An autopsy ruled his death a homicide and earlier today, the six officers involved in the death of Baltimore’s Freddie Gray, found out that they will all be formally charged with his death.
After hearing of the impending charges against all the officers, Freddie Gray’s mother, Gloria Darden, expressed joy in hearing the news.
“I feel good because we got all six of them,” Darden told BuzzFeed shortly after the Baltimore state’s attorney announced charges against the six police officers on Friday.
“You can rest, Freddie. You can rest. You can be in peace now,” Darden added.
Gray suffered a severed spine while on police custody. His death triggered protests and riots on the streets of Baltimore.
Marilyn Mosby, Baltimore state's attorney, speaks during a media availability, Friday, May 1, 2015 in Baltimore. Mosby announced criminal charges against all six officers suspended after Freddie Gray suffered a fatal spinal injury while in police custody. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Marilyn Mosby, Baltimore state’s attorney, speaks during a media availability, Friday, May 1, 2015 in Baltimore. Mosby announced criminal charges against all six officers suspended after Freddie Gray suffered a fatal spinal injury while in police custody. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
This is not a win for anybody. This is just a starting point in holding those who use the badge to kill others accountable for their actions. In other words, this is justice. You kill someone, let a judge and jury decide the outcome, not the police union.
Baltimore’s State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced Friday morning that several officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray will face homicide charges.
“To the people of Baltimore and the demonstrators across America, I heard your call for ‘no justice, no peace.’ Your peace is sincerely needed as I work to deliver justice on behalf of this young man,” she said.
Six Baltimore police officers have been criminally charged: Officer Caesar Goodson, Officer William Porter, Lt. Brian Rice, Officer Edward Nero, Officer Garrett Miller and Sgt. Alicia White.
The charges, which vary for each person, include second-degree murder, manslaughter, misconduct in office and false imprisonment.
Goodson faces second-degree depraved heart murder, which indicates a “callous disregard for the value of human life.”
“I hope that as we move forward with this case, everyone will respect due process and refrain from doing anything that will jeopardize our ability to seek justice,” Mosby said.
There is a video of the actual police shooting of 17-year old Laquan McDonald in Chicago last October, but the video is not being released at this point because of an active investigation. According to the police report, the officer who pulled the trigger “was scared for his life” and shot the teenager in his chest.
But a coroner’s report showed that Laquan was not just shot in the chest, he was also shot in the leg, in his arm, in his head, in his back. A total of 16 bullets riddled the teenager’s body, a shooting that took 16 seconds to complete.
Yes, the shooting officer made it back home to his family in one piece and Chicago is cutting a $5 million check for Laquan’s family.
Eric Harris is just another man gunned down by a police officer… a reserved police officer… with the incident caught on camera.
Harris was involved in an undercover drug operation when things went south. The video shows him exiting a car and running away, being chased by police officers and Robert Bates, a 74 year old millionaire, who volunteered as a reserved cop. On the video, Harris is caught by one of the officers and is on the ground when the 74 year old apparently went for his taser and pulled his gun instead, shooting and eventually killing Harris.
“He shot me!” Harris yelled, before he died. “He shot me, man. Oh, my god. I’m losing my breath.”
“Fuck your breath,” another officer is heard yelling on the video.
Harris’ brother Andre spoke with CNN and explained his frustration.
“It was a situation where I didn’t necessarily think that a taser should even be used,” Harris said on New Day. “As you see the footage that was three or four, maybe five people on him. We hadn’t seen the whole tape so I’m not exactly sure how many people are on him. But there was enough people on top of my brother, knees on his head, to not even have to use a taser. For it to be that many people around him and him go to use a taser really didn’t make any sense.”
“And then with the taser being yellow and on his chest, for him to shoot my brother with a .357 makes no sense to me,” Harris said. “It was overkill.” Harris added he was pleased to see charges brought against Bates.
It’s as if we’re all guilty and must be proven innocent in the courts.
What other reason would there be for police officers to pull a man out of his car and beat him, with one officer throwing the man to the ground, applying a chokehold to the man, then punching the man 16 times in his head? Why is this thuggish behavior considered “serving and protecting?”
And then, when the rest of his backup arrived, they too get in the act of serving and protecting. One officer takes out his taser and tased the breeding man while the other members of the serve and protect gang slap handcuffs on the man, his face and head bloodied by the 16 blows he received to his head. And then when the man was finally taken away to the safety of a hospital room, one of the officers can be seen on camera pulling a bag out of his pocket and planting drugs in the man’s car.
The man – I must say – is black and yes, all the responding officers were white. But should that apparent crime of being the wrong color caused the man to be choked, beaten and almost killed by the “serve and protect” gang? Don’t blacks have the same constitutionally projected rights as everyone else? And why shouldn’t black people be expected to go home to their families, like this man was attempting to do before the gang intervened?
And of course you already know what happened next. The officers were not changed with any wrong-doing. But the man, a 57-year-old auto worker from Detroit named Floyd Dent, has a court date to answer for the drugs the Detroit Police gang members planted in his car.
Serving and Protecting… the only way they know how…
ps. No drugs were found in Mr. Dent’s system when he was examined at the hospital.
Dancing. Yes, dancing. That was all it took for the NYPD to “protect and serve” this man, who committed the unthinkable crime of dancing on a public New York street.
The man, a YouTuber named Alexander BOK, took up the #DanceDares challenge by TV personality Ellen Degeneres, who dares ordinary people to dance behind a perfect stranger without touching them. After accepting his challenge, Alexander BOK did his criminal dance routine behind a New York police officer. That is when all hell broke loose!
The shooting is being called an execution by the victim’s family. And according to eye witnesses, the victim, Ezell Ford, was laying face down when police pumped a bullet into his back. The autopsy reveals that his bullet was shot at close range.
The autopsy stated that the shot to Ezell Ford’s back and another to his abdomen were fatal, according to the TV station. The wound on his back revealed a muzzle imprint from the gun, suggesting the shot was fired at close range, the station reported.
Several witnesses said Ford was face down on the ground when he was shot, the station reported. But police said he was killed while resisting arrest and had “grabbed the officer’s handgun and attempted to remove the gun from its holster.”
“The officer yelled out to his partner that Mr. Ford had his gun. The officer’s partner then fired two rounds striking Mr. Ford,” the LAPD said in a statement, as quoted by KABC. “At about the same time, the officer on the ground while on his back grabbed his backup weapon, reached around Mr. Ford and fired one shot at close range striking Mr. Ford in the back.”
The Ford family’s lawyer called it an execution.
“I dare say that this is criminal, I think they executed this poor young man, mentally incompetent man,” said attorney Steven Lerman, according to the news station.
Reuters interviewed 25 African American male officers on the NYPD, 15 of whom are retired and 10 of whom are still serving. All but one said that they had been victims of racial profiling, which refers to using race or ethnicity as grounds for suspecting someone of having committed a crime.
The officers said this included being pulled over for no reason, having their heads slammed against their cars, getting guns brandished in their faces, being thrown into prison vans and experiencing stop and frisks while shopping. The majority of the officers said they had been pulled over multiple times while driving. Five had had guns pulled on them.
Desmond Blaize (pictured above), who retired two years ago as a sergeant in the 41st Precinct in the Bronx, said he once got stopped while taking a jog through Brooklyn’s upmarket Prospect Park. “I had my ID on me so it didn’t escalate,” said Blaize, who has sued the department alleging he was racially harassed on the job. “But what’s suspicious about a jogger? In jogging clothes?”
The NYPD and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the police officers’ union, declined requests for comment. However, defenders of the NYPD credit its policing methods with transforming New York from the former murder capital of the world into the safest big city in the United States.
Ex-Police Chief Skeptical.
“It makes good headlines to say this is occurring, but I don’t think you can validate it until you look into the circumstances they were stopped in,” said Bernard Parks, the former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, who is African American.
“Now if you want to get into the essence of why certain groups are stopped more than others, then you only need to go to the crime reports and see which ethnic groups are listed more as suspects. That’s the crime data the officers are living with.”
I was getting worried there. The silence coming from the Hillary camp in regards to the nationwide protects going on these days, was deafening. But on Tuesday, Speaking to an audience after receiving an award from The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights in New York, Hillary declared, “yes, black lives matter.”
She wondered what Robert Kennedy would say about “the thousands of Americans marching in our streets demanding justice for all,” and “the mothers who’ve lost their sons.”
“What would he say to all those who have lost trust in our government and our other institutions, who shudder at images of excessive force, who read reports about torture done in the name of our country, who see too many representatives in Washington quick to protect a big bank from regulation but slow to take action to help working families facing ever greater pressure,” Clinton said, pivoting to the release of a Senate report last week investigating the CIA’s interrogation techniques after 9/11.
Clinton said that recent world events, including the mass murder of children in Pakistan and the siege in Sydney, Australia, “should steel our resolve and underscore that our values are what set us apart from our adversaries.”
I remember watching the clip below of MSNBC’s interview with the Cleveland police union who kept insisting that the police officer who murdered of 12 year old Tamir Rice was “justified,” and while watching, all these questions and comments started coming to mind as I listened to the unbelievable cops-are-always-right nonsense coming from the cop.
Apparently Cenk Uygur from The Young Turks had the same questions and comments, and he used his platform on YouTube and blasted the cop for his moronic response.
“Just, for Christ’s sake, be a human for a second,” Uygur challenged the man after watching a clip of the MSNBC piece. “And say, ‘We’re so sorry that [a] 12-year-old kid died, man. Obviously we didn’t mean that.’ Is that too hard to say? Is that too hard to say — ‘We didn’t mean to kill your 12-year-old son. We’re so sorry about that.’”
Uygur continued. “You killed him in two seconds — [Rice] didn’t have time to listen to what you said,” Uygur said in response. “This Orwellian prick; we just saw the video, we’ve seen the video a million times. You pull up and you shoot him. You pull up and you shoot him. One-one thousand, two-one thousand and he’s dead.”
He made the news not because he chose to exercise his first Amendment rights to call for justice for Tamir Rice – the 12 year old who was killed by police for playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland park – Andrew Hawkins of the Cleveland Browns made news because he was attacked by the Cleveland police union for exercising those First Amendment rights.
Yesterday, despite being called “pathetic” by the Cleveland police union, Andrew Hawkins continued expressing his first Amendment privileges.
He used his constitutionally protected First Amendment right to speak his mind on the violence exhibited against blacks and other minorities by police, with his choice to wear a t-shirt calling for justice for Tamir. For this, Andrew Hawkins, the wide receiver for the Cleveland Browns, was slammed by the police union in Cleveland who called Andrew’s decision to wear the t-shirt “pretty pathetic.”
Well Andrew felt the need to express his feelings a little more that the t-shirt would allow, and on Monday, he called the press together and released this statement.
“I was taught that justice is a right that every American should have. Also justice should be the goal of every American. I think that’s what makes this country. To me, justice means the innocent should be found innocent. It means that those who do wrong should get their due punishment. Ultimately, it means fair treatment. So a call for justice shouldn’t offend or disrespect anybody. A call for justice shouldn’t warrant an apology.
“To clarify, I utterly respect and appreciate every police officer that protects and serves all of us with honesty, integrity and the right way. And I don’t think those kind of officers should be offended by what I did. My mom taught me my entire life to respect law enforcement. I have family, close friends that are incredible police officers and I tell them all the time how they are much braver than me for it. So my wearing a T-shirt wasn’t a stance against every police officer or every police department. My wearing the T-shirt was a stance against wrong individuals doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons to innocent people.
“Unfortunately, my mom also taught me just as there are good police officers, there are some not-so-good police officers that would assume the worst of me without knowing anything about me for reasons I can’t control. She taught me to be careful and be on the lookout for those not-so-good police officers because they could potentially do me harm and most times without consequences. Those are the police officers that should be offended.
“Being a police officer takes bravery. And I understand that they’re put in difficult positions and have to make those snap decisions. As a football player, I know a little bit about snap decisions, obviously on an extremely lesser and non-comparative scale, because when a police officer makes a snap decision, it’s literally a matter of life and death. That’s hard a situation to be in. But if the wrong decision is made, based on pre-conceived notions or the wrong motives, I believe there should be consequence. Because without consequence, naturally the magnitude of the snap decisions is lessened, whether consciously or unconsciously.
“I’m not an activist, in any way, shape or form. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I keep my opinions to myself on most matters. I worked extremely hard to build and keep my reputation especially here in Ohio, and by most accounts I’ve done a solid job of decently building a good name. Before I made the decision to wear the T-shirt, I understood I was putting that reputation in jeopardy to some of those people who wouldn’t necessarily agree with my perspective. I understood there was going to be backlash, and that scared me, honestly. But deep down I felt like it was the right thing to do. If I was to run away from what I felt in my soul was the right thing to do, that would make me a coward, and I can’t live with that. God wouldn’t be able to put me where I am today, as far as I’ve come in life, if I was a coward.
“As you well know, and it’s well documented, I have a 2-year-old little boy. The same 2-year-old little boy that everyone said was cute when I jokingly threw him out of the house earlier this year. That little boy is my entire world. And the No. 1 reason for me wearing the T-shirt was the thought of what happened to Tamir Rice happening to my little Austin scares the living hell out of me. And my heart was broken for the parents of Tamir and John Crawford knowing they had to live that nightmare of a reality.
“So, like I said, I made the conscious decision to wear the T-shirt. I felt like my heart was in the right place. I’m at peace with it and those that disagree with me, this is America, everyone has the right to their first amendment rights. Those who support me, I appreciate your support. But at the same time, support the causes and the people and the injustices that you feel strongly about. Stand up for them. Speak up for them. No matter what it is because that’s what America’s about and that’s what this country was founded on.”
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