Portland police were already under federal supervision for violent policing. Then they racked up over 6,000 use of force incidents during a summer of protests calling for an end to such abuse.
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The city’s decision to release portions of recordings of an officer beating a suspect with a baton undercut its arguments for keeping the rest of the videos sealed, a judge said.
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A Nebraska woman filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Lincoln and others Tuesday, after police officers fired rubber bullets at close range into a crowd of people protesting racial injustice and one of the bullets severed the woman’s nose.
Read moreA freelance photographer who was shot with rubber bullets during Black Lives Matter protests in Phoenix claims in his lawsuit against Maricopa County that he was a victim of the “same police brutality that the protesters were on the streets attempting to resolve.”
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A 9-year-old Black girl was handcuffed and pepper-sprayed by police in Rochester, New York, footage released Sunday showed, sparking new outrage over excesses committed by the country’s law enforcement.
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California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said investigators will look into reports of a “pattern and practices of unconstitutional” policing carried out by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
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Former New York City Police Department officers and firefighters who say Mayor Bill de Blasio put them in harm’s way by unsealing discipline records advanced their claims to the Second circuit on Tuesday.
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New York’s attorney general brought a federal complaint Thursday over the NYPD’s brutal response to civil rights protests following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
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Sheriff’s officers in Kern County, California, must stop using chokeholds while in the field and will be able to stop their colleagues if they see them use the move, the California Attorney General’s Office said Tuesday in announcing a major settlement between the county and state.
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A Black former police detective who suffered severe injuries when a sheriff’s deputy “intentionally swerved” at him and ran him over with a truck sued the officer for damages in Kansas federal court.
Read moreA federal court in California denied in part two San Francisco police officers’ motion for summary judgment in an excessive force case in which the officers used pepper spray and a baton and shot a mentally ill man on his front porch after he yelled and cursed at them to go away.
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Shocking abuses in California’s prison system persist despite decades of court orders meant to curb violations of disabled prisoners’ civil rights, lawyers for an inmate class told a federal judge Tuesday.
Read moreAt 339, Allegheny County’s use last year of a restraint chair on pretrial detainees “was almost four times more per capita than all other jails in Pennsylvania,” according to a federal complaint by three women with mental or physical disabilities who were jailed ahead of trial.
Read moreTwo Gretna, Louisiana, police officers who beat and tased an unarmed man with paranoid schizophrenia — who became unresponsive and died two days later — are not entitled to qualified immunity on excessive force claims, the Fifth Circuit ruled. The man, who was not suspected of any crime, was curled in a fetal position and did not struggle against the officers, called for his mother and pleaded for someone to “call the real police” as he sustained 26 blunt-force injuries.
Read moreThe Ninth Circuit upheld a ruling in favor of a Los Angeles police officer who shot and killed a 14-year-old boy. Although a member of the jury in this excessive force case was in social media groups that closely followed law enforcement activity, and didn’t disclose that fact, such an affiliation “would not have provided a basis for a challenge for cause.”
Read moreA federal court in California denied a Los Angeles police officer’s motion for summary judgment in a wrongful death suit alleging unreasonable use of deadly force during an altercation in a gym locker room that ended with the officer shooting a man multiple times. There’s a genuine question as to whether the man posed a threat to justify such a response.
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Milwaukee Bucks guard Sterling Brown and the Milwaukee city attorney have agreed to a revised $750,000 settlement of a lawsuit Brown filed after getting taken to the ground, shocked with a Taser and arrested during an encounter with police in 2018.
Read moreA man may pursue part of his civil rights suit accusing police officers in Waco, Texas, of beating him to the point where he was “bleeding profusely” after he refused to provide his ID when he was pulled over for changing lanes without signaling fast enough, a federal court in Texas ruled, finding a further development of the facts is required to determine whether qualified immunity is entitled.
Read moreA federal court in Texas ruled that excessive force and fabrication of evidence claims may continue against two police officers who shot, without warning, an armed juvenile who had a gun to his own head. The officers shot the boy multiple times and, as an “involuntary reflex to being shot,” the boy pulled the trigger of his own gun, shooting himself in the temple.
Read moreIn a dispute arising from the arrest of a man who had threatened his girlfriend and her daughters with a chainsaw, the Ninth Circuit reversed a ruling in favor of one of the arresting officers, finding that controlling precedent at the time “put officers on notice” that kneeling on a prone and non-resisting person’s back so hard as to cause injury was excessive.
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