Reports are that Mr. Burroughs with his wife and children were returning from a wedding when police started following them. The family pulled up in their driveway and this is what happened:
Bruce Burroughs and Shough said the family — Todd Burroughs, his wife Rebekah, and two of their children, ages 10 and 9 — were coming home from a wedding early Sunday.
According to Bruce Burroughs, Todd Burroughs pulled into the driveway of his home and got out of the pickup truck. The deputies used a Taser and pepper spray to subdue him.
When Todd Burroughs got a bottle of water from his truck to help ease the effects of the pepper spray, the deputies ordered him to drop it. Burroughs’ dog got between him and the deputies and was shot, then Burroughs was shot.
Some eyewitnesses report that Mr. Burroughs may have been shot up to 6 times and his protective dog hit 3 times. I cannot find any news report confirming those numbers, but whatever the truth, the fact remains that the unarmed man was brutally killed in front of his wife and kids. How horrifying for that family.
This has to be a wake-up call for the majority community. So far, the fight against police brutality is being fought primarily by Black folks; but White America must know that with this governing philosophy of “comply or die” nobody is safe. In fact, while racists have been descending on the comments section of every news report about cops killing unarmed black people, spewing their particular brand of bilious racism, they would be well advised to look up the stats. In terms of raw numbers, more white people are killed by cops than every other group combined.
Over the past year, the Post found that the vast majority of those shot and killed by police were armed and half of them were white. Still, police killed blacks at three times the rate of whites when adjusted for the populations where these shootings occurred. And although black men represent 6 percent of the U.S. population, they made up nearly 40 percent of those who were killed while unarmed.
Todd Burroughs and his dog were shot and killed in Rockingham County, North Carolina, which according to the Guardian, ties with Colorado for the fifth spot in the deadliest police state. Ahead of them are California leading the way with 57 year-to-date, Texas with 42, Florida with 30, and Arizona with 17. Mr. Burroughs was the 14th North Carolinian killed by police in 2016.
We are rapidly approaching the signature collection phase of our campaign to get the Over-Policed Rights Act on the California ballot. We will be needing your help.
This is a screengrab of the Summary and Title of the Ballot Initiative sent to us by the California Department of Justice:
Our Michael Brown Over-Policed Rights Act as seen through the eyes of the California Justice Dept
We await word from the Secretary of State who will be sending us a schedule with the maximum filing deadline and the certification deadline.
More awesome news! Our law has been submitted as a Resolution to the NAACP. That august body will now discuss and then vote on whether to adopt The Michael Brown Over-Police Rights Act (MBOPRA) at the Legislative Session of the NAACP’s Annual Convention.
Jamar Clarke, killed for no reason by overzealous cops
Federal authorities said Wednesday that they would not pursue civil rights charges against two Minneapolis police officers in the shooting death of Jamar Clark, a decision met with both outrage and resignation by activists who for months have demanded prosecution.
They had a body, they had eyewitnesses, they acknowledged that a tense situation was unnecessarily escalated to a dangerous situation, but they cannot find intent to violate Jamar’s civil rights, they claimed. NAACP President Nekima Levy-Pounds responded to the decision with this statement:
“We are in a land of disparities and a land in which we are treated like second-class citizens,” she said. “No matter how hard we try, no matter how hard we pound the pavement, no matter how much we lift our voices, they don’t want to give us justice.”
O, and did you catch the part where the Police union President, Lt. Bob Kroll, described Black Lives Matter as a “terrorist organization” for daring to advocate on behalf of Jamar?
I’ve been a police officer for 25 years, I was in another community, Saugus, Massachusetts, and took the chief's job here about three years ago. In [Saugus] I was in a plainclothes narcotics capacity for seven years. We got great results, we took a lot of dealers off the street, but it never impacted the users. Addicts could still get drugs readily. I think the policing community is starting to be aware that there is no such thing as the crime of addiction. The ancillary crimes that go with it, possession of drugs, sometimes desperation to get the drugs leads to theft, burglary, things like that, those obviously are crimes. But addiction itself is not a crime, it's a disease.
One sophisticated police officer who took a look at the situation and saw people in crisis; not suspects to be arrested, or beaten and battered into compliance.
(Wordcloud composed of Support the Dream Defenders, Michael Brown Over-Policed Rights Act, Expand Medicaid, Freedom of Information Act Project, Combat Racism, Demand Equality.)
Members of the Daily Kos group Support the Dream Defenders launched four ongoing projects:
1. We came together to support the Dream Defenders in Florida and their mission, our first project and the origin of our name. The Dream Defendersdefend the Dream of Martin Luther King Jr. by "develop[ing] the next generation of radical leaders to realize and exercise our independent collective power; building alternative systems and organizing to disrupt the structures that oppress our communities." Please donate here.
2. Our Michael Brown Over-Policed Rights Act, crowd-sourced at Daily Kos in the fall of 2014 after the death of Michael Brown. Our bill quickly earned endorsements from the NAACP and the ACLU. The NAACP forwarded our bill to members of Congress, and we distributed it to members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other progressive members of Congress. President Obama signed into a law a small piece of our bill in December 2014. The Department of Justice included parts of our law in their reports on Ferguson, Missouri, in 2015. Our state version of the MBOPRA is currently in committee in the Kansas legislature.
3. Our Freedom of Information Act project. Nineteen Republican governors chose to kill poor people by not expanding Medicaid. Ebola has killed about 9000 people in total; Republican governors kill 23,000 people PER YEAR by refusing federal support for Medicaid, a story ignored by traditional media. Our project forces those governors to out themselves, clapping them in a Catch 22. With the support of readers, we publicize our results through letters to the editor, press releases, and petitions.
You can receive all future diaries of Support the Dream Defenders in your Daily Kos Stream by clicking here. Then click "Follow," which will make all STDD diaries appear in "My Stream" of your Daily Kos page.
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