Man shot dead by Massachusetts state trooper was mentally ill, suicidal

By Mike Ingram
June 22, 2015
World Socialist Web Site

 

Santos Laboy, a 45-year-old man from Somerville MA was shot three times in the chest by a State Trooper on Friday June 19 after allegedly brandishing a folding knife which he refused to drop when confronted by the trooper.

There are contradictory reports of events immediately prior to the shooting, but it appears Laboy was being pursued by Boston University (BU) police who were searching for a man with outstanding warrants. They spotted Laboy at 2 p.m. and attempted to stop him. Laboy fled on foot through the Esplanade along the Charles River, pulling out a knife.

As he ran across a pedestrian footbridge, Laboy was confronted by a state trooper crossing the bridge from the other direction. Witnesses said they heard an exchange between the two, including the trooper telling Laboy to drop the knife, then at least three shots were fired and Laboy lay dead at 2:20 p.m.

According to the Boston Globe, an eyewitness to the shooting, Samantha Bourdeau, was riding in a car on Storrow Drive when she saw a man on the road, and “the next thing you knew, you look directly up and he’s on the bridge.” She said she saw police shoot him multiple times and heard at least three consecutive “booms” from the gunfire.

Another eyewitness, BU graduate student Chelsea Reid, said she saw a shirtless man running along the Esplanade and said several officers jumped out of a van and gave chase. The officers yelled, “Take him down! Take him down!” Reid said. “I’m shaken up. … It’s just a lot,” the Globe reported.

The victim’s family members have condemned the killing as unnecessary. Laboy’s sister Olga Santiago told reporters she doesn’t understand why the officers couldn’t subdue him without killing him. Olga and her mother found out about the shooting when they recognized Laboy’s gray gym bag on the news, causing her mother to have what doctors said was a minor heart attack. Another sister of Laboy, Rosa Santiago, said, “He needed help, he didn’t need to be dead. He was the type of person that was all to himself, he didn’t talk.”

Laboy was well known to police who said he had a “long and violent criminal history.” A posting on Laboy’s Facebook page reads, “I’m real close to turning into a savage. Only one chain link is holding me together.” Another reads, “Message to US Marshall, Boston Police and Probation … Despite your threat to use force to capture me if I refuse to surrender, I’m still free and getting stronger by the day. Got nothing to lose…”

Laboy’s suicidal tendencies were known to police after a February 2009 incident in which he had wielded a three-foot samurai sword, smashing cars and police cruisers and begging officers to shoot him in the head. That incident ended peacefully as police held Laboy at bay until able to subdue him with a beanbag gun. Laboy faced 10 charges, including assault with a dangerous weapon and destruction of property worth over $250 and was sentenced to five years in prison followed by three years probation after being convicted on five of the counts.

Laboy’s family has told reporters he was released from prison for the sword attack about one and a half years ago and had lived briefly in Somerville with Rosa Santiago before more recently living on the streets and in homeless shelters. Prior to going to prison for the sword attack, Laboy had spent roughly 20 years in prison after being convicted in a shooting that left a man paralyzed. His sister said Laboy attacked the man after being robbed.

Speaking outside of their mother’s apartment in the Mission Hill area of Boston, Laboy’s sisters Rosa and Olga Santiago questioned the use of lethal force, stating that law enforcement were generally aware of Laboy’s record of mental illness and suicidal tendencies. “They knew he was suicidal. They knew it. They didn’t have to shoot him like the way they killed him, like a dog.”

His sisters said Laboy showed signs of mental illness going back to a young age, but he never received treatment. They said that later Laboy refused offers of help or medication and remained angry. Olga Santiago said, “They killed my brother. You are supposed to figure out what the problem is first before you shoot, you don’t shoot somebody without knowing their mental health problems.”

Suffolk District Attorney Danial F. Conley has assigned Chief Trial Counsel John Pappas to lead a probe into the shooting, according to spokesman Jake Wark. “The preliminary investigation suggests that the man was armed with a knife, refused orders to drop it, approached the trooper, and was shot,” Wark said.

Rosa Santiago claimed her brother was shot four times and multiple witnesses testify to hearing at least three shots. “He needed help. He didn’t need to be dead. Our question is, you shoot somebody one time with a small knife? Why do you have to shoot him three more times? That’s murder to us.”

Laboy is the second member of their family to be killed by police. Their cousin, Nelson Santiago, 39, was fatally shot by Boston police officers in 2002. Conley’s office found that police officers were justified in using deadly force when they shot and killed Santiago, claiming he “menaced police” in a stolen car on a dead-end Dorchester street.

More than a quarter of Chicago county jail inmates suffer severe mental illness

By George Marlowe
June 1, 2015
World Socialist Web Site

 

Recent reports have highlighted the fact that at least a quarter of the prison population at Chicago’s Cook County Jail suffer from serious mental health illnesses.

Speaking to the Chicago Tribune, the new head of the jail noted that out of the jail’s approximately 8,000 detainees, some 1,900 have been identified as suffering from mental illness. Dr. Nneka Jones, a 37-year-old clinical psychologist now in charge of the jail, told the press it is becoming a “social epidemic.”

In a previous interview with ThinkProgress, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart admitted, “Conservative numbers are 25, but we think it’s closer to 30 or 35 percent of our jail population that has a mental illness… so we’ve effectively become the largest mental health hospital in the country.”

Located in the highly impoverished West Side of Chicago, the dilapidated and sprawling jail is the largest single-site prison in the country. Conditions have long been dangerous and brutal for inmates, particularly the mentally ill, and are unlikely to change for the better. In a chiefly cosmetic move the Cook County sheriff appointed Dr. Nneka Jones as executive director of the facility on May 26, the first time a mental health professional has been hired to run a major US jail.

The conditions in the jail have previously been deemed so hazardous and inhumane that they were considered a violation of prisoners’ constitutional rights by federal authorities in 2008. In the last five years alone, with the deepening of the economic and social crisis, the number of inmates with mental health illnesses has more than doubled.

Cermak Health Services, the on-site hospital at the jail run by the county, suffers from extreme overcrowding and poor quality care. Most detainees with severe mental health issues are treated in an emergency triage fashion to temporarily ameliorate mental health issues with medications or to subdue detainees who have outbursts. The highly overcrowded jail and its hospital have effectively become a dumping ground for the mentally ill with no proper alternatives.

Alongside the decimation of social safety nets and the deterioration of the social conditions in Chicago, there has been a sharp increase in mental health problems. Those suffering from severe mental health illnesses—including schizophrenia, severe depression, bipolar disorders and trauma—are caught up in devastating cycles of poverty and homelessness.

Instead of providing adequate mental health services to those who need it the most, Cook County and Illinois officials have carried out severe cuts to such programs. The increasing number of people held in jail is a direct result of the bipartisan assault on access to mental health care for the indigent. With diminishing access to psychiatric beds in hospitals and community mental health centers, many of the most vulnerable are thrown into the criminal justice system and subjected to brutal treatment, which make matters worse.

According to the National Alliance of Mental Health, between 2009 and 2012 the state of Illinois made the fourth-largest cuts to such programs of any state in the country, cutting spending by 32 percent. The draconian cuts imperiled tens of thousands in need of psychiatric services, assistive community treatment, housing or crisis services.

In 2012, Chicago’s Democratic mayor, Rahm Emanuel, closed six of the city’s 12 mental health facilities. The same year Illinois Democratic Governor Pat Quinn closed the nearby Tinley Park Mental Health Center. The shuttered facility was subsequently used for urban warfare training exercises.

Current Republican Governor Bruce Rauner’s budget for fiscal year 2016, which starts in June, targets providers of community-based health care centers for savage cuts. Rauner is calling for an $82 million reduction in funding for the Department of Human Service’s mental health division. This is a cut of 15 percent of the department’s current funding. Rauner claims this is necessary to close a $6 billion shortfall in his proposed state budget.

The cuts will eliminate funding for psychiatry, housing programs for the homeless and care coordinators who direct the mentally ill to appropriate care. Care providers have been outraged by the budget proposals and point out that many of those who desperately need care will be driven to the streets, hospital emergency rooms and prisons.

Such cuts only exacerbate the homeless crisis. An analysis by the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless estimates that over 138,575 Chicagoans were homeless in the course of the 2013-14 school year, a staggering 19.4 percent increase from the previous year. That number is a direct result of the 2013 school closures, with nearly 22,144 students now considered homeless in Chicago Public Schools.

According to a report by the US Conference of Mayors, over 25 to 30 percent of those who are homeless suffer from severe mental health problems including schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. Lacking affordable housing and care, those who end up on the streets inevitably find themselves locked up in the overcrowded and brutal conditions of Cook County Jail.

One national expert on jail operations has recently testified that detainees at Cook County Jail face an “extremely high risk” of harm, making it one of the most dangerous jails in the country. According to the Chicago Tribune, during a hearing of a civil lawsuit brought by the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University, Jeffrey A. Schwartz testified that a culture of brutality exists within the prison due to “serious failures” of staff leadership exasperating the problem.

However, US District Judge Virginia Kendall denied Schwartz’s motion to require Sheriff Dart to stem the alleged “crisis of violence” in the jail. In an attempt to cover up for abuse under his watch, Dart has dismissed the allegations as a “fictitious novel” and suggested the lawsuit is unnecessary.

Far from such conditions being “fictitious,” the violent treatment of mentally disabled prisoners across the country has come under scrutiny with a recent report from Human Rights Watch. The report highlights that violent and deadly abuse is rampant in US jails and prisons all across the country.

In many respects, the clock has been turned back centuries. There are now ten times more mentally ill people in prisons than in hospitals. The availability of psychiatric beds per capita has decreased to levels before 1850—before the American Civil War—when efforts were made to treat the mentally ill in hospital settings instead of imprisoning them. In the 1800’s, efforts were made by figures such as Dorothea Dix and more far-sighted layers within the ruling class to stop the imprisonment and cruel and inhumane treatment of the mentally ill.

The growing number of detainees suffering from mental illness in Cook County jail reveals the enormous regression American society has undergone. With no answer to the vast social problems it has caused, the ruling elite and the Democratic Party political establishment that has long run America’s third largest city have no answer outside of criminalizing the poor.

US establishment shields killer cops

By Andre Damon
May 27, 2015
World Socialist Web Site

 

Within three days of a judge’s ruling acquitting a Cleveland cop who brutally murdered two unarmed people, the Obama administration announced a settlement with the city that holds no one accountable for a string of police murders and leaves the existing apparatus of violence and terror intact.

These developments taken together reveal a basic reality of social and political life in America: the categorical defense by the entire political establishment and all official institutions of a paramilitary police force that has been granted a license to kill.

The court ruling exonerated Officer Michael Brelo of manslaughter charges stemming from the deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, who were killed November 29, 2012 after police fired more than 130 rounds into their car. Forty-nine of those shots were fired by Brelo, who jumped onto the hood of the car and shot the unarmed occupants directly through the windshield 15 times.

Brelo was one of over a hundred cops who participated in a high-speed chase through Cleveland that culminated in a fusillade of bullets comparable to the killings of unarmed civilians at military checkpoints that became a common feature of the US military occupation of Iraq.

Judge John O’Donnell acquitted Brelo on the pseudo-legal grounds that the prosecutors had not proven that Brelo’s bullets were the ones that actually killed the two victims. Providing a judicial imprimatur for police to act as judge, jury and executioner, he declared, “Brelo’s entire use of deadly force was a constitutionally reasonable response to an objectively reasonably perceived threat of great bodily harm from the occupants” of the car.

Meanwhile, no charges have been brought against a Cleveland cop who last November shot twelve-year-old Tamir Rice for holding a toy gun, and then failed to provide first aid as the child lay dying on the ground.

The same glaring disparity between homicidal police violence and the official response is expressed in the Obama Justice Department’s toothless settlement with the Cleveland police. The settlement stems from a Justice Department investigation that cited multiple cases of wanton and unconstitutional police violence and concluded that the Cleveland police department engaged in a pattern of “unnecessary and excessive use of deadly force, including shootings and head strikes with impact weapons,” as well as “the unnecessary, excessive or retaliatory use of less lethal force including Tasers, chemical spray and fists.”

The agreement, signed by the city authorities, mandates a handful of trivial “reforms,” including the hiring of more minority officers and the creation of a Community Police Commission to give the appearance of oversight. It also calls for additional funding for the police.

Far from being an aberration, Cleveland is one of at least 19 cities where the Justice Department has since 2000 found a “pattern or practice of excessive force.” Just over the past three years, Justice Department inquiries have reported systematic brutality and violations of democratic rights by police in Ferguson, Missouri; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle, Washington.

This has not prevented President Obama from declaring that the murder last August of 18-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson cop Darren Wilson is “not typical of what happens across the country.” Wilson was exonerated by a rigged grand jury, as was New York City Officer Daniel Panteleo for the choking death of Eric Garner.

In working-class communities throughout the United States, police function as de facto death squads, treating workers and youth as an occupied population to be held in check with brutality and even murder. The methods of military violence developed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the so-called “war on terror” have been brought home for use against the US population.

Brelo personifies the convergence between the police and the military. An Iraq war veteran, Brelo told police investigators that he used his Marine training in deciding to “elevate” himself onto the hood of his victims’ car and “push through the target.”

So far this year, police have killed 455 people in the United States, putting them on track to take significantly more lives in 2015 than the 1,100 they killed last year. Every year, cops kill more people in the United States than the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq in 2004, at the height of the conflict, and police killings account for one out of every 16 homicides in the US.

The wave of police violence in the United States is not some excrescence of American “democracy.” It is deeply embedded in the structure of American society and rooted in the capitalist system and its irreconcilable class antagonisms. These have been immensely heightened by the unprecedented growth of social inequality, itself bound up with the deindustrialization of cities such as Cleveland, the impoverishment of the working class, and the obscene enrichment of a new financial aristocracy.

The buildup of a militarized police force to occupy the cities is the ruling class’s response to the growth of popular opposition to its policies of war abroad and austerity at home. Far from doing anything to ameliorate mass poverty and inequality, America’s financial elite responds to any sign of opposition with overwhelming and murderous violence.

 

 

Cop used military “rules of engagement” in 2012 Cleveland killing

By Jerry White
May 26, 2015
World Socialist Web Site

 

Michael Brelo, the Cleveland police officer acquitted by a judge Sunday of shooting two people at point-blank range while standing on the hood of their car, had previously told investigators that he reverted to his military training during the incident.

In an interview with police investigators after the shooting, Brelo told a police lieutenant that the November 2012 chase and shooting “was like being back in a war,” according to testimony at the trial.

An article in Cleveland Magazine recounted the questioning. Asked if he remembered jumping on the hood of the car, Brelo said, “No, sir. It’s possible, because I was so terrified that I was going to get ran over. But I don’t recall that, sir.” Asked if he feared for his safety and that of the other officers, Brelo said, “The most I’ve ever been in my life, sir, even with Iraq. I thought we were going to be rammed, and I thought we were going to get shot and be killed.”

“Just before the interview ended,” the magazine continued, “Brelo added a possible explanation for why he might have been on the Malibu’s hood. ‘In Marine Corps training, they always teach you to elevate, and if a target is threatening you, you go through the target,’ Brelo said. ‘In my training, you were supposed to push through the target.’”

According to a former Marine reservist and retired Los Angeles sheriff’s commander interviewed by Cleveland Magazine, the “push through the target” reference comes from military ambush training. “In an ambush, you can expect an overwhelming and immediate violent response, as violent as they could possibly make it,” Sid Heal told the magazine.

Brelo was one of more than thirteen officers who shot more than 130 rounds into a car driven by Timothy Russell, 43, with passenger Malissa Williams, 30, on November 29, 2012. More than a third of those shots were fired by Brelo, who jumped onto the hood of the victims’ car and shot them 15 times through the windshield.

The image of the bullet-riddled Chevy Malibu—and the lifeless corpses of Russell and Williamscannot but recall similar scenes from Iraq or Afghanistan where US soldiers at checkpoints fired mercilessly at vehicles whose civilian occupants had allegedly failed to obey orders to stop. The similarity is no mere coincidence.

Encouraged by the Obama administration, police forces throughout the United States are increasingly hiring ex-soldiers trained in the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia to suppress workers and impoverished youth in the United States. This complements the administration’s multibillion-dollar program to send armored vehicles and other military hardware to local police departments.

Brelo was a US Marine reservist in Iraq for seven months in 2004-05 before joining the Cleveland police force in 2007. In Iraq he served in the 3rd Battalion, which was deployed to the so-called Sunni Triangle in the western Anbar Province, according to Cleveland Magazine. He joined a rifle platoon at a small forward operating base outside of the city of Hit, which came under rocket and mortar fire three or four times a day.

Some 15-20 percent of the Cleveland Police Department is made up of military veterans, the police union president said.

A 2009 survey commissioned by the International Association of Police Chiefs and the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance found that military veterans employed by local police departments often “had low tolerance for citizen’s complaints,” “had reduced empathy for others,” had “different rules of engagement and standard operating procedures” and needed to “adjust” driving behavior to domestic streets and “language to civilian environments.”

Although many of the ex-soldiers also suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), police departments are actively recruiting Iraq and Afghan veterans because “the leadership and decision-making skills learned in the military may be exactly what a police agency is seeking,” according to Police magazine.

Some 20 percent of returning soldiers are seeking civilian law enforcement jobs, and some actually go into the military with the long-term goal of becoming cops, according to a spokesman for the Georgia-based nonprofit Hire Heroes USA.

Police magazine continued, “if you compare the decision-making responsibility that is required of a 19- to 20-year-old serving in Iraq or Afghan with the decisions being made by a college student, the contrast is extreme. The soldier has led a squad from point A to point B and had to decide the safest way to get there. The college student has had to complete a class assignment in time to attend a frat party on Friday night. Some departments have recognized this and taken a more global approach to the candidate’s qualifications to be a police officer.”

According to the San Jose Mercury News, the government’s supposed concern with soldiers adjusting to a “civilian environment…didn’t stop Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), an office of the Department of Justice, from offering 220 cities $114.6 million in incentive grants to hire post-9/11 veterans to fill 800 law enforcement positions.”

The DOJ survey noted: “One of the greatest performance challenges may be overcoming the mental shift from battlefield to Main Street. The ability to make this shift leads to many of the other transition challenges highlighted during the interviews, such as interfacing with civilians.”

One former soldier turned cop said, “When we enter a building or room [in the military] we yelled ‘down’ and shot anyone who didn’t, but not in SWAT. You have to make a judgment call.”

In fact as the horrific murder of Russell and Williams demonstrated, police departments are employing “terms of engagement” long reserved for foreign enemies against a restive population in the United States that the ruling elite and its armed forces see as the domestic enemy.

Judge clears killer cop in 2012 Cleveland, Ohio shooting

By Samuel Davidson and Andre Damon
May 25, 2015
World Socialist Web Site

 

The windshield of the victims’ car [Credit: Ohio Attorney General’s Office]

A Cleveland, Ohio police officer who stood on the hood of a car and shot two occupants fifteen times following a 2012 chase was cleared of manslaughter charges by an Ohio judge Saturday. The ruling marks yet another expression of official support for police violence and terror by the political establishment, and sends a clear signal that police officers who carry out murders will not be held to account for their crimes.

The ruling acquitted Officer Michael Brelo of manslaughter charges stemming from the deaths of Timothy Russell, 43, and Malissa Williams, 30, who were killed on November 29, 2012, after police officers fired more than 130 rounds into their car.

Forty-nine of those shots were fired by Brelo, a former Marine who had served in Iraq, who jumped onto the hood of the car and shot the occupants directly through the windshield.

Hundreds of people took part in protests after the ruling, including about two hundred people who gathered at the park where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed by a Cleveland police officer six months ago. City and county police in full riot gear poured onto the streets; overnight 71 protestors were arrested with many more beaten and pepper sprayed.

Both Russell and Williams were homeless, suffered from mental health problems, and were struggling with drug addictions. Police claim that they attempted to pull the car over for a traffic violation and began chasing it when it pulled away. The chase ended when police rammed the vehicle and unleashed a hail of bullets.

Sixty-two police cars participated in the pursuit. Russell’s body was struck with 23 bullets and Williams’s with 24. No gun was found on either of the victims and they did not try to hit police with their car.

All aspects of the subsequent legal proceeding, including the actions of both the district attorney and the judge, were conducted to ensure that there would be no serious consequences for a wanton murder carried out by what was in effect a police lynch mob. The District Attorney only indicted one officer, even though at least twelve others took part in the shooting, while a total of seventy-five officers were administratively disciplined in connection with the event.

In his ruling, Judge John P. O’Donnell declared that Brelo could not be charged for the deaths of the two unarmed occupants of the car because it was impossible to prove that the bullets that killed the two victims came from Brelo’s gun, or that the victims were not already dead when he jumped onto the hood. “The state did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant Michael Brelo knowingly caused the deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams,” O’Donnell declared.

The ruling is a fraudulent travesty of justice, intended only to provide a pseudo-legal cover for the judge’s predetermined goal of protecting the officers involved in the shooting. Despite hundreds of police killings throughout Ohio over the previous decade, this is only the second indictment of any of the officers involved, and there have been no convictions.

No charges have been brought against the two police officers who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio on November 22 of last year as he played with a toy gun in a park.

Nor have charges been filed against the police officers who murdered Tanisha Anderson on November 13. Anderson, who suffered from mental illness, was killed in front of her family, who had called 911 because she was having an episode and needed to be taken to the hospital. Instead of sending an ambulance, police officers handcuffed the woman and then slammed her head onto the concrete pavement, killing her.

The US government keeps no official tally on the number of people killed by the police, but by one unofficial count, 450 people have been killed by officers in 2015, putting this year on track to top last year’s total of more than 1,100 deaths.

A study conducted by the Washington Post and researchers at Bowling Green State University found that despite the thousands of police killings over the previous 10 years, only 54 officers were indicted and only 13 were convicted, receiving mostly wrist-slap sentences.

Following the ruling, the Justice Department announced that it would conduct a civil rights investigation into the shooting. The numerous such investigations carried out by the Obama Justice Department, most notably into the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, have universally failed to result in charges against the officers involved.

In fact, the real sympathies of the White House were shown this week when Obama signed into law a bill establishing a so-called “Blue Alert” system to monitor social media for threats against the police. Over the past year, dozens of people have been arrested for making online statements critical of the police, which law enforcement interpreted as threats.

Cleveland is a stunning example of the impoverishment of the working class resulting from decades of deindustrialization and attacks on social programs throughout the country.

The official poverty rate in the city is over 35 percent, while the poverty rate for children approaches 50 percent and is even higher in the poorest neighborhoods. The median household income is $26,217, just a few thousand dollars above the official poverty threshold of $23,850 for a family of four.

Hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs in manufacturing sectors such as auto, steel, electronics and rubber were lost in the Cleveland area during the deindustrialization of the 1980s and 1990s. Over the past 15 years, manufacturing jobs continued to decline throughout Ohio, falling from over 1 million in 2000 to fewer than 350,000 in 2010.

The ongoing wave of police violence and repression is rooted in the collapse of working-class living standards and the staggering growth of social inequality in the US. Under these conditions, the police see themselves essentially as an occupying force whose aim is to oppress and intimidate an increasingly hostile population. In the case of Brelo, a former Marine, the homicidal methods used in the United States in the occupation of Iraq were brought home.

Supreme Court sides with San Francisco police officers who shot mentally ill woman

By John Andrews
May 21, 2015
World Socialist Web Site

 

On Monday, the United States Supreme Court sided with the police in yet another police brutality case, ruling that the officers were entitled to immunity because they would have no way of knowing that recklessly charging into a mentally ill woman’s room and shooting her multiple times could violate the Constitution.

Amidst an epidemic of police killings around the country, the Supreme Court is working to dismantle democratic and constitutional rights and to prevent the issue of police brutality from being litigated in the courts. The Supreme Court’s decision practically declares “open season” for police shootings, setting a precedent that supports arbitrarily throwing out virtually any lawsuit based on police misconduct.

Teresa Sheehan, a diagnosed schizophrenic in her mid-50s, had her own private room on the second floor of a group home in San Francisco, California. The incident began when Sheehan verbally threatened to stab her social worker after he raised concerns that she was not taking her medications or eating properly. The social worker filled out paperwork for an involuntary psychiatric commitment, called 911 for assistance, and evacuated the building so that no one would be in danger.

The social worker used a key to open the door for the two police officers who were supposed to take Sheehan to the mental hospital. Sheehan threatened them with a kitchen knife. The officers backed out of the room, shut the door, and called for backup.

Rather than wait for the trained crisis negotiator dispatched to resolve the situation peacefully, as accepted police practices would have dictated, the officers decided to force their way back into the room, even as backup officers with “less lethal” weaponry were arriving at the scene.

Sheehan, still holding the knife, told the officers to leave her alone. One shot pepper spray. As Sheehan screamed, “You’re blinding me, I can’t see!” both officers opened fire with .40 caliber pistols. Sheehan was struck by five bullets, including once in each breast, once in the right arm, once in the left groin, and—after she fell to the ground—once on the left side of her face.

Miraculously, Sheehan survived, but she was severely disfigured by the gunshot wounds. After a jury refused to convict her for assaulting the officers or for threatening the social worker, Sheehan filed a lawsuit for excessive force under a key provision of the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1866, a statute known to lawyers as Section 1983.

A major legal reform, Section 1983 generally permits victims of constitutional violations to sue the perpetrators in court, and it is the principal legal mechanism for civil rights lawsuits against the police. The Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” part of the Bill of Rights, has long been understood to prohibit excessive or unreasonable force by the police.

United States District Judge Charles R. Breyer, a notorious defender of the police, tossed Sheehan out of court summarily. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over California, among other Western states, reinstated Sheehan’s case, citing her expert witness on police interactions with the mentally ill who “explained that officers are trained not to unreasonably agitate or excite the person, to contain the person, to respect the person’s comfort zone, to use nonthreatening communications and to employ the passage of time to their advantage.”

The Seventh Amendment to the Constitution, a key provision of the Bill of Rights, guarantees that in federal civil cases “the right of trial by jury shall be preserved.” The Ninth Circuit ruled, ultimately, that determinations such as whether “the officers acted reasonably by forcing the entry” instead of “freezing or attempting to de-escalate the situation” must be made by a jury, not judges.

The Supreme Court accepted review of the case, with Justice Stephen Breyer—the trial judge’s brother—disqualifying himself, primarily to decide whether the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires police officers to “accommodate” a person’s disability, including mental illness, when making an arrest.

The Supreme Court dismissed review of the ADA claim as “improvidently granted,” obviously annoyed that the attorneys for San Francisco and the Obama administration refused to argue the extreme right-wing position that the ADA simply does not apply to arrests.

Right-wing Justice Samuel Alito, joined by six of the eight participating justices, including the supposed liberals Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, went on to rule that the two police officers had “qualified immunity” from Sheehan’s lawsuit because the applicable legal principles governing their conduct were not “clearly established.”

“Qualified immunity” is a reactionary judge-made doctrine with no basis in the Constitution or the text of Section 1983. In practice, “qualified immunity” gives judges from the trial courts on up to the Supreme Court virtually unfettered discretion to toss out lawsuits against police officers and prevent them from being decided by a jury.

In this case, Alito wrote, without even a hint of any sympathy for someone afflicted by a severe psychiatric disorder and shot to pieces by police, that Sheehan “was dangerous, recalcitrant, law-breaking, and out of sight.”

Even where “an officer acts contrary to her training,” according to Alito, “that does not itself negate qualified immunity where it would otherwise be warranted.” In other words, police are free to disregard rules and guidelines without facing any consequences in the courts.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote separately, refusing to join in Alito’s “qualified immunity” analysis only because San Francisco “snookered” the Supreme Court into accepting review of the case on the premise that they would argue that the ADA does not apply to arrests, what he called a “bait and switch.”

Despite the growing anger over police violence expressed in places such as Ferguson and Baltimore, the Supreme Court continues its march in the opposite direction, issuing a steady drumbeat of decisions undermining democratic rights and expanding authoritarian doctrines such as “qualified immunity.”

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Albuquerque, New Mexico: Family charges SWAT team drove son to suicide

By D. Lencho
May 19, 2015
World Socialist Web Site

 

The family of an Albuquerque, New Mexico man filed a lawsuit May 13 against the city of Albuquerque, the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) and two APD officers, Jim Fox and Moises Grossetete. Santiago Chavez, who was mentally ill, committed suicide after a 15-hour standoff with a SWAT team three years ago.

On June 20, 2012, APD officers arrived in the neighborhood of 20-year-old Chavez. He had been throwing rocks at passing vehicles and allegedly pointed a gun at a neighbor. Chavez then barricaded himself in his grandmother’s house and a SWAT team was called to the scene. A 15-hour standoff ensued, which ended when Chavez turned his gun on himself.

Police and witnesses have provided conflicting accounts of what happened that day. The day after the incident, an APD officer, Tasia Martinez, told local media, “He opened fire at the officers and fired multiple rounds at the group of officers as they were close enough to give him that advantage to do that. … While they were retreating, one of the officers, Drew Bader, who is a SWAT officer, responded with gunfire.”

Martinez added, “I don’t feel like there’s anything we could have done differently.” Later, however, APD said that Chavez had fired one shot at the officers, who responded with eight rounds.

The lawsuit gives a very different account from the APD version, citing the neighbor who told police that before the standoff that “he was not assaulted” and that Chavez “didn’t point the gun at him or threaten him with it.”

In addition, according to the family’s lawsuit, the APD violated Chavez’s Fourth Amendment right to be secure against unlawful arrest without probable cause. “Shortly upon his arrival,” the lawsuit noted, “Defendant Grossetete caused officers to block off Decedent’s street with squad cars and to use a megaphone to order him from his home.”

The lawsuit states that Chavez was not free to leave at any time after Grossetete arrived at 9:40 a.m. “Defendant Grossetete did not have probable cause to arrest Decedent, nor did he have a warrant or exigent circumstances which can, in some cases, obviate the warrant requirement,” the lawsuit charges.

Shortly after arrival, according to the lawsuit, despite information given by Grossetete to Fox which “any objectively reasonable office would have known did not support an arrest under the circumstances,” Fox deployed the SWAT team to build a perimeter around Chavez’s home and continued the “in home warrantless arrest.”

The house was surrounded by at least 11 SWAT officers, who “began deploying multiple different types of lethal and non-lethal munitions into the house, including flash bang devise, wooden batons, chemical agents, and in excess of 150 rounds of powdered and liquid gas fired out of launchers,” in an effort to force Chavez out of the house and allow the SWAT team entry.

Between 2:51 p.m. and midnight, according to the lawsuit, the SWAT team sent in baton rounds, played sirens, and shot chemical munitions and tear gas into the home. They also sent robots into the home and used a bear cat to deploy chemical munitions. Chavez reportedly cried out, “The police are trying to kill me!”

The lawsuit states that officer Martinez breached the front door of the house with a V-100 vehicle after about midnight, ripping the door off its hinges. More gas was then launched through the front door, and Chavez “could be seen in the house holding a gun to his head.” Chavez then shot himself and bled to death on the kitchen floor.

Police lapel videos also show officer Bader “laughing at, and making fun of the Decedent.” Bader, who has shot several people while with the APD, was not placed on leave following the incident.

The lawsuit accuses the SWAT officers of violating Chavez’s constitutional rights, escalating a low-level incident and using unnecessary force. The Chavez family’s attorney, Rachel Higgins, charges, “Deployment of force was excessive and a cause of his death.”

Chavez’s mother Rachael Hernandez told KRQE News 13, “They were outside, they were yelling ‘Santiago, we are here to help you.’ Inside I was screaming, ‘Please don’t hurt my son’ … They weren’t there to help him.”

US prisons rife with violence and torture against mentally disabled prisoners

By Zaida Green
May 15, 2015
World Socialist Web Site

 

Mentally disabled prisoners in the bloated US prison system are subject to violent and even deadly abuse, according to a new report. Individuals suffering a range of mental illnesses, unable to find proper treatment in mental health facilities, are punished as a result of their disabilities in the nation’s prisons and jails.

A new report from Human Rights Watch, “Callous and Cruel: Use of Force against Inmates with Mental Disabilities in US Jails and Prisons,” details the cruel and inhuman treatment of mentally disabled prisoners, including minors and the elderly, by jail and prison staff.

Some of the abuses described in the 127-page report include denial of medical attention, violent beatings, repeated use of toxic chemical sprays in an enclosed area, and decades of solitary confinement. Many prisoners have died as a result of abuse, and experts fear that the rate and level of abuse against mentally disabled prisoners are increasing.

The nation’s prisons incarcerate an estimated 2.4 million people, nearly 25 percent of the world’s prison population. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) show that in federal prisons, 61 percent of women and 55 percent of men have at least one mental health problem.

These figures are even higher in local and state facilities: in state prisons, 73 percent of women and 55 percent of men have at least one mental health problem, while the rates are 75 percent among women and 63 percent among men in local jails.

Numerous Department of Justice investigations and class-action lawsuits surrounding treatment of mentally disabled prisoners have demonstrated that abuse is systemic and widespread. “The violence that we have found against prisoners with mental disabilities is not by-and-large the result of ‘rogue’ officers or a few bad apples,” says Jamie Fellner, author of the HRW report.

Although national statistics on the prevalence of use of force against prisoners in the US do not exist, state-level statistics reveal that force is used disproportionately against the mentally disabled.

For example, in Colorado, chemical spray is involved in cell extractions of mentally ill prisoners at a rate 12 times higher than with other prisoners. In four California facilities, use of force against prisoners with mental illness constituted 87-94 percent of force incidents, even though those prisoners composed, at most, half the population.

Under US constitutional and international law, force may be used against a prisoner only as a last resort. However, force is routinely used against “disruptive” prisoners exhibiting symptoms of mental distress, and applied long after prisoners have been restrained or subdued.

One case cited by the report is that of Nick Christie, a 62-year-old man who was tortured to death in a Florida jail. The prisoner was stripped naked and sprayed over a dozen times with pepper spray over the course of 36 hours while immobilized in a restraint chair after asking for his car keys and being “loud and belligerent.” Christie was eventually taken to the hospital, where he died shortly thereafter.

The 5,100 jails and prisons in the United States serve as the country’s de facto mental health care facilities. Correctional facilities house at least 360,000 people with serious mental illnesses, three times as many people housed in public mental hospitals.

What accounts for a situation in which serious psychological disorders, including depression, schizophrenia and trauma-related disorder, are rampant among prison inmates, and prisoners are punished for these disorders instead of being treated?

An estimated one in five prisoners in the United States has a serious mental illness, including schizophrenia and major depression. According to Bureau of Justice Statistics’ figures, individuals with severe mental illness are three times more likely to be in a jail or prison, and 40 percent of those suffering from a severe mental illness will have spent some time either in jail, prison or community corrections.

The drive to deinstitutionalize, or shut down, public mental hospitals began in the 1950s and accelerated in the 1970s. In 1955 there were 333 beds per 100,000 Americans. Thirteen states closed 25 percent or more of their total state hospital beds between 2005 and 2010. According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, the number of public mental hospital beds per capita has now plunged to 14.1 beds per 100,000 Americans, or to 1850 levels.

Prison and jail custodial staff are rarely screened to check whether they can manage prisoners calmly and professionally. Steve Martin, a use-of-force expert and former corrections official, said that most correctional staff are “marginally trained” or not at all and see behavior of mentally ill prisoners as simply misbehavior.

“Corrections staff throughout the country do not get sufficient training in techniques to avoid the use of force, nor do they get sufficient training on how to handle a mentally ill prisoner,” said Eldon Vail, former Washington State secretary of corrections.

Prisoners can spend months, years and even decades locked in solitary confinement, spending only three to five hours a week of “recreation” alone in caged enclosures. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture regards the imposition of solitary confinement of any duration on persons with mental disabilities as cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

As with police killings, the growing number of mentally disabled prisoners—and their systematic mistreatment and torture—is one more indication of the increasing brutalization and violence of the US ruling elite in response to growing social problems and tensions.

Texas executes mentally incompetent death row prisoner

By Kate Randall
May 13, 2015
World Socialist Web Site

 

Derrick Dwayne Charles was executed Tuesday in Texas at the Walls Unit execution chamber in Huntsville. Charles, 32, was injected with a single dose of pentobarbital and was pronounced dead at 6:36 p.m. local time.

Charles’s execution went forward after the US Supreme Court declined to review whether he had been wrongly refused help in developing an incompetency claim based on his mental disability. He was the seventh prisoner executed in Texas so far this year, more than in any other state.

Charles was convicted and sentenced to death in 2003 for the killings 13 years ago of his 15-year-old girlfriend Myiesha Bennett, her mother Brenda Bennett and her grandfather Obie Bennett. Nineteen years old at the time, Charles told authorities that he was high from smoking marijuana soaked in embalming fluid and was delusional when he committed the crimes. He pleaded guilty to capital murder, leaving it to a jury to decide whether he should receive a life sentence or the death penalty.

The US Supreme Court denied a last-minute appeal on Charles’s behalf to stay his execution, despite clear signs of his intellectual disability. In 1986, the high court ruled in Ford v. Wainwright that an individual should be spared execution if “mental illness prevents him from comprehending the reasons for the penalty or its implications.”

Charles’s lawyers argued that their client “suffered from severe and debilitating mental illness since childhood” as a result of genetic inheritance and his childhood environment.

Recently, the Houston-based US District Court for the Southern District of Texas also rejected Charles’s petitions for a stay and for funds to hire a mental health expert to develop his insanity claim. Turning down the petitions, US judge Nancy Atlas also seized on the technicality that Charles’s attorney waited four months after the state had set an execution date before turning to the courts.

The Fifth Circuit Court of appeals in New Orleans refused to halt Charles’s execution as well.

Charles’s appellate attorney, Paul Mansur of the Texas Defender Service, argued in a series of unsuccessful appeals that Charles received some psychiatric care as an adolescent and most likely suffered from attention deficit disorder, depression and a possible brain injury. Court documents assert that his mother suffered from schizophrenia.

According to court records, Charles was diagnosed with depressive disorder and at age 10 was violent toward his peers, lost his temper easily, had witnessed domestic violence and had to undergo treatment due to “serious dysfunctionality at home and at school.” A psychological assessment notes that he came from a “very deprived background.”

Hospital records show that Charles was at risk for mental anguish and suicide and suffered seizures and stuttering as an infant. In 1995, his parents admitted him to the hospital for symptoms of depression, lack of sleep, irritability and violent outbursts, including fights at school. Hospital records at the time showed Charles testing “in the intellectually deficient range of intelligence” and exhibiting “some signs of neurological problems.”

This record of mental impairment was not enough to sway the courts to spare Derrick Charles’s life.

Texas lawmakers are also intent on keeping the state’s killing machine going, despite a shortage of pentobarbital, the lethal drug used by the state to send prisoners to their deaths. After Charles’s execution, Texas has only two more doses of the deadly barbiturate on hand.

In a 23-8 vote Monday, a state Senate measure to keep the names of execution drug providers from the public won initial approval. State Sen. Joan Huffman said her legislation, Senate Bill 1697, was a “practical solution” to the harassment and threats faced by companies who provide pentobarbital to the state prison system. A similar measure has been proposed in the Texas House.

“Discussion in the public area has led to a chilling effect for companies who want to supply this compound to the state of Texas,” Huffman said. “There are very few doses left of the drug that’s currently being administered.”

Texas and other states have turned to compounding pharmacies, which are only loosely regulated, for the drugs for lethal injections, as manufacturers in the US and Europe have stopped providing them for use in executions.

In 2013, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) announced that the Woodlands Compounding Pharmacy, near Houston, had provided it with doses of pentobarbital. The Woodlands owner said public knowledge of the transaction led to threats against the pharmacy. After this, the TDCJ stopped releasing the names of its pentobarbital suppliers.

Last year, then-Texas attorney general Greg Abbott concluded that the names of the compounding pharmacies could be kept secret, despite the fact that such information has long been public. A Travis County judge then ruled in December that the prison system must make the providers’ identities public. TDCJ has refused to release the names of its drug sources as the issue plays out.

State Senator Kirk Watson, an opponent of Senate Bill 1697, commented, “We are moving into an area here where we are talking about contracts with the state that we are going to hide from the public.”

Attorneys for death row inmates in Texas and other states argue that such secrecy on the lethal chemicals makes it impossible to ensure that the state can carry out an execution in line with the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. They point to a series of recent executions in which condemned inmates displayed clear signs of pain during their lethal injections.

These executions included that of Michael Wilson in Oklahoma, who said, “I feel my whole body burning” while strapped to the gurney; Dennis McGuire in Ohio, who gasped for air and choked for about 10 minutes before dying; and Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma, who regained consciousness during his execution, writhing and moaning, before finally succumbing 43 minutes later.

Of the 1,408 executions carried out in the US since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 525 of them have been in Texas.

Victoria, Texas police kill 25-year-old father with PTSD outside his home

Notes on police violence in America

By Zaida Green
May 1, 2015
World Socialist Web Site

 

Twenty-five-year-old Brandon Lawrence, an Afghanistan veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, was shot by police multiple times outside his home last weekend while his family was inside. Lawrence was pronounced dead at a hospital the following morning, April 26. The two unnamed officers involved have been placed on paid administrative leave.

Police responded to a disturbance call last Saturday around 11 p.m., after Lawrence and a neighbor had gotten into an argument. Lawrence told his wife, Yasmine, that the neighbor had threatened to get a friend, come back, and shoot him. Police arrived at Lawrence’s apartment with guns drawn and did not initially identify themselves.

Lawrence, holding a machete, was told by police to drop his weapon and come outside. Lawrence exited his apartment but held onto the machete, confused about the identities of the police officers. Eyewitnesses contradict the police department’s claims that Lawrence charged at the officers with the blade.

“I don’t understand why the police shot him,” Boyce Bernal, a neighbor and close friend of Lawrence told reporters. “I’d understand it if he was charging them or swinging, but he wasn’t.” Yasmine said that her husband had just started a new combination of medication to treat his PTSD and “wasn’t given a chance” to understand what was happening. “He was just standing. … He wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. He was just trying to protect us.”

The police department claims to have body cam footage showing Lawrence advancing toward the officers. Neither said footage nor the initial 911 call have been released. “If Brandon really was targeting the officers, they would release that video, and they would prove it,” said Lawrence’s father, Bryon Lawrence.

Yasmine criticized the police department’s attempt to disparage her dead husband by raising his misdemeanor record at a press conference. “It just felt like they were trying to save their own asses.” Lawrence’s stepfather, Bruce Jacquot, expressed doubts that the investigation into the shooting would be objective. “I worry that I’m not going to walk away with the clarity I deserve.”

Lawrence leaves behind two children, two-year-old Vivianna and one-year-old Hayden. “He was so excited to be a father,” Yasmine explained. “He always talked about the things they would do together. … That was just ripped away from him. He wasn’t even given a chance.“

Inkster, Michigan police department withheld video of officers celebrating bloody beating

In defiance of a court order, the Inkster Police Department kept secret for over a month footage of the police station booking of Floyd Dent, a 57-year-old auto worker beaten by police in January.

The video shows police officers laughing, fist-bumping, and re-enacting their brutal assault. Off-camera, Dent was being held in a nearby detention cell. He was not provided with immediate medical attention for the four broken ribs, traumatic brain injury, and fractured eye socket that he received from the beating.

Wayne County Circuit Judge David Groner had ordered the release of the footage on April 1. Dent’s attorney, Gregory Rohl, described Dent’s booking process, “It looks terrible for them. From what [Dent] remembers about what happened in there, they were doing high-fives and stuff behind him, making fun of him.” A heavily edited video was released by the police department two weeks later.

At the time, then Police Chief Vicki Yost claimed that the department had fully complied with the court order and had sent everything to attorneys and prosecutors. Rohl insisted that the police had released only 20 percent of the footage. There were two cameras, one in the reception area and the other in Dent’s jail cell, recording the booking process, “but what they did was splice [the footage] together,” Rohl explained. “I was advised by an officer that [the footage released] is incomplete and that her version is 21 minutes long, and she was rather disturbed by what she saw.”

Floyd Dent was beaten by police officers following a routine traffic stop on January 28. Dent was charged with assault, resisting arrest, and possession of cocaine. The charges of assault and resisting arrest were dropped in late March, after dashboard camera footage was released showing officers placing Dent in a chokehold, punching his head, kicking him, and shocking him with a Taser. At no point did Dent put up any resistance. Dent and his attorney maintained that the cocaine was planted during the arrest.

The Wayne County Prosecutor threw out the drug charge against Dent last week, and charged one of the officers involved in the beating, William Melendez, with mistreatment and assault. Melendez was fired from the department, and Police Chief Yost resigned the same day. None of the other officers at the scene of the arrest or at the booking have been disciplined.

Yost herself was involved in a fatal police shooting nearly two decades ago, in 1996. 20-year-old LaMar Grable was killed by her partner, Sergeant Eugene Brown, while on patrol outside of their precinct. Police claimed that Grable ran away when the officers confronted him about a gun he was carrying. The only fingerprints found on the gun belonged to Yost. She refused to testify at the lawsuit filed against Brown, pleading her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

19-year-old killed by police in Long Beach, California after looking at them

Police officers in Long Beach, California, killed 19-year-old Hector Morejon last Thursday while investigating reports of trespassing and vandalism of a vacant apartment.

Morejon, standing in the apartment next to a wall, was shot by police after reportedly turning to them, “bending his knees”, and “extending his arm”. The police department has acknowledged that the officers at no time spoke to Morejon. Police have not revealed the number of times he was shot, or whether he was armed.

Lucia Morejon, Morejon’s mother, saw her son being taken to an ambulance and identified herself, wishing to accompany him. Police denied her access. Lucia and Sonya Mercado, the family’s attorney, say that the youth’s last words were “Mommy, mommy, please come, please come.” He died shortly after arriving at the hospital.

Morejon’s family is denying police claims that Hector was involved in gang activity, and is calling for an independent investigation by the US Justice Department. According to the Los Angeles Time’s Homicide Report, Morejon is the 41st person killed by Long Beach police since 2000.