to treat every situation with lethal force? … It’s not a racial issue, or black or white. It’s wrong or right.”

Brown said he was pepper-sprayed during the protest and that his friend was arrested for failing to disperse.

Toni Martin, Antonio Martin’s mother, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that her son was with his girlfriend at the time of the shooting. The video did not appear to show a female with the two young men.

Belmar said the 18-year-old had a considerable criminal record in the less than two years since he turned 17, with three assault charges, armed robbery, armed criminal action and unlawful use of a weapon.

The chief said some protesters questioned why the officer couldn’t use pepper spray or a stun gun.

“Frankly, that’s unreasonable,” Belmar said. “When we had somebody pointing a gun at a police officer, there’s not a lot of time.”

Berkeley has body cameras and dashboard cameras. The officer wasn’t wearing his body camera, Belmar said. The dashboard camera activates when the red lights are on, and they were not on at the convenience store.

Belmar said the body of the young man remained on the scene for about two hours. After Brown died in August, the fact that his body remained on the street for more than four hours drew widespread criticism. Belmar said two hours is fairly typical as police gather evidence, and he said interference from protesters may have prolonged the situation in Berkeley.

http://news.yahoo.com/police-officer-missouri-shot-killed-man-pulled-gun-084531706.html

2014 ‘killed by cops’ tally tops 1,000

Posted: December 17, 2014 by gamegetterII in Police state USSA
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There are no frills to be found at www.killedbypolice.net. The site is just a simple spreadsheet. The information it contains, though, is invaluable. It is a list of every single person documented to have been killed by police in the United States in 2013 and 2014. There are links to a media report for every single death, as well as their names, ages, and when known, sex and race.

The site is so valuable because, as we’ve noted previously, there is no reliable national database for keeping track of the number of people killed by police each year. The FBI tracks homicides by law enforcement officers, but participation is voluntary, and many agencies don’t participate. As I noted last week, Eric Garner’s death at the hands of a New York Police Department won’t show up in the FBI’s statistics for 2014 because the state of New York does not participate in the program.

The FBI’s statistics for 2013 say that law enforcement officers killed 461 people that year. Killedbypolice.net apparently got its start last year. Using their system of monitoring by news report, they have calculated that police actually killed 748 people between May and December. That’s 287 more than the FBI reports for the whole year.

And for 2014, which still has a couple of weeks left, the site has reported 1,029 people have been killed by police. That’s about a 30 percent increase over last year, though with four-month gap at the start of 2013 (measuring 25 percent of the year), it’s possible the numbers would be much closer if we had January through April. Even with the FBI’s broken numbers, we know that 2013 marked a two-decade high in killings by police.

Neither the site nor its Facebook page indicates who is responsible for compiling this information, and they’re protecting their identity by hosting the site through GoDaddy. We can’t talk to whoever is responsible for this database about how or why they started it and how much effort it is to keep track of this information. Here is a page for people to submit information to help improve the quality of the database.

http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/09/more-than-1000-people-have-been-killed-b

Ivy Mike- #Ferguson – return of the assholes

Posted: December 10, 2014 by gamegetterII in Ferguson
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“Lives matter, regardless of race and regardless of who is initiating unwarranted violence. Beating a white guy to death with hammers because of “Burn this bitch down!” is as repellant and evil as three white psychos dragging a black guy to death because of “Aryan pride.” If you find yourself rooting for one set of perps in either case above, you are a fuckhead.”

http://www.ivymikecafe.com/2014/12/10/ferguson-return-of-the-assholes/#comment-10298

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