The violence is coming from inside the house!
Robyn Pennachia at Wonkette:
“This violence that I’ve seen is disgusting,” LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell said in a press conference about the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles this weekend. I’d agree with him, except that he was talking about violence coming from the protesters, not his own officers. The protesters, he said, were throwing fireworks at the police, adding that they could be fatal. There have been a whole lot of videos of these protests so far and while it’s entirely possible that this has been happening, somehow all of the videos I keep seeing are of the LAPD enacting horrific acts of violence on not just protestors, but on journalists covering the protests. (Though be aware, even if there is video, police in this country have a history of planting agents provocateurs to incite violent in order to shut down protests and turn public support to their side, so … grain of salt.) In this video, a police officer shoots a rubber bullet directly at Australian reporter Lauren Tomasi, hitting her in the leg. In the clip, Tomasi is standing alone on the street with no one in between her and the officer, who physically turns away from where the other officers were pointing their guns and shoots directly at her.
Now, it’s possible that the officer didn’t mean to hit Tomasi and instead meant to hit some terribly violent protester we cannot see, even when the camera spins around, but if that’s the case, that officer needs to be taken off the streets before they make a mistake like that with a real gun. This is not a person with good aim! I have never fired a gun in my life, and yet I am somehow confident that, in the same position, my aim would not be that bad — largely because I have eyes and because I would not point the gun directly at an Australian reporter. Tomasi wasn’t the only journalist hit, either. British photojournalist Nick Stern was shot in the thigh with a “sponge bullet.” What is that, you ask? Is it like what comes out of a Nerf gun? It is not! It is another kind of “non-lethal” bullet, like a rubber bullet, that could actually be quite lethal depending on where it hits you and how hard. In Stern’s case, the bullet tore right into his thigh — though, luckily, not in the femoral artery, in which case he would be dead now. "There was something hard sticking out of the back of my leg and my leg was getting wet from blood," Stern told the BBC. The wound was bad enough that he had to have actual surgery afterwards.
What a joke the LAPD are in shooting at Aussie outlet Nine News’ Lauren Tomasi and British photojournalist Nick Stern.
