The third was a deputy with the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office, 45-year-old Brad Garafola.
Advertisement
Of the more than 2.5 million U.S. military veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, 11% to 20% have PTSD in a given year, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs says.
Following attempts to quell protests against police brutality across the U.S.in recent years, police departments have faced greater public scrutiny from the minority communities that complain of law enforcement using military weapons against residents.
A black former soldier killed five police officers during one such protest in Dallas, Texas, on July 7. Jackson also wrote he loves Baton Rouge but wonders if the city loves him. “In uniform, I get nasty hateful looks and out of uniform some consider me a threat”.
Hours before Monday’s press conference in Louisiana, a judge in Baltimore, Maryland, handed down a not guilty ruling in a case against the highest-ranking officer on trial of a black man who died in police custody after suffering a spinal injury.
“We do believe he was targetting officers, and he definitely did ambush these officers that he shot”, Lt JB Slaton, a Louisiana State Police spokesman, said yesterday morning.
In the span of 10 turbulent days, 10 law enforcement officers have been killed by attackers – at a protest march in Dallas, a courthouse in MI and now a convenience store in Baton Rouge.
It was the second time in 10 days that a heavily armed man set out to avenge the killing of young black men at the hands of police. Four of the six officer charged in Gray’s death have gone to trial, and none has been convicted.
One of the people paying his respects Tuesday to law enforcement officers was LSU football coach Les Miles, a prominent figure in a city where the Tigers’ purple and gold colors can be seen flying everywhere.
Gray didn’t break his own spine.
An older relative had showed him the video. If everybody goes free after such an obvious outrage, then a person might despair that cops who wrongly kill will never be held accountable.
“Black officers have to be more vocal about these issues, we have to take a stronger stand both with and for the community”, he says. “Violent extremism tends to thrive in an environment characterized by poor governance, democracy deficits, corruption and a culture of impunity for unlawful behaviour engaged in by the State or its agents”.
Last year a Chicago judge acquitted the police officer who killed 22-year-old Rekia Boyd because, the judge said, prosecutors charged the officer with involuntary manslaughter and “the crime, if any there be, is first-degree murder”. Also previous year, a jury convicted NY police officer Peter Liang of manslaughter in the death of Akai Gurley, but in April a judge reduced Liang’s charge to criminally negligent homicide and spared him jail time. “As president, I will bring the full weight of the law to bear to make sure those who kill police officers are brought to justice”.
What these shooters were not, it appears, in any way affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement.
Advertisement
The penalties for killing a police officer are rightly more severe than those for killing a civilian because police are symbols of the rule of law, she said.
