en.wikipedia.org/…/Killing_of_Timothy_Russell_and… – two homeless black people were pulled over for a traffic stop, they were not searched and were let go. As they departed, police claimed they heard shots fired from the vehicle as it passed them (later determined to be a backfire) prompting the beginning of a 22-mile police chase. When Russell eventually pulled into a parking lot, the pair were shot to death by thirteen officers who fired 137 shots at the pair. It’s unclear where the pizza comes into it, but police alleged they saw a firearm in the vehicle (none was found).
Mark Venuti: wc.arizona.edu/papers/94/108/01_92_m.html – allegedly suicide-by-cop, he was carrying a Bible over his head and after being shot, charged at the officers yelling at them to shoot him again.
Khiel Coppin: courthousenews.com/brooklyn-mom-of-2-sons-killed-… – Khiel was mentally ill and allegedly told police he had a gun. Police later also killed his brother in a separate altercation, in apparent retaliation for bad press over the killing of Khiel.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Douglas_Zerby – a neighbour mistook the hose nozzle for a gun and called police; officers did not check what he was holding and fired without warning, killing him.
Levar Jones: www.11alive.com/article/news/…/101-464504897 – Levar, a black man, was shot and wounded by an officer at a traffic stop while retrieving his licence from his vehicle. His dashcam captured the entire incident. The officer was convicted of aggravated assault and battery and imprisoned for five years, and Levar received a $285,000 settlement.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Killing_of_John_Crawford_III – shot and killed while holding a BB gun, captured on surveillance footage. A second person suffered a fatal heart attack while fleeing from the shooting.
David Loveless: policebrutality.info/…/man-arrested-for-pointing-… – Arrested and charged with two counts of “assault on a law enforcement officer by intimidation” for allegedly pointing his finger like a gun at officers. David denied pointing his fingers at anyone. The officers involved had previously testified against David’s son in a robbery case, giving him motive to threaten them. I can’t find further information on whether David was convicted of these charges.
Rumain Brisbon: www.dangerousobjects.org/rumain-brisbon (link includes sources) – Note: This site catalogues multiple examples of unarmed black people being subject to shooting or police brutality, with a focus on the harmless objects that were the catalyst of the police response.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Charles_Kinsey – Charles, a behavioral therapist, was retrieving his autistic patient Arnaldo Rios-Soto who had run away from a group home, when police encountered them during an unrelated search for an armed suicidal man. Arnaldo naturally did not respond to police orders. Kinsey, while lying on the ground with his hands in the air and attempting to negotiate between police and his patient, was shot when officer Jonathan Aledda mistook the toy truck Arnaldo held to be a gun – interestingly, Jonathan says he was aiming at Arnaldo, who he thought was holding Charles hostage, but shot Charles instead. Jonathan was arrested in 2017 and found guilty of culpable negligence in 2019, at which point he was fired, but his conviction was overturned in 2022.
weird about the pizza thing—i apologize to readers for the slight misinformation there (obviously this is not my meme but i do still stand by its rhetorical value).
The case definitely involved an incident of “police thought they saw a firearm that didn’t exist”, it just doesn’t say anywhere in the Wikipedia article that what they thought they saw was actually another object. Maybe it’s true, but it’s a piece of trivia from an external article that just didn’t make the Wikipedia page.
The best part of the Charles Kinsey one in particular is that Kinsey was working with an autistic adult who was having a breakdown. He was sitting in an intersection, holding a toy firetruck and blocking traffic. Fearing that the police would choose to mistake the man’s toy firetruck for a gun, Kinsey stayed with the man and explained to police that it was a toy truck and not a gun. In order to assure officers that he was no threat, Kinsey was lying on his back with his hands in the air. A police officer then shot Kinsey. A different officer asked the shooter why he shot Kinsey, and the shooter replied, and I swear to you this is an exact quote, “I don’t know.” Not being able to articulate what, if anything, Kinsey did wrong did not stop police from handcuffing him and leaving him without medical care for 20 minutes as he bled from his gunshot wound. The officer was convicted of culpable negligence and ordered by a court to serve 5 months’ probation and write an essay about policing. That conviction was overturned on appeal. The police union representing the officer explained that, despite police having been informed by witnesses that the autistic adult was holding a toy truck and confirming themselves using binoculars that it was indeed a toy truck, that the shooter was aiming for the autistic man holding the toy truck and was trying to save Kinsey’s life, despite the fact that the danger existed solely in the shooter’s head.
The people of Miami Dade county, having done nothing wrong, were forced to pay Kinsey an undisclosed sum.
You know, you’re allowed to just ignore stupid excuses people dredge up to justify cop murders and just say the cops are fascist and need to be removed.
Yeah, and the grand jury was like “nah, cop did nothing wrong”. No one blames the asshole that called the cops on the dude for no fucking reason either.
and the grand jury was like “nah, cop did nothing wrong”.
Reminder that the grand jury is just an arm of the prosecutor, and is frequently used as a scapegoat when the prosecution doesn’t want to indict someone. There’s an old legal joke that if the prosecution wanted them to, a grand jury would indict a bologna sandwich for murder.
Basically, the grand jury doesn’t have any defense lawyers, (because nobody has been accused of a crime yet, so there’s no way for a defense lawyer to defend against anything) and the prosecutor has full control over what evidence the grand jury is allowed to see. If the prosecution wanted to, they could just write “lol yeah I did it, signed [defendant]” on a scrap of paper, put it in front of a grand jury, and tell them to use it as evidence. It doesn’t matter if the evidence is legally gathered and admissible in court, because the grand jury isn’t a courtroom.
The prosecution can even exclude exculpatory evidence (evidence which specifically excludes the accused as a suspect.) Maybe there’s a receipt from a gas station across town, alongside timestamped CCTV video footage, which proves the suspect wasn’t at the scene of the murder when it happened. The prosecutor can exclude that from the grand jury’s evidence, so they aren’t allowed to factor it into the decision; The grand jury is only allowed to rule based on the evidence that the prosecution presents. Maybe the prosecutor knows this person is too poor to afford an attorney, so they’ll throw the charge at them (even though they know the person didn’t do it because of the exculpatory evidence) just to be able to say they closed the murder case. Because they know that when the person’s case lands on a public defender’s desk, the public defender won’t have time to argue it in court; They’ll just tell the person to take a plea deal for a lesser misdemeanor charge. The innocent person’s life is ruined for the foreseeable future, (because now they’re financially buried by the misdemeanor fines and the six months of jail time,) but the prosecutor got to cross another case off of their to-do list.
The grand jury is just a shield for the prosecution to hide behind, when it would be politically inconvenient to decide whether or not to prosecute someone. Prosecutors don’t like charging cops, because the cops will just outright refuse to gather future evidence for them. But the district attorney is typically an elected position, and the people are outraged at a cop murdering someone. So to save face with the cops and their constituents, they just don’t bring any evidence to the grand jury. This allows them to avoid prosecuting the killer cop, while simultaneously going to the public with an “I tried but the big bad grand jury wouldn’t let me indict them” sob story. Now the district attorney looks like a hero to the people for trying, and the cops are happy because the prosecution refused to indict a cop for murder.
How about Daniel shaver? For having nothing? That’s one of the worst execution videos I’ve seen, up there with ISIS and cartel videos. In those videos, they’re scared, but they know what’s happening. He had so much fear and the guy that shot him felt good about it. Got to keep the gun as a trophy.
You mean when Philip “Mitch” Brailsford shot a crawling man who was begging for his life five times with an AR-15 and then got away with it? Yeah, the Mesa Arizona police department fired him, then rehired him so he could get his retirement, then let him retire.
Then, half a decade later, the city paid the victim’s wife 8 million dollars because Mitch Brailsford murdered her husband, psychopath style.
Hooray for justice! The taxpayers pay for the murdered and the murderer!
For the record, Mark Venuti and Khiel Coppin both claimed to have a gun. Obviously doesn’t excuse the misidentification, but gives them at least some benefit of the doubt. Most of the rest are instances of racism. ACAB
I’ve just posted a comment where I researched all the incidents here. Mark Venturi appears to be suicide-by-cop, and Khiel seemed to be mentally ill and told police he had a gun while concealing the hairbrush as though it were a gun. The real fucked up part of Khiel’s case is that the cops then killed his brother too in apparent retaliation for the backlash from killing Khiel. ACAB.
Jesus H. Christ, even when you think you can give cops the benefit of the doubt, they make sure to do something mustache-twirlingly evil to remind you ACAB.
Just like in 2020 when people were stepping forward in droves to tell their stories about police brutality, and then the police demonstrated the accuracy of these statements in real time, on video, for months on end.
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