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The city of Detroit, its mayor, police chief, and numerous named and unnamed police officers are being sued over claims that police brutality has been inflicted on peaceful protesters demonstrating there in recent months.
Detroit Will Breathe, a nonprofit corporation seeking to end racially unjust policing and police brutality, and 14 individual demonstrators filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Detroit on Aug. 31.
With the lawsuit, the group is asking the Court to stop the city’s police officers from using rubber bullets, tear gas and batons against the peaceful protesters.
Already, those tactics have caused bone fractures, concussions, collapsed lungs and other injuries to demonstrators, leaving them disoriented on the streets, hospitalized or both during marches that began May 29, the plaintiffs say.
The demonstrations began in the wake of the May 25 death of George Floyd at the hands — and knee — of police officers in Minneapolis.
“Beginning on … the first night of protests, peaceful protesters, including (the) plaintiffs, were, among other things, tear-gassed, pepper- sprayed, beaten and otherwise subjected to unconstitutional excessive force, shot with rubber bullets, blasted with deafening and disorienting sound cannons and flash grenades, put in chokeholds, cordoned off in small groups (‘kettled’), and arrested en masse without probable cause,” the lawsuit says.
Since then, Detroit Will Breathe has continued to lead peaceful protests almost every day.
“In response to the continued protests, (the) defendants escalated their use of unlawful force with new and increasingly violent tactics,” the lawsuit says.
Detroit is one of several American cities – including Minneapolis, Seattle and Portland – to see near-daily demonstrations against police brutality and racial injustice since Floyd’s death. Many have been peaceful, but some have tainted with violence and accompanied by rioting and looting.
The city of Detroit, Mayor Michael Duggan and Police Chief James Craig are named as defendants in the case, along with police Sgt. Timothy Barr; officers Stephen Anouti, David Hornshaw and Mariah Erard; and 100 unnamed officers identified only as “Does 1-100.”
In the most general terms, the plaintiffs have been peaceful protesters “exercising their First Amendment rights and have been met with brutal violence,” one of the lawyers representing them told the Detroit Free Press.
“We are at a point where the city needs to decide what its image is, what its soul is; whether Detroit is a place that encourages free and open thought and dialogue or whether open dialogue is met with brutal violence.”
The police have used legal force to deal with those who have created chaos, violated curfew, damaged property and threw “rocks, iron railroad spikes and fireworks at officers, some of whom were injured,” the newspaper said.
Police are investigating multiple complaints against officers, though, including one not named in the lawsuit who has been charged with felony assault for shooting rubber bullets at three photojournalists covering one of the protests.
The city’s lead attorney told the Free Press Detroit that it might countersue the plaintiffs.
Included in the protesters’ lawsuit are accounts of several demonstrators who say they were hit, kicked, thrown to the ground and tear gassed, as are several photographs of injuries and police in riot gear using force on civilians.
Alex Anest, one of the 14 individual plaintiffs, says he participated in an Aug. 22 march in downtown Detroit and ended up hospitalized for five days with a collapsed lung and broken rib.
A volunteer field medic, Anest said there was a red cross emblazoned on his clothing the day of the march and he was trying to help a fellow medic who had been thrown to the ground by police when he was hit in the back by a police officer wielding a baton.
“Blinded with pain,” Anest said, he was dragged across the pavement by police and handcuffed. Then officers refused to let an EMT treat him even after he “begged” for medical attention, according to the lawsuit.
He was later arrested, booked and released hours later, and only then did he get to a hospital, with the help of other protesters, he says.
Have you participated in peaceful protests in Detroit? Were you subjected to police brutality, or did you witness police brutality? Tell us about it in the comment section below.
Detroit Will Breath and the other plaintiffs are represented by Jack W. Schulz and Amanda M. Ghannam of Schulz Law PLC; Julie H. Hurwitz, William H. Goodman and Melissa A. Brown of Goodman Hurwitz & James PC; and Sean Riddell of The Riddell Law Firm PLLC, all of Detroit.
The Police Brutality Lawsuit is Detroit Will Breath, et al. v. City of Detroit, et al., Case No. 2:20-cv-12363-RHC-APP, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division.
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