Demonstrators face off against French police in a demonstration Tuesday demanding justice after Chinese national Liu Shaoyo was shot and killed by police over the weekend. (Photo credit: L’Express)
“They began to bang on our door and then we heard something we didn’t know who it was, by that time I was stricken with panic.
“My father was really trying to hold back the door and then the door opened all of a sudden. A shot was fired. All of this happened in just a few seconds,” she was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.
This post was first published on Facebook, and has been adapted for publication on Reappropriate.
There’s a widely shared and watched video floating around the web (after the jump) that features a Chinese American woman speaking at protests organized after a jury found Officer Peter Liang of the NYPD guilty of manslaughter in the killing of Akai Gurley.
It’s a slick and convincing video that uses the kind of politically correct, in vogue language that typically appeals to many Chinese and Asian American progressives like myself.
Two weeks of evidence came to a close when Liang took the stand to tearfully testify that he pulled the 11.5-pound trigger of his service weapon and a fired a shot into the darkened stairwell of a residential building when he was “startled” by an unknown, and that he failed to give CPR when confronted by a dying Gurley in the stairwell of the Louis H. Pink Houses because he didn’t feel like he had sufficient training to perform the life-saving measures and that Gurley’s friend — who had never learned CPR — would be better for the task. As for why he never called for help, Liang’s defense claims that his call for an ambulance was never recorded in official transcripts of the incident because reception in the stairwell was “spotty”.
NYPD officer Peter Liang, accused of manslaughter in the killing of Akai Gurley, at the first day of his trial. (Photo credit: Twitter)
The manslaughter trial against Peter Liang — the police officer accused of manslaughter in the fatal shooting of Akai Gurley, an unarmed Black man killed when Liang opened fire with his service weapon in a darkened stairwell — began yesterday with opening statements by both the prosecution and the defense, and the calling of two witnesses. Liang’s case has been viewed as one of several examples of state violence against Black bodies in recent years, and several activists (including myself) have rallied in support of the Gurley family in calling for Liang and all other police involved in suspicious shootings against unarmed Black citizens to face criminal accountability. Late last year, news media reported that Liang had elected to face a jury trial in the case against him, and in the last week, jury selection resulted in a juror pool consisting of only one African American jury member and no Asian Americans.
Liang’s supporters seemed largely unswayed by the details that have emerged about the fateful moment in the stairwell of Louis H. Pink Houses in late 2014 that left Akai Gurley dead by the police officer’s hand.
Alabama police officer Eric Parker who was accused of civil rights violations committed during the arrest of Sureshbhai Patel, which resulted in permanent paralysis of the elderly Indian grandfather. (Photo credit: AP / Brynn Anderson)
After a second trial ended in a mistrial due to jury deadlock late last year, a judge has now granted a motion of acquittal filed by defense attorneys to dismiss the case against Alabama police officer Eric Parker, who stood accused of using excessive force in his arrest of an elderly Indian grandfather in February of last year. Prosecutors had been seeking a third trial against the police officer.
Sureshbhai Patel, who was 57 at the time of the attack and who had just arrived in the United States to help care for his infant grandchild, was walking in the early morning of February 6, 2015, when he was approached by two police officers including Officer Parker. Police were responding to a call of a suspicious “skinny Black guy” in the area. Patel, who doesn’t speak much English, was detained and being handcuffed when dashcam video (after the jump) shows Parker suddenly slamming an otherwise cooperative and non-violent Patel to the pavement. The injury left the elderly man permanently paralyzed and reliant on a walker for mobility.
