MORE ABUSES BY POLICE AGAINST BLACKS

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A nationally respected attorney intends to file a federal complaint against four Atlantic City, New Jersey, police officers who allegedly beat an African American teen senseless.

The attorney, William H. Buckman,  who is an expert in civil rights law, whose offices are in nearby Moorestown, has confirmed that he will file the complaint within days on behalf of the teen, Trent Brewer, Jr., in federal district court.

Buckman, according to a 2002 Philadelphia Inquirer article, "has emerged as one of the region's most prominent civil rights lawyers and a national expert on racial profiling."  In 1996, in State v. Soto, the article continued, "Buckman was part of a legal team that convinced a Superior Court judge in Gloucester County that state troopers were targeting minorities for traffic stops and searches.

Further  the Inquirer noted, "the landmark ruling–the first in the country to recognize racial profiling as a problem–led to U. S. Justice Department oversight of all New Jersey Turnpike stops and changes in other states."

Before the night Brewer was allegedly beaten–on January 27, 2012–he had not had any prior contact with law enforcement, much less warnings for minor infractions.  Brewer, who high school teachers often compliment for good behavior, is also known community-wide for quiet, respectful conduct.

Yet Brewer, like many other African Americans insist, isn't the only black victim of egregious police brutality in this seaside, gambling resort promoted for nearly a century as "the nation's playground.  Instead, Brewer is simply one of the latest police victims.

Determined efforts by Brewer's mother, Andrea Gray, to "seek justice" for what she describes as "a vicious police attack," has also played a major role in keeping her son in the public eye.

Gray continues to shine a spotlight on what she said was "a brutal police assault on a defenseless child." She’s received immeasurable support from New Jersey civil rights advocate Terence Jones and Steven Young, the president of the National Action Network's South Jersey chapter,

Meanwhile, news coverage of the demonstrations, rallies and town hall meetings dramatizing Brewer's plight have raised his name recognition well beyond that of blacks who have charged police officers with egregious brutality in recent years.

A woman was shot and killed in her Louisville, Kentucky, home by police executing a "botched" search warrant who forced their way in, surprising the woman and her boyfriend who thought the officers were burglars, her family says in a lawsuit.

The lawsuit states that Taylor and her boyfriend, Walker, were asleep in their bedroom when police in plainclothes and unmarked vehicles arrived at the house looking for a suspect who actually lived in a different part of the city and was already in police custody.

The lawsuit — filed by the family of the woman, Breonna Taylor, an EMT worker — says she and her boyfriend thought they were being burglarized and he fired at the officers in self-defense. The lawsuit accuses the three officers of "blindly firing" more than 20 shots into the apartment.

The three officers entered Taylor's home "without knocking and without announcing themselves as police officers," the suit states. The police  had a court order to enter the apartment  this way.

The lawsuit says Taylor and Walker woke up and thought criminals were breaking in. Walker called 911 and police said he opened fire and shot an officer.

The police then proceeded to spray gunfire into the residence with a total disregard for the value of human life," the lawsuit alleges. "Shots were blindly fired by the officers all throughout Breonna's home."

The suit states that Walker had a license to carry and kept firearms in the home, and that Taylor was unarmed. Taylor and Walker had no criminal history or drug convictions. No drugs were found in the apartment.

Her address was listed on the search warrant based on police's belief that a drug suspect had used her home to receive mail, keep drugs or stash money. The warrant also states that a car registered to Taylor was seen parked on several occasions in front of a "drug house" known to the suspect.

Taylor's mother, Tamika Palmer, filed the lawsuit in April in Jefferson Circuit Court alleging wrongful death, excessive force and gross negligence.

Just weeks before residents of Atlanta shut down their own streets over the police shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile in other parts of the country, Deravis Caine Rogers was shot dead by police in their own Georgia city

He was African American, unarmed, and he provided “no provocation” for the shooting, according to the police report.

His case didn’t attract the attention that other police shootings caught on cellphone videos have. But in a rare development, the officer who fired the gun, James Burns, has already been charged with murder and was subsequently fired.

 It is the first time in six years that a district attorney in Georgia has charged an officer without the officer first appearing before a grand jury for indictment.

“The decision of the Atlanta police department] to terminate and of District Attorney  Paul Howard to prosecute Officer James Burns for the killing of Caine Rogers does indeed mark an unprecedented shift in how Atlanta and Fulton County hold police accountable for their actions,” said Xochitl Bervera, director of the Racial Justice Action Center, based in Atlanta.

Criminal charges against police for fatal incidents have been extremely rare nationwide. A 2014 Wall Street Journal analysis found that over a seven-year period ending in 2011, just 41 people were charged. During that same period the FBI count found that there were 2,718 “justified homicides” by law enforcement – a figure that is known to dramatically undercount police killings. A project by the Guardian found that in 2015 alone, there were 1,134 deaths at the hands of law enforcement. Of course some of those deaths may have been in self defence.

Criminal charges against police for fatal incidents have been extremely rare nationwide. A 2014 Wall Street Journal analysis found that over a seven-year period ending in 2011, just 41 people were charged. During that same period the FBI count found that there were 2,718 “justified homicides” by law enforcement – a figure that is known to dramatically undercount police killings. A project by the Guardian found that in 2015 alone, there were 1,134 deaths at the hands of law enforcement.

On the day of the shooting, Burns had been called to an apartment complex after a report that a pedestrian was spotted looking into cars in a suspicious manner. Burns claims that when he arrived on the scene, a vehicle quickly pulled out of where it was parked, coming down the hill toward Burns’ car.

 In Burns’s statement of events, he moved his car to try to block Rogers by pulling sideways in front of it, but Rogers continued past in what Burns called an attempt to run him over.

However an investigation was completed within several weeks of the incident that included review of dash cam footage, police found that Burns “had no provocation, no reason, to discharge his weapon”, according to Sgt Warren Pickard. They found that Burns was actually standing behind his own vehicle, not in immediate danger of being hit as he had claimed.

When asked by investigators why he chose to block Rogers’s car even though the radio report described a pedestrian and not a vehicle, Burns replied that he just thought “everyone in this area was of interest”. That was proof that he is a racist.

Burns shot and killed Rogers through the passenger side window.

The driver of the vehicle hsd posed no immediate threat to you,” a disciplinary memo issued by Atlanta’s police chief, George N Turner, found in its decision.

The Fulton County district attorney, Paul Howard, issued an arrest warrant for felony murder, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and violation of his oath, and Burns turned himself in. He was being held in jail until a preliminary hearing was scheduled.

Bervera said the swift action is “a direct result” of community outcry in Atlanta and nationally. But, she added: “Officer Burns didn’t operate in a vacuum – he was trained and supervised by higher-ups. The community should not be too quick to celebrate or think that justice has been done.”

Bervera contrasted Rogers’s case to another from more than a year ago. Alexia Christian was shot 10 times by two Atlanta police officers in April 2015 while she sat in the back of a squad car, and advocates have been calling for the release of videotapes associated with the death ever since.

 Howard said he would not seek charges over Christian’s death. Police say Christian slipped her hand out of a handcuff and fired a pistol at the officers, provoking their gunfire.

Bervera called that investigation botched. In general, the department has been slow to discipline “any officer for any misconduct”, said Bervera.

Rogers’s father, Deravis Thomas, says he doesn’t want his son’s incident to be “swept under the rug” as others have been.

While Thomas commended Turner, the police chief, for swift disciplinary action, he called for greater accountability for officers involved in other shootings he said are just as unwarranted.

“You can’t have a police force policing the citizens of a city with the police believing that they can commit murder and just say some magic words – ‘Oh, I feared for my life’ – and it will disappear,” he said. “We need punishment and accountability, because that becomes a deterrent.

“Now you’ve got policemen that are getting shot … It’s terrible either way. A life taken is a life taken. The trust is gone.”

n one year alone, a total of  as many as 57,375 years of life were lost to Police Violence. A new study finds that police killings exact a toll greater than accidental gun deaths.

People killed by police in 2015 and 2016 had a median age of 35, and they still had an average of about 50 years left to live when they died. It’s this metric—the gap between how long someone lives and how long they were expected to live.

I am 86 years of age. My mother died when she was 91 years of age. I hope that some stupid careless cop doesn’t shoot away the next five years of my life so that I to can live up to  91  years of age.  

Of the 1,146 and 1,092 victims of police violence in 2015 and 2016, respectively, 52 percent were white, 26 percent were black, and 17 percent were Hispanic. Together, these individuals lost 57,375 years to police violence in 2015 and 54,754 to police violence in 2016. Young people and people of color were disproportionately affected: 52 percent of all the years of life lost belonged to nonwhite, non-Hispanic ethnic groups. Whites also tended to be killed by police at older ages than African Americans and Hispanics—though this is partly because, in the general population, whites are older on average than the other groups.

WOW! I am an older white man. What are the chances that I will be shot dead by a stupid careless cop?  Will I be shot on the street? Will I be shot in my home? Perhaps if I lay naked on the floor of a church that is filled with worshipers  with my empty hands outstretched, I will be spared when a careless armed cop approaches me with his gun drawn and pointed at me.