A white Texas police officer can be heard twice on a body camera video saying leading a homeless black man by a rope down city streets while he and his partner are on horseback will look “bad”.
Related: Texas police apologise after officers on horseback led black man by rope
Continue reading...A jury has sentenced Amber Guyger to 10 years in prison for the murder of Botham Jean, after viewing racist text messages sent by the former Dallas police officer.
Prosecutors had symbolically asked for a minimum sentence of 28 years. Jean, who was 26 when he died, would have turned 28 last Sunday.
Continue reading...Before the jury was seated on day six of the trial of Amber Guyger on Saturday, former Dallas police chief Craig Miller was called by the defense as an expert witness to testify about a temporary condition called “inattentional blindness”.
Related: 'I hate myself': Dallas officer testifies about night she killed unarmed black man
Continue reading...We learn to lie as children, between the ages of two and five. By adulthood, we are prolific. We lie to our employers, our partners and, most of all, one study has found, to our mothers. The average person hears up to 200 lies a day, according to research by Jerry Jellison, a psychologist at the University of Southern California. The majority of the lies we tell are “white”, the inconsequential niceties – “I love your dress!” – that grease the wheels of human interaction. But most people tell one or two “big” lies a day, says Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire. We lie to promote ourselves, protect ourselves and to hurt or avoid hurting others.
The mystery is how we keep getting away with it. Our bodies expose us in every way. Hearts race, sweat drips and micro-expressions leak from small muscles in the face. We stutter, stall and make Freudian slips. “No mortal can keep a secret,” wrote the psychoanalyst in 1905. “If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips. Betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”
Continue reading...Tamir Rice, Terence Crutcher and Ramarley Graham were all killed by police officers. The Guardian meets the women, men and children who lived with them, raised them, called them brother or father or son, and hears how they now live with the grief of their loss
Continue reading...A Los Angeles county deputy lied when he said he was shot in the shoulder while standing in a sheriff’s station parking lot last week and will face a criminal investigation, authorities said.
“The reported sniper assault was fabricated” by deputy Angel Reinosa, assistant sheriff Robin Limon said at a news conference on Saturday.
Continue reading...Family of New York man insists ‘we’re not finished’ after dismissal of Daniel Pantaleo, who put Garner in a banned chokehold
One thousand, eight hundred and sixty days after Eric Garner was killed on the streets of Staten Island, New York, his family finally received a sliver of justice.
On Monday, the New York police department (NYPD) commissioner, James O’Neill, announced the NYPD would fire Daniel Pantaleo, who, on that hot summer’s day in July 2014, placed the unarmed 43-year-old in a banned chokehold that contributed to Garner’s death.
Continue reading...Daniel Pantaleo held Garner in chokehold before his death, and his words became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement
A New York City police officer involved in the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed African American man killed by police on Staten Island in 2014, has been fired by the department.
The decision was announced by New York police department (NYPD) commissioner James O’Neill on Monday after an administrative police judge advised that officer Daniel Pantaleo should lose his job for misconduct during the arrest.
Continue reading...Jim Kenney urged state and federal government to stand up to NRA or ‘then let us police ourselves’
The mayor of Philadelphia has joined a growing chorus of calls for America to take action on gun control after a dramatic shooting incident in which six police officers were wounded as they served a drug warrant.
The officers were injured as part of a night of drama which saw a tense standoff eventually resolved when the suspected gunman was taken into custody. It is believed he had an automatic rifle and he exchanged multiple bursts of gunfire with police which saw civilians run for cover in a densely populated part of the city.
Continue reading...Police sergeant says authorities are ‘imploring shooter to surrender and avoid further injuries’
Multiple police officers have been wounded after a gunman opened fire in Philadelphia on Wednesday, during a standoff that extended into the evening.
The police sergeant Eric Gripp tweeted that at least six officers were shot in the incident in the city’s northern Nicetown neighborhood. All the officers’ injuries were considered non-life-threatening, he said, and were being treated at local hospitals.
Continue reading...A police department in Galveston, Texas, has apologized after two white officers on horseback led a black man through the city’s streets on a rope.
Related: Trump hits back at Obama for comments about racism in America
Continue reading...Case is one of several across the US of police targeting anti-Trump and anti-fascist groups with monitoring and criminal trials
The Los Angeles police department has revealed in court that it infiltrated an activist group planning anti-Trump protests, in the latest case of US law enforcement spying on leftwing organizers.
A confidential informant working with the LAPD secretly recorded multiple meetings of a group called Refuse Fascism in 2017, according to newly disclosed police documents. The LAPD transcripts, first reported by the Los Angeles Times and reviewed by the Guardian, were submitted in a criminal case against activists who blocked a California freeway during an anti-Trump demonstration.
Continue reading...Chicago Police Board finds the officers exaggerated the threat posed by the 17-year-old to justify his shooting
The Chicago Police Board on Thursday fired four police officers for allegedly covering up a white officer’s 2014 fatal shooting of black teenager Laquan McDonald.
The nine-member board found the officers exaggerated the threat posed by the 17-year-old McDonald to justify his shooting by Jason Van Dyke and voted unanimously for the dismissal of Sgt Stephen Franko and officers Janet Mondragon, Daphne Sebastian and Ricardo Viramontes.
Continue reading...Authorities said a man died after a shooting involving a police officer in South Bend, the Indiana city where the Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is mayor.
Buttigieg said he changed his campaign schedule to return to South Bend on Sunday and hold a late-night news conference. He said the circumstances of the death would be thoroughly investigated, and called on any witnesses of the shooting to come forward and speak to investigators.
Continue reading...A video taken by Sandra Bland in 2015 shows how a white state trooper confronted the 28-year-old black woman in a traffic stop after he says she failed to signal. Texas authorities have denied withholding the footage shot by Bland, who was found hanged in a jail cell near Houston in 2015. The video had not been publicly seen until it was aired this month by a Dallas TV station. Both lawmakers and Bland’s family say they had never seen the clip
Continue reading...Donald Trump rejected a charge by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, that he was engaged in a cover-up, saying he was the "most transparent president" the country had ever had. In a last-minute press conference in the Rose Garden, outside the Oval office, Trump condemned the Democats, and said "the crime was committed on the other side". Trump added he would refuse to work with them unless they dropped their investigations into his administration and finances
Continue reading...The New York police department’s use of celebrity doppelgänger photos calls their use of a facial recognition system into question
The New York police department used a photo of Woody Harrelson in its facial recognition program in an attempt to identify a beer thief who looked like the actor, according to a report published on Thursday.
Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology highlighted the April 2017 episode in “Garbage In, Garbage Out”, a report on what it says are flawed practices in law enforcement’s use of facial recognition.
Continue reading...Supervisors vote eight to one to restrict surveillance: ‘We can have security without being a security state’
San Francisco supervisors voted to make the city the first in the United States to ban police and other government agencies from using facial recognition technology.
Supervisors voted eight to one in favor of the “Stop Secret Surveillance Ordinance”, which will also strengthen existing oversight measures and will require city agencies to disclose current inventories of surveillance technology.
Continue reading...Jury in trial of Minneapolis police officer took less than one day to reach their verdict over the shooting death of Justine Ruszczyk Damond
The former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor has been found guilty of third-degree murder for the shooting death of the Australian life coach Justine Ruszczyk Damond, who approached his squad car minutes after calling 911 to report a possible rape behind her home.
Mohamed Noor was convicted of third-degree murder as well as manslaughter for the July 2017 death Damond, a 40-year-old dual citizen of the US and Australia. He wasn’t convicted of the most serious charge of intentional second-degree murder.
Continue reading...Footage is consistent with claims of McCoy’s family, who said officers did not try to wake him or talk to him before shooting
Vallejo police have released footage of the killing of Willie McCoy at a Taco Bell, showing six officers shooting the 20-year-old who was sleeping in his car.
The disturbing body-camera videos show the young rapper had moved his hand to scratch his shoulder before officers opened fire. The footage is consistent with key claims of McCoy’s family, who watched footage earlier this month and said the officers “executed” him while he was not alert or awake. The videos, released after significant pressure, show:
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