Anger, tears at Montreal anti-police brutality march

MONTREAL - Mia Laberge and Naomie Décarie could hardly withhold their angry tears after Montreal police charged toward demonstrators Thursday and, seemingly unprovoked, fired tear gas into the crowd.

“They are operating on a strategy of fear,” said Laberge, a law student at the Université du Québec a Montréal. “We have the right to demonstrate, but as a woman, I felt threatened by them.

“These are the people who are supposed to protect us, but we’re not safe at all.”

A joint demonstration by students protesting rising tuition fees and people against police brutality began at about rush hour at Berri and Ste Catherine Sts. About 2,000 protesters headed north, then west along Sherbrooke St., but no police were visible along the route, although they were positioned on adjacent streets and in the métro.

When about six officers did appear, a few protesters started throwing rocks at them. At Aylmer and Sherbrooke Sts., police fired off two loud sound grenades, sending a panic through the crowd. Protesters ran in all directions, but riot police formed a line, and banging on their shields with their batons, marched forward, shoving demonstrators north.

Montreal police spokesman Ian Lafrenière said police had to stop the march for the safety of motorists on Sherbrooke.

“(Demonstrators) have rights but so do others,” he said, adding that police hadn’t been informed of the march’s route.

One man, trying to stop some young men from throwing rocks, was hit in the forehead with a tear-gas canister and it exploded.

Scott Weinstein, a nurse in the crowd who was providing first aid when needed, poured water over the man’s eyes, as the man screamed in anger.

“If he hadn’t been wearing ski goggles, he could have been blinded,” Weinstein said. “His hair was singed and his goggles covered in chemicals.

“I’ve never been in a demonstration ever where police threw explosives into the crowd,” said Weinstein, who says he’s been in dozens of demos. “It’s a terrible path to take because these people will lose their eyes.”

The man, who said he had a 20-month-old child, sat on the steps of an apartment building and tried to comprehend what had just happened.

“I was being peaceful and this is what they do to me?” he yelled.

The crowd then broke up into different groups, with some demonstrators, like Décarie and Laberge, deciding to leave the march.

“I feel totally traumatized by this,” Décarie said. “They’re treating us like terrorists and no one is even armed.”

Police reported more than 150 arrests, two injured police officers and a few vandalized store fronts. One police car was flipped over and smashed. Police said a second one was damaged as well.

They also reported looting at Future Shop.

On Ste. Catherine St., Tina Tsimiklis, in town from Halifax for her children’s March break, was taking photos of her sons in front of a smashed store window.

“This is pretty fricking awesome,” said 16-year-old Dimitri Tsimiklis. “Nothing ever happens like this in Halifax.”

Tina Tsimiklis said they saw protesters and police in riot gear coming along the street and, not knowing what was going on, they convinced a reluctant security guard at the Eaton’s Centre to let them in.

A young woman, who didn’t want to give her name, held a bag of ice to her right eye after a police officer whacked her with his baton.

“(Riot police) were coming towards us and my friend dropped his cellphone so I bent down to pick it up with my arms raised in the air, so one hit me in the face and my back,” she said.

Lafrenière defended the police force’s tactics, saying they had warned people ahead of time that pepper spray and tear gas would be used if necessary.

Police made the majority of the evening’s arrests in front of the Bibliothèque Nationale, on Berri St.

Weinstein said those arrested were just standing still, arms locked, in front of the library chanting.

“They were the least provocative of the whole march,” he said. “They were catchable.”

Lafrenière claimed the demonstrators “wanted to put on a show.”

“They were chasing us all night long because they wanted to get arrested,” he said.

New Orleans Police Kill Unarmed Man During Pot Raid

By Jacob Sullum

On Wednesday night a New Orleans police officer shot and killed an unarmed 20-year-old man, Wendell Allen, during a pot raid. Police, who had a search warrant, say they recovered about five ounces of marijuana, bags, digital scales, and a handgun from the house. They arrested two men for possession with intent to distribute. Allen, a former high school basketball star who was given a five-year suspended sentence for that offense last year, escaped charges this time around, what with being dead and all. The New Orleans Police Department is investigating why Officer Josh Colclough shot Allen, whose mother told a local TV station:

His police title, that's just a title. He's still a man just like the next man that commits a murder. So my child's crime should be treated the same if he'd gotten killed by a regular man.

Should be, but certainly won't. A regular man who breaks into a house and kills someone, even accidentally, would be guilty of murder. But the drug laws authorize police officers to do things that otherwise would be considered burglary and armed robbery. In this case, the cops charged into the house with guns drawn, knowingly endangering everyone inside:

"All the children said that when they came in and they heard the boom, they put guns in the children's faces and asked them to back up. They proceeded upstairs and all they heard was a pow and Wendell screaming," said [Crystal] Butler [Wendell Allen's aunt]. NOPD confirms that 5 children were inside the Gentilly home when the search warrant was executed ranging from ages 1 to 14.

"We have not been able to yet completely understand what exactly occurred,” Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas said yesterday. No matter why Colclough fired his gun, the crucial error occurred long before he ran up the stairs, when legislators decided this was an appropriate way to deal with a plant they did not like.

Fatal Shooting of Ex-Marine by White Plains Police Raises Questions

NY Times

 

The niece stood in the darkened stairwell of the Winbrook Houses, listening, as 20 feet away five police officers yelled at her uncle, who had locked himself in his apartment.

It was 5:25 on a chill November morning. The officers banged loud and hard, demanding that her 68-year-old uncle open his door.

“He was begging them to leave him alone,” she recalls. “He sounded scared.” She pulls her shawl about her shoulders and her voice cracks; she is speaking for the first time about what she saw. “I heard my uncle yelling, ‘Officers, officers, why do you have your guns out?’ ”

The string of events that night sounds prosaic, a who-cares accumulation of little mistakes and misapprehensions. Cumulatively, though, it is like tumbling down the stairs. Somehow the uncle, Kenneth Chamberlain Sr., a former Marine who had heart problems and wheezed if he walked more than 40 feet, triggered his medical alert system pendant. The system operator came on the loudspeaker in his one-bedroom apartment, asking: “Mr. Chamberlain, are you O.K.?” All of this is recorded.

Mr. Chamberlain didn’t respond. So the operator signaled for an ambulance. Police patrol cars fell in behind — standard operating procedure in towns across America. Except an hour later, even as Mr. Chamberlain insisted he was in good health, the police had snapped the locks on the apartment door.

They fired electric charges from Tasers, and beanbags from shotguns. Then they said they saw Mr. Chamberlain grab a knife, and an officer fired his handgun.

Boom! Boom! Mr. Chamberlain’s niece Tonyia Greenhill, who lives upstairs, recalls the echoes ricocheting about the hall. She pushed out a back door and ran into the darkness beneath overarching oaks. He lay on the floor near his kitchen, two bullet holes in his chest, blood pooling thick, dying.

It makes sense to be humble in the presence of conflicting accounts. The White Plains public safety commissioner declared this a “warranted use of deadly force”; the shooter was later put on modified assignment. Mr. Chamberlain, in the commissioner’s telling, had withstood electric charges, grabbed a butcher knife and charged the officers.

The alert system phone in Mr. Chamberlain’s apartment recorded most of the standoff, as did a security camera in the hall. And the officers’ Tasers carried video recorders.

Last month, the Westchester County district attorney played these for the dead man’s son, Kenneth Chamberlain Jr., who teaches martial arts for a local nonprofit organization and intends to file a lawsuit. He is lithe, with a shaved head, and takes pride in a reasoned manner. “My family, we’re not into histrionics,” he says. “We don’t run down the street inciting riot.”

His voice cracks, though, as he describes the tapes. “I heard fear,” he says. “In my 45 years on this earth, I never heard my father sound like that.”

The district attorney will present the case to a grand jury and has not released transcripts. But the family’s recollection matches that of neighbors who listened through closed doors.

They say officers taunted Mr. Chamberlain. He shouted: “Semper fi,” the Marine Corps motto. The police answered with loud shouts of “Hoo-rah!” Another officer, the niece says, said he wanted to pee in Mr. Chamberlain’s bathroom.

Someone, the niece and neighbors say, yelled a racial epithet at the door. Black and white officers were present.

Kenny Randolph listened from his apartment across the hall. “They put fear in his heart,” he says. “It wasn’t a crime scene until they made it one.”

The police say Mr. Chamberlain was “known” to them, although it appears he had not been convicted of a crime. There are intimations that he wrestled with emotional issues. Sometimes, neighbors say, he talked to himself. Who’s to say? As often, life’s default position is set to “complicated.”

Many police departments have trained corps of officers expert in talking with the emotionally upset. Their rule of thumb: talk quietly and de-escalate. That night in White Plains, no one appeared to have de-escalated anything.

Mr. Chamberlain sounded spooked. His son recalls hearing his father say on tape: “This is my sworn testimony. White Plains officers are coming in here to kill me.” A few minutes later, a bullet tore through his rib and heart. The ambulance took him to White Plains Hospital, where he soon died.

His son lives five minutes away. He says he could have talked his father down. Standing in the office of his lawyer Randolph M. McLaughlin, he mimes knocking on his dad’s door. “Dad, it’s me, Ken, I’m here.” His eyes are bloodshot and brimming. “I always said, ‘I’m the protector now.’ But I wasn’t there when he needed me.”

INLAND: Police kill two during unrelated traffic stops

Inland police kill two suspects in unrelated incidents that, when viewed with others, show a rise in officer-involved shootings

BY RICHARD BROOKS

Police in Riverside and San Bernardino [California] killed two men during unrelated but eerily similar nighttime traffic stops that turned violent when armed passengers tried to run away, investigators said.

Brandon James Dunbar, 26, of Riverside, was fatally shot about 2:30 a.m. Thursday after running into a backyard near Anna Street and Lincoln Avenue.

Dunbar was shot when he turned toward the pursuing officer while holding a gun, Sgt. David Amador said in a written statement. Dunbar died soon afterward at a local hospital.

It was the city’s fourth officer-involved-shooting this year and its sixth in the past four months.

Riverside Police Chief Sergio Diaz said he believes more young men are arming themselves, perhaps in relation to increased tension among gangs in the city.

Police said they never know what they’ll find when they answer a call or make a traffic stop.

Ron Martinelli, a former police officer and consultant, said federal statistics show a 30 percent increase in officer deaths since last year. Many of the deaths were from shootings.

“We’re seeing suspects that are more violent than they’ve ever been before. It isn’t just that they’re armed,” Martinelli said. “We find more of a propensity for the suspects to engage the officers with weapons.”

In the San Bernardino case, 23-year-old paroled burglar Anthony Paul Gilmore Jr. was fatally shot at 7:46 p.m. Wednesday along 16th Street just east of North Arrowhead Avenue. Police said he was a Fontana resident. Coroner’s officials said he was from Rialto.

Two officers encountered Gilmore after they spotted a car with no rear license plate run a stop sign in a residential neighborhood, Sgt. Gary Robertson said in a written statement. The car was being driven by a woman whose name has not been released.

During the traffic stop, Gilmore tried to flee after being asked if he was carrying a weapon, investigators said. An officer grabbed him, a struggle ensued, and both officers and Gilmore fell to the ground, according to the statement.

“During the struggle, one of the officers saw a weapon lying on the ground right next to the suspect,” Robertson wrote. “The suspect … grabbed the weapon and put it under his body.

“The officer, fearing that the suspect was going to shoot him or his partner, fired … at the suspect several times.”

Gilmore was handcuffed and taken to Loma Linda University Medical Center where he died at 8:52 p.m.

The two officers suffered minor bumps and scrapes.

Earlier Wednesday, a Chino police officer drove himself to the hospital after a rifle-wielding bank bandit wearing a bullet-proof vest dropped part of his loot but shot and wounded the officer while running to a getaway car.

The officer is recuperating. That manhunt continues.

And in Rialto, police shot and wounded 22-year-old Huston Leron Parker on Feb. 8 when he pointed a replica handgun at them while they were investigating a report of someone shooting at a car along the 100 block of East Jackson Street, officials said.

“Based on my observations … at the scene, it appears that this suspect may have staged this confrontation,” Capt. Randy De Anda said soon after the incident.

OFFICER INVOLVED SHOOTINGS

Two police shootings this week bring the total to six in the Inland area since Jan. 1. Here are some details police have released in those cases.

Jan. 7: Riverside police shot David Ledezma at his home after they say he threw a pipe at them and threatened them with another pipe; Ledezma later died

Feb. 8: Rialto police shot Huston Leron Parker when he aimed a replica handgun at them; Parker was wounded

Feb. 18: Riverside police shot Danny James Bond after he fled from officers and reached for a handgun; Bond died at the scene

Feb. 22: Riverside police shot Rudy Ray Casioce after he fled from a traffic stop; Casioce, who was armed, was unhurt

Feb. 29: San Bernardino police shot Anthony Paul Gilmore Jr. after he fled from a traffic stop and then grabbed a gun during a struggle with police; Gilmore later died

March 1: Riverside police shot Brandon James Dunbar after he fled from a traffic stop and then pulled a gun on an officer; Dunbar later died

Oakland Police Shoot Oscar Grant’s Cousin

by Jorge Rivas, for Colorlines

Over the weekend Oakland Police seriously injured 24-year-old Tony Jones after they shot him in the back. Jones’ mother says he is a cousin of Oscar Grant — the Hayward man killed by a BART police officer on Jan. 1, 2009.

“I talked to my son. My son said ‘Momma, the officers [are] lying. They watched me get out of the car. They watched me walk. They started speeding up and I took off running across the street and when I took off running and I heard the gun go pow, pow, pow,’” Jones’ mother Betrina Works-Grant told KGO. “He said he was running with his hands like this [at his sides]. The police shot at him and shot him in his back. They never said they [were] the police,” More details from KGO:

Sunday evening shortly before midnight, Oakland police stopped a car on the 2000 block of 62nd Avenue. Police say they suspected the vehicle might be linked to a robbery that had just occurred in the area. While police have not identified Jones by name, they say a passenger with a gun ran from the vehicle and was shot by an officer. Jones’s mother and attorney deny he had a gun.

“Tony said he did not have no gun. He got out the vehicle. Some lady, he paid the lady $10, to give him a ride to wherever he got shot at,” said Works-Grant.

For several hours, attorney Waukeen McCoy says he was denied the right to meet with his client at the hospital, going so far as to take a picture of the Oakland officer he says refused entry after Jones requested to see his attorney.

“We believe what happened is that the Oakland Police Department is hiding the fact that they shot him in his back while he was retreating from them,” said McCoy.

The news comes on the heels of the San Francisco District Attorney announcing BART police officer “acted lawfully” when he shot and killed a knife-wielding homeless man on a train platform.

“Officer Crowell only fired at Hill after recognizing an imminent threat of serious bodily injury and commanding Hill to drop the knife,” the report said, according to the Bay Citizen. “Officer Crowell fired at Hill in self-defense.”

In August 2011, Colorlines.com published a two-year long investigation that identified 16 Oakland Police officers still on duty who were responsible for more than half of the department’s officer-involved shooting incidents in the past decade. These repeat shooters operate behind a wall of secrecy, built over decades and sealed with a 2006 California Supreme Court decision blocking public access to personnel records.

Americans angry after police kill two black men

From Press TV

Family and residents hold signs in honor of Ramarley Graham, who was shot and killed by police after he was chased into his grandmother’s Bronx home.

The killing of two African-American men, one of them a Marine, at the hands of US police forces has sparked a public outcry in the United States with police refusing accountability over the deaths.

The Association of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs defended the killing of Sergeant Manuel Loggins in front of his daughters, saying Marine was shot because he was acting “oddly.”

The association claimed Loggins’ actions were a threat to his daughters who were inside a parked car.

“His daughters, ages 9 and 14, could be heard screaming in the SUV, and when approached by sheriff's personnel reported their father had been acting oddly,” the association said in a statement, adding the officer involved is still under investigation.

Loggins, who was enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1998, received multiple medals and commendations from the military.

Meanwhile, New York police are still probing the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Ramarley Graham.

Graham died on February 2 after a police officer chased him to his grandmother’s apartment and shot him in the chest.

He was unarmed at the time and police did not have a warrant to enter the house.

Graham's death sparked angry protests as African-American community leaders say police used unnecessary force against both men because of their skin color.

Last week, people also held protest rallies in Wakefield, a low-income neighborhood with a large African-American and Caribbean immigrant population, over renewed concerns about the prospect of application of aggressive tactics by the New York Police Department (NYPD).

Experts say the shooting can be linked to the NYPD’s aggressive street policing program called “Stop-and-Frisk.” Critics say the program predominately targets low-income minority neighborhoods.