Acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf says 'full, augmented federal force’ remains in Portland, on standby, amid protests

The Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission unanimously voted Thursday night to demote Milwaukee Police Chief Alfonso Morales, who the civilian board said poorly handled the police response to protests in the city sparked by George Floyd’s killing on Memorial Day.

Commissioners earlier this year reprimanded Morales for the department’s deployment of tear gas against protesters, with one board member saying in June that using the cough- and tear-inducing gas during a viral pandemic was “unacceptable.”

Democrats in the Virginia Senate unveiled a wide-ranging bill to overhaul policing in the state Thursday ahead of a special session this month in which criminal justice issues will be one of the centerpieces of debate.

The proposal touches on the recruitment of officers, training, use of force, standards of conduct and accountability, but it sidesteps some hot-button issues that have bogged down reform efforts in other states and already generated controversy in Virginia.

Senate Democratic Caucus Chair Mamie E. Locke (D-Hampton) said at a news conference that legislators were responding to the national reckoning on policing that has followed the deaths of African Americans at the hands of officers in other parts of the country.

Newly released footage from a body camera shows a police officer discharging tear gas into a peaceful protester’s face during a demonstration in downtown Cleveland in late May.

The footage from a Cuyahoga County sheriff’s deputy reveals use of force by officers to control protests for racial justice and police restructuring following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day.

The Cleveland Police Department is already facing two excessive force lawsuits over officers’ actions during the May 30 protests that escalated into riots, Cleveland.com reports.

A 50-year-old man in Indiana has been charged with a hate crime for threatening “to intimidate and interfere” with his Black neighbor, the Justice Department said Thursday. The man was also charged with two counts of unlawfully possessing firearms.

Shephard Hoehn, of Lawrence, Ind., began to harass his Black neighbor in June, according to court documents. Hoehn was reportedly angry that the neighbor hired a construction crew to remove a tree from the neighbor’s property.

The man allegedly threatened his neighbor in multiple racist ways. Hoehn “placed and burned a cross above the fence line facing his neighbor’s property,” the Justice Department said in a statement. He also “created and displayed a swastika on the outer side of his fence, facing his neighbor’s property; created and displayed a large sign containing a variety of anti-Black racial slurs next to the swastika; visibly displayed a machete near the sign with the racial slurs; loudly played the song ‘Dixie’ on repeat; and threw eggs at his neighbor’s house,” the statement said.

The King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office filed murder charges against a teenager who allegedly shot and killed a 19-year-old inside Seattle’s Capitol Hill Occupied Protest zone in late June.

Marcel Long, 18, was charged Wednesday with first-degree murder in the killing of Seattle resident Lorenzo Anderson, who died at Harborview Medical Center shortly after the shooting.

Long confronted Anderson with a handgun inside the CHOP zone in the early hours of June 20 and chased after him until he was restrained by witnesses, according to court documents. Surveillance video shows that Long broke free from the restraints and raced after Anderson, ultimately aiming the gun into the crowded street.

Department of Homeland Security acting secretary Chad Wolf on Thursday defended his handling of the protests in Portland, Ore., and bristled at criticism from his predecessors, telling a Senate panel that former DHS secretaries Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff were “dead wrong” when they raised concerns that the Trump administration’s response had gone too far.

Appearing before the Senate committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Wolf said DHS officers and agents were deployed to Portland to protect federal buildings from destructive attacks and claimed they did not interfere with peaceful protests. He blamed city and state officials for cutting off cooperation with the Trump administration, including a Portland City Council resolution that directed local police to sever ties with federal authorities.

A federal judge made clear in his blistering opinion that he thought Clarence Jamison was doing nothing more than driving a Mercedes as a Black man when he was stopped by a White Mississippi police officer. The officer detained Jamison for nearly two hours, tore his car apart looking for drugs and left him on the side of the road when nothing was found.

U.S. District Court Judge Carlton W. Reeves placed the 2013 case alongside others that have sparked outrage, citing the deaths at the hands of police of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. He lamented that thousands had lost their lives to police use-of-force and countless others had been subject to misconduct by officers.

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — Body camera videos from a North Carolina jail show a man, who died days after his arrest, struggling with guards to get up from where he lay on the floor, calling out for his mother and yelling “I can’t breathe!” more than 20 times as they restrained him.

The videos released Wednesday show the moments in December when John Neville, 56, was told by a nurse in the Forsyth County jail in Winston-Salem that he had a seizure. Neville died at a hospital of a brain injury Dec. 4, three days after his arrest on a warrant accusing him of assaulting a woman.