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Cultural muscle memory

Body camera footage released by Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department from the deadly police shooting of Danquirs Franklin, March 25, 2019.

An independent autopsy of Andrew Brown Jr., 42, shows sheriff’s deputies in Elizabeth City, N.C. shot the Black man in the back of the head, killing him while he was driving away. Four other bullets struck his right arm. Deputies were at his home one week ago to serve a search warrant and to arrest Brown on felony drug charges.

No more than four seconds elapsed between the arrival of Pasquotank Sheriff’s deputies at Brown’s home and shots being fired, new video obtained by CNN shows.

Lawyers for the family say body-camera video* shows both of Brown’s hands were on the steering wheel (NBC News):

“Of course, we don’t know the specifics of what happened, and we haven’t seen video,” said Keith Taylor, a 23-year veteran of the New York Police Department who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. “But if you have someone fleeing away from law enforcement and if there is no weapon or threat of a weapon, then what is the justification for ending that person’s life?”

The FBI announced it has opened a civil rights investigation into the killing.

Yet another police killing in the wake of recent conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd might suggest not only bad police training is at fault but a kind of cultural muscle memory.

Chauvin took his time choking Floyd in 2020: 9 minutes and 29 seconds. Cleveland police in November 2014 shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice within two seconds of arrival. Police took four seconds or less with Andrew Brown.

Police killings in the U.S. are attracting international attention.

An international coalition of human rights experts from 11 countries released a 188-page report in March in response to a string of police killings. The US-based National Conference of Black Lawyers, the National Lawyers Guild, and the International Association of Democratic Lawyers characterized the killings as “police murders” and violations of rights under international law:

From the evidence adduced at the hearings regarding the widespread and systematic killing and maiming of unarmed Black people who posed no threat of death or serious bodily harm to police or others, based on systemic racism, the Commissioners find a prima facie case that Crimes against Humanity have been committed.

The Guardian summarizes other accusations the commission levels at the U.S. for:

  • violating its international human rights obligations, both in terms of laws governing policing and in the practices of law enforcement officers, including traffic stops targeting Black people and race-based stop and frisk;
  • tolerating an “alarming national pattern of disproportionate use of deadly force not only by firearms but also by Tasers” against Black people;
  • operating a “culture of impunity” in which police officers are rarely held accountable while their homicidal actions are dismissed as those of just “a few bad apples”.

The commission report concludes the U.S. operates two systems of justice, “one for white people and another for people of African descent.” It calls on the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague to open an investigation.

Resistance is futile

But not only does the U.S. refuse to recognize the ICC, U.S. police departments resist even local civilian oversight, the Washington Post reports. Albuquerque police thwarted efforts of a civilian review board to hold them accountable to the city:

Over four years, police had fatally shot 20 people, including a mentally ill Hispanic man struck three times in the back outside his home. Justice officials discovered a pattern of unconstitutional and excessive use of force, and a civilian oversight office that had “simply been too forgiving of the department’s use of deadly force.”

Federal authorities demanded a wide range of reforms from the city — including a new civilian oversight agency with greater authority.

But many in Albuquerque fought change at every turn: The police union sued to block the new agency and later demanded the resignation of an agency board member who pushed to tighten the police department’s use-of-force policy. The city council took four years to give the agency stronger subpoena power for its investigations. And veteran police officials pushed back against efforts to increase scrutiny of the department’s use of force, creating a backlog of investigations that has prevented the agency and its board from completing their reviews of most fatal shootings.

The Post’s review of “audits, misconduct complaints, emails, lawsuits and interviews with dozens of current and former officials” found this is a pattern across the country.

A pattern of authoritarian abuse. A pattern of “callous disregard” for human life (CBS News):

A New York City jail supervisor was charged Monday with criminally negligent homicide in the death of a detainee who hanged himself on her watch last in November. 

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said jail captain Rebecca Hillman showed “callous disregard” for Ryan Wilson by ordering officers not to perform potentially lifesaving measures and leaving him hanging in a locked cell for about 15 minutes.

Ryan Wilson, 29, was Black, held on a robbery charge, and upset he had been moved to a different housing unit over an altercation with another inmate:

He told the officer he would hang himself unless Hillman let him out of his cell and — after waiting 10 minutes for her — he did, prosecutors said.

Hillman told other inmates that Wilson was “playing” and ordered a subordinate jail officer not to enter Wilson’s cell because she thought he was faking, prosecutors said. Hillman called for non-emergency backup and ordered the cell door locked while she went on her rounds, prosecutors said.

About 15 minutes after Wilson hanged himself, Hillman ordered the door unlocked and allowed officers inside, prosecutors said. He had a faint pulse and was dead by the time medical personnel arrived, prosecutors said.

Loveland, Colo. police last summer roughed up Karen Garner — 73, white, five-feet tall, eighty pounds, suffering dementia — while arresting her for suspected shoplifting. She was tackled, handcuffed, and hog-tied.

As she sat weeping in a cell for hours with an untreated arm fracture and dislocated shoulder, officers sat nearby reviewing body-camera footage:

“Ready for the pop? Hear the pop?” the officer who initially handcuffed Garner can be heard saying, referencing the moment he injured her shoulder.

The nearly one-hour booking cell video released Monday shows two Loveland Police Department officers who participated in Garner’s arrest fist-bumping each other while discussing the incident. At one point, they are joined by another officer as they mock and praise the arrest, which they claimed “went great,” while referring to Garner as “ancient,” “senile” and “flexible.”

“We crushed it,” one of the officers says.

There is more. And it is vile.

* Update: A judge has ruled that body camera video will not be released to the public.

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