...such as riots in Anaheim.
Boff, who is in Anaheim getting her new ice-skates, tells me that there have been riots in Anaheim for the last week over the police shooting of an unarmed youth.
Sure enough, here's the story:
Riot police fired bean bag rounds and pepper balls into a crowd of protestors late Tuesday outside City Hall as council members inside voted unanimously to ask the U.S. attorney's office to investigate recent officer-involved shootings, including one of an unarmed man.
About 250 riot police were called in by officials to quell the more than 600 demonstrators before restoring order. Twenty-four people were arrested in the unrest.
The back-to-back weekend shootings have sparked four days of protests. A crowd of protesters who were shut out of the council meeting because there was no more room grew violent, tossing rocks and bottles at police and ignoring warnings to disperse.
Officers formed lines to try to contain the crowd as residents set fire to trash cans, loudly taunted police and swarmed a Starbucks, breaking windows.
Police helicopters hovered from above as colorful fireworks from nearby Disneyland lit up the sky.
There is the problem with being able to select news - you miss the stuff in your back yard.
Here is an article on the reasons for the riot:
Huizar told The Daily Beast that she went to the location of the shooting Sunday morning to find out what happened to her son. While she was there, she said, residents poured out of apartments to tell her what they had seen. Huizar was told that Diaz was at a spigot washing his hands and getting a drink of water when the police officers appeared. According to the events as they are outlined in the lawsuit, two plainclothes officers approached Diaz, without telling him they were cops, around 4 p.m. As they began to chase him down an alleyway, Diaz ran toward the front of an apartment building. Diaz “was not brandishing a firearm, did not possess a firearm, and in no way was he a danger to himself or others,” according to the complaint.
Although there were children playing in the street, the officers shot Diaz on the back of his legs near his buttocks and he fell to the ground. When Diaz fell to his knees, his mother said, an officer shot him in the head and left him on the grass without calling for an ambulance. The complaint states that Diaz was not under the influence of alcohol, medication or controlled substances at the time he was shot.
Shot him in the head after he fell to his knees? My knee-jerk reaction is to say, "sounds bogus." Except:
A video sent anonymously to OC Weekly shows a wounded but still alive Diaz lying on the grass as uniformed police officers arrive on the scene. “He’s still alive man!” a man yells at the officers, who ignore the residents’ pleas for them to call an ambulance for Diaz. Then as an officer tries to cover the camera with his hand, a man reminds him in Spanish, “The law allows us to film,” and the officer backs off. A young woman also is heard challenging the officer: “Why did you have to shoot him in the head?” Later she says, “He wasn’t gonna jump.” Three minutes after the filming begins, an officer turns Diaz on his back. The recording ends before an ambulance is called or arrives. Diaz died in a hospital a few hours later.
With the advent of cell phone cameras, we are learning that "bogus" happens on an almost routine basis.
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