John Brown's Body

     It still remains the most shocking, least-reported instance of police brutality in the United States of America. An initial round of indictments in February and a second, much smaller round in May brought the total of officers indicted for their actions during the George Floyd protests in Austin, Texas, to 21. During these incidents, at least seven nonviolent protestors were severely injured by nonlethal beanbag ammunitions fired by Austin Police Department officers. Justin Howell was awarded $8 million in a civil suit after being shot in the head by one of these rounds left him permanently disabled by a traumatic brain injury. Maredith Drake, a volunteer medic, was awarded $850,000 after being shot in the hand while trying to carry Howell to safety, resulting in her losing a finger. Another such The city has approved five settlements totaling $13 million out of 18 lawsuits filed against the city this year, with more settlements expected in the coming months. One ind...

     The arrest of Karen Garner rightfully garnered outrage around the nation and around the world. The arrest of the septuagenarian with dementia on suspicion of shoplifting was not another case of an officer killing an unarmed black man, but it did highlight the danger bad cops pose to other vulnerable portions of the population. During the June 26th, 2020, arrest, over $13.88 worth of merchandise that she actually put back before she left, Officer Austin Hopp broke her arm, sprained her wrist, separated her shoulder, did not call for medical assistance, and then kept her in jail with this painful injury for hours, going so far as to manipulate her shoulder in her booking photographs to hide the injury. For context, Ms. Garner was 5'2" and 80 pounds. Hopp pleaded guilty and in May was sentenced to five years in prison and three years of parole for felony assault as part of a plea agreement in order to avoid the 10 to 30 years in prison he would have faced had he gone to...

     Originally, Judge Peter Cahill seemed like an average, respectable judge. That changed pretty quickly after the Derick Chauvin case. I won't get into Chauvin's sentence: 22.5 years is a fairly good sentence for a murdering cop to receive when compared to other sentences around the country. Still, earlier this month, with the trial of Chauvin's fellow officers Tou Thao and J. Alexander Kueng fast approaching, Cahill postponed the trial yet again, this time until January 2023. His reasoning? He believed the February federal conviction of the three officers on civil rights charges punishable by life in prison and the May guilty plea of Thomas Lane, who will be sentenced in September to three years in prison for accessory to manslaughter in the state case, would cause a jury to be unfairly prejudicial against the remaining two officers in their state trial. The officers are all set to be sentenced on federal charges by the end of the year.      This means ...

     This month, President Biden formally announced an executive order that has been in the works since at least January, an executive order signed on the second anniversary of George Floyd's death and one that makes sure, as Biden says, his name is "more than a hashtag." The four officers who murdered Floyd were all convicted of federal charges brought by Attorney General Merrick Garland while two have been convicted on state charges and two more await trial. Dozens of states and cities have passed hundreds of laws and ordinances reforming the police. Federal investigations, which were used only once by the Trump administration, were launched into the Minneapolis, Phoenix, Louisville, and Mount Vernon Police Departments in 2021 alone; the 2023 budget proposes more funding for investigations like these. The COPS Office has secured more than $125 million in new funding to build community policing, with much more expected in the coming years. Now, this executive order is th...

     During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the right made a spectacle of looters and criminals who took advantage of diverted police attention to commit crimes. It's a stretch, for sure, given that 99 percent of protests were peaceful and those that were not often saw violence instigated by far-right groups like the Proud Boys, but lying is what the right does. Mike Pence falsely blamed the 2020 murder of a federal agent in California on nearby George Floyd protestors, when it was in fact committed by a follower of the far-right Boogaloo movement, which seeks to start a race war between blacks and whites.      However, one aspect of this that isn't talked about enough is that the instances of violence were less an assault on police and more a back-and-forth between police and rioters. On January 6th, not a single Capitol cop was ever charged for excessive force against rioters; in fact, most criticism came from officers not using enough force, althou...

     Ahmaud Arbery's family achieved accountability and justice with two separate criminal convictions for murder and a hate crime that each of the three murderers will spend the rest of their lives in prison for, state laws in Georgia establishing penalties for hate crimes and overhauling citizen's arrest statues, and the signing by President Biden of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. Unfortunately, Breonna Taylor's family never saw accountability with the acquittal of the man who helped murder the young woman and also apparently had a history of sexually harassing women; in this case, we must keep up the pressure for the Justice Department to file charges while acknowledging that even the historic $12 million settlement the Taylor family reached with Louisville as well as a federal investigation into the department cannot bring her back. Slowly but surely, George Floyd's family is seeing the accountability and the justice they deserve.       Back in ...