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Police abuse

Afro-Indigenous Man To Receive Nearly $7 Million For Wrongful Conviction

Milwaukee, Wisconsin — On May 13, the Milwaukee Common Council approved a $6.96 million settlement for the wrongful conviction of an Afro-Indigenous man who spent 18 years in prison. Danny Wilber, an Oneida Nation of Wisconsin citizen, was convicted for first-degree intentional murder in Milwaukee County for an incident that occurred in Jan. 2004. The wrongful conviction settlement is the second largest in Milwaukee’s history, and is the result of a federal lawsuit against the City of Milwaukee and nine former Milwaukee police officers alleged to have violated Wilber’s constitutional rights. “The Milwaukee Police Department knew Danny Wilber was innocent—and they framed him anyway," said Lacey Kinnart, Wilber’s partner for more than a decade, in an interview with the LRI Native News Desk.

Forensic Failures: 36 Police-Custody Deaths Should Have Been Ruled Homicide

An unprecedented independent audit found that 36 deaths in police custody over a two-decade span in Maryland should have been ruled homicides by the state’s top medical examiner, a stinging rebuke of Maryland‘s past efforts to investigate the deaths of those once held by law enforcement. The yearslong audit, shared exclusively with The Baltimore Banner ahead of Thursday’s release, cited a likely reason behind the massive failure: racial and pro-police bias in the work of the state’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, which had been led for nearly 20 years by Dr. David Fowler. Before the audit, the deaths had been classified as accidents, natural causes or simply undetermined.

Seattle Protesters Oppose Hate, Clash With Police

Seattle, WA – On Saturday, May 24, Seattle’s LGBTQ community and their allies protested an anti-queer, Christian evangelist rally at the Capitol Hill neighborhood’s Cal Anderson Park. They protested the rally that was called by the group Mayday USA, which aims to classify transgender people as mentally ill and to legally define life as starting at conception. Although the Seattle community outnumbered the reactionaries, the Seattle Police Department (SPD) wasted no time in acting as the reactionaries’ personal armed guard. In total, 16 protesters were arrested by the time the police were walked out of the block by protesters.

DC Rallies In Support Of Butler Family At Neighborhood Cookout

Washington, DC – Over 100 community members and organizers from the DC Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (DCAARPR) gathered on Saturday in Ward 8 to enjoy a cookout in support of the Butler Family. The cookout, hosted by the DC Alliance, featured activities for the kids (such as a bounce house), along with music, dancing, games and plenty of food. The DC Alliance organized the event to support five defendants – Ronald Butler, Donte Butler Sr., Donte Butler Jr., Frederick Simms and Jermaine Irving Jr. – all family members, who were brutally attacked by Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officers in an incident that underscores the racist violence embedded in policing.

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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?

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?

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

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

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.

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Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

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