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Naked, unarmed black man shot dead by white metro Atlanta cop

RT | March 10, 2015

An African American man running and “crawling” naked through his apartment complex in suburban Atlanta was fatally shot Monday by a DeKalb County police officer. The unarmed man may have had mental health issues, authorities said.

The unidentified white DeKalb police officer responded to a call regarding a man, identified as Anthony Hill, 27, according to social media and confirmed by the Atlanta Journal Constitution, who was allegedly “acting deranged, knocking on doors and crawling around naked,” at The Heights apartment complex in Chamblee, Georgia, said Cedric Alexander, director of the county public safety department.

Despite being equipped with a stun gun and pepper spray, the officer fired two shots when Hill allegedly ran in his direction, ignoring calls to stop.

“The officer called him to stop while stepping backward, drew his weapon and fired two shots,” he said.

Hill, a resident of The Heights, died of the body wounds. Alexander said the investigation is in the hands of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) as “a result of what’s going on currently across this country as it relates to police shootings.”

“No weapon was found,” Alexander said. “The GBI is going to take the point on this investigation.”

Alexander did not say the distance between Hill and the officer, a 7-year veteran of the police force, when the latter shot.

“I think in all fairness we need to wait and see what the outcome of the investigation is because I can’t tell you, beyond what I have told you so far, what kind of measures that officer may have taken,” he said.

The officer has been placed on administrative leave.

As for Hill, Alexander suggested the man may have had some mental health issues.

“I can only reasonably assume that if he was running around the apartment complex naked, I believe we can make the assumption there may have been some mental health experience that he might have been having,” Alexander said.

Alexander added that DeKalb County police officers do undergo some training to deal with the mentally ill, but he said there will be an examination to determine if additional instruction is warranted.

“That’s becoming more and more apparent,” Alexander said. “We have already, as many departments have begun to do, look at how to expand our mental health training when we find it certainly necessary to do so. Because it appears that we’re seeing more and more of these cases across the country in which police are engaging with those who appear to be in distress.”

Hill’s murder comes about a week after the suspicious DeKalb County police shooting of a 44-year-old Kevin Davis in Decatur.

READ MORE: Wisconsin officer who shot unarmed man was exonerated in previous fatal shooting

March 10, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | 2 Comments

Coroner says man fatally shot himself in the chest while handcuffed behind his back

RT | August 26, 2014

​The release of an autopsy report in Louisiana is raising new questions about the unusual shooting death of a 22-year-old black male who died earlier this year in a police car while his hands were cuffed behind his back.

RT reported earlier this year that police in Iberia Parish, LA said Victor White III died in early March after he fatally shot himself while handcuffed in the back of a squad car. White had reportedly been apprehended for possession of drugs, and was searched no fewer than two times before being cuffed and placed in the backseat of a police vehicle. According to the police report from the time, White uncovered a gun while in the car and shot himself in the back.

According to a coroner’s report just recently obtained by NBC News, however, White died from a gunshot wound that entered his body in the chest. Nevertheless, Dr. Carl Ditch wrote in the report that White was capable of firing the shot while cuffed “due to his body habitus” and has agreed to rule the death a suicide.

Hannah Rappleye, a reporter for NBC, compared the coroner’s story with the official police report from March in an article published by the outlet this week.

“White was shot in the front, not the back. The bullet entered his right chest and exited under his left armpit. White was left-handed, according to family members. According to the report, the forensic pathologist found gunshot residue in the wound, but not the sort of stippling that a close-range shot can sometimes produce. He also found abrasions on White’s face,” she wrote. “And yet, despite the contradictions – and even though White’s hands were never tested for gunpowder residue – the Iberia Parish coroner still supported the central contention of the initial police statement issued back in March.”

“Although the decedent was handcuffed at the time with his hands to his back, due to his body habitus, the pathologist and investigators agree that he would have been able to manipulate the weapon to the point where the contact entrance wound was found,” Ditch wrote.

The deceased’s father, Rev. Victor White II, told NBC that he had his doubts about the coroner’s report.

“You can’t make me understand,” he said. “You can’t make me understand how my son took his left hand, when he was handcuffed behind the back, and shot himself. I don’t believe a thing they’re saying at this point.”

According to the coroner, however, White was indeed capable of causing his own death.

“As Coroner of lberia Parish it is my duty to rule on cause and manner of death in all such cases as Mr. White’s to the best of my ability and without bias. Based on the forensic evidence and information gained from the ongoing State Police investigation, I have determined the cause of death is a single contact gunshot wound to the right lateral chest, and the manner of death is suicide,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, though, the Louisiana State Police remain in the midst of an investigation launched nearly nine months ago into the shooting death. Writing for NBC, Rappleye wrote that that probe has so far failed to reveal any new information about the tragic death.

“Due to the pending investigation, records normally considered public are not available. The State Police will not yet release dash cam footage, or the number of or names of any officers present during White’s death. They will not give any timeframe as to when they expect the investigation to conclude,” she wrote.

“You always want to make sure in the end you did whatever you could do possible, that in whatever case you put forward, is the right case, and the outcome is the right outcome,” Trooper Brooks David, public information officer for the Louisiana State Police, told NBC. “So if it takes us eight months, or two months, you always want to make sure that you do the right thing.”

According to Rev. White, however, legal action might be the next step if the eventual release of the Louisiana State Police’s report raises more doubts about his son’s death.

“I don’t’ think anything is going to be different from what they already said,” he told NBC. “It’s difficult to see that anything else would bring us back what we need. The only thing we want back is our son.”

August 27, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception | , , , | 1 Comment

Watchdog groups slam Ferguson police ‘harassment’ of reporters

RT | August 20, 2014

As tensions continue to simmer following nine days of street protests in Ferguson, Missouri, where a teenager was shot dead by a police officer, two watchdog groups have slammed the heavy-handed police tactics.

To compound the physical and mental strain of reporting on the weeks-long protests in Ferguson, where the public is desperate for justice after a white police officer shot black teenager Michael Brown to death, journalists themselves are finding themselves the target of police tear gas, rubber bullets and flash bang grenades.

However, Robert Mahoney, Deputy Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), said the police tactics would not prevent reporters from doing their jobs.

“Ferguson is an international story and journalists are going to cover it. They have a right to do so without fearing for their safety or liberty,” Mahoney said. “The harassment and detention of reporters must stop. From senior commanders on down, the word must go out to security forces to let journalists do their job.”

CPJ also released a guide for journalists on how to stay safe while covering events in Ferguson.

Jasmine Heiss, an observer with Amnesty International, expressed concern over reports that journalists were being tear-gassed while performing their jobs.

“Just last night I’ve heard several journalists and community say that either gas was thrown at them while they were reporting, or, in the case of the community members that gas was thrown into residential neighborhoods while they were walking,” Heiss told RT.

“Increasingly repressive tactics [are] being used to curtail free speech,” she added.

Six journalists were detained by police while covering the protests on Monday and early Tuesday, compelling the American Society of News Editors to describe the incidences as a “top-down effort to restrict the fundamental First Amendment rights of the public and the press.”

According to CNN, 11 journalists have been arrested in the course of the protests, which have thrown a glaring spotlight on US race relations, not to mention military-style police equipment and tactics now being deployed on the streets of America.

Police were caught on video firing a tear gas canister that exploded directly in front of an Al Jazeera America crew, causing the reporters to discard their camera equipment and flee the fumes.

In another heated encounter, a police officer is actually caught on video telling journalists, “I’m going to f***ing kill you!”

Meanwhile, social media accounts have exploded with real-time proof of the “severe press intimidation,” as the Huffington Post described the heavy-handed tactics, where Ferguson police fired at journalists with rubber bullets and flash bang grenades, in some cases preventing media from leaving their vehicles for fear of being targeted.

German reporter Ansgar Graw and his colleague Frank Hermann were detained by police for taking photos of a burned-out gas station, close to the spot where Michael Brown was killed.

“I tried to take some pictures at a spot where before I think were taken several thousand photos of the same spot, and some police officers tried to shoot me and my colleague from Germany…but it was on Monday at 2 o’clock, it was perfect…there was no threat, no tensions were in the air,” he told RT.

The journalist said the police told them they could photograph, but they had to continue walking otherwise they would be arrested. Despite complying with the police orders, Graw said they were still detained.

August 20, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Local police in US kill at least 400 people a year, mostly minorities

RT | August 15, 2014

A white police officer in the United States killed a black person on average of twice per week from 2005 to 2012, according to homicide reports offered to the FBI. But this data is limited, as only about 4 percent of law enforcement agencies contributed.

There was an average of 96 such incidents out of at least 400 police killings each year that local police departments reported to the FBI, according to analysis conducted by USA Today.

The analysis comes in the wake of the fatal police shooting by a white officer of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri that has set off national outrage over US law enforcement’s aggressive use of deadly force, incongruent targeting of minorities, and a militarized posture that treats citizens as the enemy.

The FBI report shows that 18 percent of African-Americans killed during those seven years were under the age of 21. Whites killed that were under the age of 21 came out to 8.7 percent.

As USA Today noted, only around 750 agencies – out of the 17,000 law enforcement entities across the United States – offered such data to the FBI.

On top of the limited participation, the self-reported contents of the database are considered incomplete. The data are not audited after submission to the FBI, and information on “justifiable” homicides has often been at odds with independent statistics gathered on police fatalities.

”There is no national database for this type of information, and that is so crazy,” said Geoff Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina. “We’ve been trying for years, but nobody wanted to fund it and the (police) departments didn’t want it. They were concerned with their image and liability. They don’t want to bother with it.”

Alpert added that the limited FBI data – the most complete record of people killed by US police – can show that a death had occurred, but it is reliable for little else.

“I’ve looked at records in hundreds of departments, and it is very rare that you find someone saying, ‘Oh, gosh, we used excessive force.’ In 98.9 percent of the cases, they are stamped as justified and sent along,” Alpert told USA Today.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police, on the other hand, said police use of force is blown out of proportion. Based on data from the Bureau of Justices Statistics in 2008, the group said less than 2 percent of 40 million people who had contact with police passed along complaints that officers used or threatened force.

“In large part, the public perception of police use of force is framed and influenced by the media depictions which present unrealistic and often outlandish representations of law enforcement and the policing profession,” the group said in a 2012 report.

Nevertheless, many independent studies of police shootings in major US cities have come to the conclusion that minorities are disproportionately targeted for police violence.

“We need not look for individual racists to say that we have a culture of policing that is really rubbing salt into longstanding racial wounds,” NAACP president Cornell Williams Brooks told Mother Jones.

Brooks added that in the US, many people suspected of minor crimes are confronted with “overwhelmingly major, often lethal, use of force.”

Meanwhile, officers are rarely convicted or sentenced for killing a suspect.

“Unfortunately, the patterns that we’ve been seeing recently are consistent: The police don’t show as much care when they are handling incidents that involve young black men and women, and so they do shoot and kill,” said Delores Jones-Brown, law professor and director of the Center on Race, Crime, and Statistics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, according to Mother Jones.

“And then for whatever reason, juries and prosecutor’s offices are much less likely to indict or convict.”

The US Justice Department is investigating at least 15 police agencies in the US for systemic abuse, including allegations of excessive force, racial profiling or false arrest.

August 15, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

America’s most popular prescription sleep medication linked to mass shootings

RT | January 20, 2014

A new report describing the bizarre and dangerous side effects of the sleep aid Ambien has once again raised questions about one of the United States’ most popular prescription drugs.

In a story by the Fix, Allison McCabe chronicled the numerous cases in which Ambien has caused individuals to commit unsafe, and sometimes deadly acts.

In 2009, 45-year-old Robert Stewart was convicted on eight charges of second-degree murder after he killed eight people in a nursing home. He was originally charged with first-degree murder, but by claiming his tirade was Ambien-induced he was able to have the charges lessened and sentenced to 142-179 years in prison.

In a similar case, Thomas Chester Page of South Carolina was sentenced on five counts of attempted murder despite his claims that Ambien was the cause of a shootout with officers. He received 30 years of prison on each count, to be served concurrently.

Although the Food and Drug Administration approved Ambien in 1992, its warning labels have changed significantly over the last two decades as evidence mounted documenting the drug’s ability to induce dangerous behavior.

“After taking AMBIEN, you may get up out of bed while not being fully awake and do an activity that you do not know you are doing,” the label currently reads. “The next morning, you may not remember that you did anything during the night… Reported activities include: driving a car (“sleep-driving”), making and eating food, talking on the phone, having sex, sleep-walking.”

In the courtroom, cases related to Ambien use have ranged from shootings to child molestation charges to car accidents. In one such case, flight attendant Julie Ann Bronson from Texas ran over three people – including an 18-month old who suffered from brain damage as a result. When Bronson woke up in jail the next morning, she could barely comprehend what she had done.

“It was surreal. It was like a bad dream,” she said in May 2012. “I did the crime but I never intended to do it. I wouldn’t hurt a flea. And if I would have hit somebody, I would have stopped and helped. We’re trained in CPR.” Bronson pleaded guilty to the felony charges, but also received lesser charges by citing Ambien as the reason for her actions.

While some drug companies work on sleep aids that do not induce the kind of unpredictable and risky behavior Ambien does, the popularity of the medication raises concern over America’s prescription drug culture. The market for sleeping pills is a billion-dollar industry, yet dangerous side effects continue to be reported.

Last year, a report by the Department of Health and Human Services highlighted about 2,200 doctors for suspicious activities such as over-prescribing drugs. More than 700 Medicare doctors were also flagged for issuing what could be seen as “extreme” and potentially harmful prescriptions.

Although the report noted that some prescriptions could have been effective, it added, “prescribing high amounts on any of these measures may indicate that a physician is prescribing drugs which are not medically necessary or that he or she has an inappropriate incentive, such as a kickback, to order certain drugs.”

Soon after that report was issued, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that roughly 18 women a day are dying in the United States due to prescription drug overdose, namely from painkillers like Vicodin and Oxycontin. With women making up 40 percent of all overdose deaths in 2010, these numbers marked a 400 percent increase compared to data from 1999.

The benefits of medication have also been placed under heavy scrutiny when it comes to other health issues, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In December 2013, RT reported that the authors of the primary study promoting medication over behavioral therapy in order to treat ADHD now have serious concerns over their original results.

“I hope it didn’t do irreparable damage,” said one of the stud’s co-authors, Dr. Lilly Hechtman of Montreal’s McGill University. “The people who pay the price in the end is the kids. That’s the biggest tragedy in all of this.”

January 22, 2014 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment