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Police abuse

DOJ Knew About and Used Notorious Homan Square ‘Black Site’

March 19, 2025 Iain Carlos and Sam Carlen, Black Agenda Report. , , , , ,
Scandals don’t get much more disturbing than that of Homan Square. In 2015, the Guardian revealed Chicago Police had allegedly employed torture and days-long unlawful detention at the secretive “black site”-like Homan Square facility, a nondescript warehouse located in Chicago’s west-side Garfield Park neighborhood. Outraged and alarmed by these revelations, politicians and activists clamored for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate human rights abuses at the facility, which still operates today. Despite the pleading, the DOJ elected not to investigate Homan Square, and instead conducted a broad investigation of Chicago Police Department use of force practices.

RCMP Violated Charter Rights During CGL Arrests, Court Finds

February 20, 2025 Amanda Follett Hosgood, The Tyee. , , ,
A B.C. Supreme Court decision issued yesterday is “precedent setting,” according to a lawyer for three Indigenous land defenders arrested in 2021 along the Coastal GasLink pipeline route. “The courts found the conduct of the police officers abused the court’s process. This is an extraordinarily rare finding, and it demonstrates how serious the police officers’ misconduct was,” Frances Mahon said during a press conference following the decision. “In particular, it was a rebuke to the C-IRG members who thought it was appropriate to say the most egregious, racist things about beautiful Indigenous women when they thought nobody could hear them.”

Community Members Oppose Motion At Consent Decree Hearing

December 31, 2024 Zunyana Crier, Fight Back! News. , , , , ,
New Orleans, LA – On Tuesday, December 17, community organizations and New Orleanians impacted by police misconduct or police violence united at the Consent Decree Fairness Hearing to demand that Judge Susie Morgan rule against the New Orleans Police Department sustainment plan. The consent decree is the federal oversight instituted in 2013. That year, the Department of Justice found the NOPD to be practicing unlawful misconduct and unconstitutional policing. Different community groups rallied outside against the motion. The people came together around five points of unity.

Parents Of Forest Defender Killed By Police File Civil Rights Lawsuit

December 21, 2024 Sean Summers, Unicorn Riot. , , , , ,
Nearly two years after police killed Terán, and a year after the state refused to bring charges against any of the state troopers responsible, Tortuguita’s parents are still seeking answers and accountability for the death of their 26-year-old child. Belkis Terán and Joel Paez, Tortuguita’s mother and father, are suing Georgia Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Ryan Long as well as Georgia State Patrol troopers Mark Lamb and Bryland Myers in federal court claiming that the raid that led to their child’s killing violated Tortuguita’s civil rights.

Cops Are Making Their Own Crack Cocaine!

December 14, 2024 Mike Pappas, Left Voice. , , , , ,
Florida’s Broward County is poised to erase the criminal convictions of thousands of people who were arrested for purchasing drugs, particularly crack cocaine. Why, you may ask? Did the holiday season lead Broward county’s Supreme Court to suddenly grow a heart, Grinch-style, realizing punitive measures to address drug use and addiction will never help people? No, it’s because it was found that those drugs were produced by the cops themselves in the Sheriff’s office. You sure did read that right. As reported by Democracy Now, “For years, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office produced crack cocaine to be sold by undercover police to the public.”

New Yorkers Protest NYPD Shooting Three On Subway

September 21, 2024 Fight Back! News. , , ,
Brooklyn, NY – On September 18, close to a hundred people came out to protest the NYPD shooting 3 civilians on the subway. The protest was organized by the New York Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NYAARPR). On Sunday, September 15, two NYPD officers followed a 49-year-old man, Derell Mickles, up several flights of stairs at the Sutter Avenue L train station in Brownsville. They suspected that Mickles skipped the $2.90 fare and proceeded to follow him closely. A confrontation ensued and an officer drew their gun after Mickles allegedly pulled a knife—which NYPD has said they have lost. An officer responded by shooting, hitting Mickles, two bystanders and his fellow officer.

Activists In Philly Have A Novel Approach To Help De-Oppress Society

September 21, 2024 Damon Orion, Counter Punch. , , ,
In 2019, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America reported that one in 1,000 Black men in the U.S. are killed by police. Statista states that between 2015 and August 2024, Black U.S. residents were fatally shot by law enforcement officers at a rate of 6.2 per million of the population per year compared to 2.4 white Americans per million per year. This is an all-too-familiar example of systemic oppression, which the diversity, equity, and inclusion-based software company Develop Diverse defines as “the mistreatment of a social, ethnic, or racial group, perpetuated by governments, schools, health care systems, and other socioeconomic structures.”

What Will It Take To Make Black Lives Matter?

September 3, 2024 Detroit Will Breathe, Left Voice. , , , , ,
This summer, the American Midwest has been the epicenter of several notable police murders of Black people including John Zook, Jr. of Wayne, Mich., Sonya Massey of Springfield, Ill., Sherman Butler of Detroit, and Samuel Sharpe of Milwaukee. While most of these tragedies occurred many miles from one another, they all share common threads in that the victims were poor, Black, and suffering from some version of a mental health crisis at the time of their deaths. Samuel Sharpe, a veteran and well-known resident of an unhoused community in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Milwaukee, was gunned down without hesitation, just blocks from the Republican National Convention (RNC), as he turned to run away from police after being approached by officers in the midst of an argument with a neighbor.

Do Civilian Review Boards Work?

September 1, 2024 Zina Hutton, Governing. , , , ,
In the years following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, states and localities across the country introduced hundreds of pieces of legislation meant to address police violence. Many of those new laws included the creation of civilian police accountability boards: civilian-led groups that receive complaints about police misconduct and have the power to advise police departments on potential consequences. These boards were a kind of low-hanging fruit for people looking to make immediate changes to policing, says Rachel Moran, founder of the University of St. Thomas School of Law’s Criminal and Juvenile Defense Clinic.

Utica Streets Shut Down By 1,000 During Justice For Nyah Mway March

July 24, 2024 Brendan Maslauskas Dunn, Unicorn Riot. , , , ,
Utica, NY — Nearly 1,000 people shut down the streets of Utica on July 13 in response to the police killing of 13-year-old Nyah Mway. The protest occurred during the busiest weekend of the year, when the city hosts the Boilermaker Road Race, one of the largest 15K races in the country. The march started in Roscoe Conkling Park at the base of the city’s ski hill. The majority of those gathered, like Mway, were Karen — an ethnic group from Myanmar that the country’s army has been fighting for 75 years. Many in the crowd wore “Justice for Nyah Mway” t-shirts, or traditional Karen clothes.

A Report On Police Misconduct During The George Floyd Protests

June 6, 2024 Defending Rights & Dissent. , , , , , ,
On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for over nine minutes. Tens of millions of people took to the streets, not only in outrage, but with a fervent hope that people coming together and demanding justice would lead to safer communities for Black Americans—and for everyone. From day one of the protests, police unleashed horrors on protesters. Cops dressed in riot gear fired less-lethal weapons into crowds of unarmed civilians, sometimes within seconds of arriving at the scene. The weapons were “less-lethals” but they still resulted in gruesome, and in some cases permanent, injuries.

Nabbed Stopping Military Shipment To Israel

March 25, 2024 Cathy Vogan, Consortium News. , , , , ,
Paul Keating, branch secretary of the Australian Maritime Union (AMU) spoke for fellow members in solidarity with the Palestinian community and faced off with police, when he and several hundred protestors blockaded Sydney’s Port Botany on Sunday to protest Australia’s export of military aid to Israel. The protestors’ target is ZIM Shipping, a well known Israeli company that trade unionist Ian Rintoul says supports and is connected with Israel. “It offered its services to the Israeli state for the conduct of the genocide,” he told Consortium News.

Baltimore: Cops Tried To Arrest A Whole Neighborhood

March 24, 2024 Taya Graham and Stephen Janis, The Real News. , , ,
Former Baltimore Police Sgt. Ethan Newberg’s disgraceful downfall continues as new body camera footage reveals an incident in which the ex-cop made three illegal arrests, and then threatened to arrest entire block full of witnesses. Although they were initially responding to a neighborhood dispute, Newberg and his partner arrested a local resident who was not involved in the altercation almost immediately. When neighbors began to protest, Newberg escalated to arrest two more residents—and threatened to keep going until the whole neighborhood was in handcuffs. 

Alliance Unites To Free Survivors Of Torture And Wrongful Conviction

March 4, 2024 Kobi Guillory, Fight Back News! , , , , ,
Chicago, Illinois – “You can't throw a stone and not hit someone who is affected by police torture and wrongful conviction here in Chicago, the torture capital of the United States,” said Merawi Gerima, a co-chair of the Campaign to Free Incarcerated Survivors of Torture (CFIST.) Gerima was speaking at the annual People's Hearing on Police Crimes on Saturday, February 24, at the office of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR) in Woodlawn neighborhood on the predominantly Black South Side.

Marvin Haynes Exonerated And Released From Prison After 19 Years

January 10, 2024 Niko Georgiades, Unicorn Riot. , , , , , ,
Minneapolis, MN — In a historic ruling, Hennepin County Judge William Koch vacated Marvin Haynes’ murder conviction, dismissed his charges with prejudice, and ordered his release from prison where he was sentenced to serve life. Haynes walked out of MCF-Stillwater as an exonerated man into the loving arms of his family and supporters on Dec. 11, 2023. Marvin Haynes was 16 years old when he was framed for murder by the Minneapolis Police and Hennepin County Attorney’s Office. Haynes’ wrongful conviction was supervised by former Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar and upheld by the Minnesota Supreme Court years later in an appeal.
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