Over the last 40 years, he has represented over a thousand victims of police brutality and misconduct. His most notable cases include the 1991 Rodney King against LAPD, 2009 Oscar Grant against the Oakland BART Police, and 2015 Mario Woods against SFPD.
He was arrested because on February 15, 2025, he was out for a walk in his neighborhood when he got lost and wandered onto a woman's porch, who called the police. He was using a curtain rod as a walking stick, which officers demanded he drop. When he didn't, they tased, beat, and arrested him.
No buttons, no facial expressions, no gestures, no signs. Not one sound. Standing up. There are only two things you can do at the State of the Union, and they are sit down and stand up. All kinds of people were standing up all night. Me too - I stood up - at the moment that I heard this man say some of the most racist things I have heard come out of any leader's mouth about the people of my city.
A Kern County, California, SWAT team shot and killed my father, Lyle Federman, in 1998. He had no criminal record. He was accused of no crime. The police had no warrant. He was an eccentric, nature-loving computer programmer that wanted to be left alone. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that a jury could find that the police "used excessive force" and violated his constitutional rights when they broke into his home and shot him 18 times while "he was surrendering..."
In an eyewitness video analyzed frame by frame by The New York Times, Alex Pretti raises one hand and holds a phone in the other. Federal agents tackle him, and one appears to find and remove a gun holstered on his hip. Then, an agent shoots - and a second follows. They appear to fire nine more shots as Pretti lies on the ground.
The operation has seen around 3,000 Department of Homeland Security agents (DHS) - including agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) - flood Minnesota over the past two and a half months, taking particular aim at Minneapolis and St. Paul. The agents have harassed and abducted residents, showing blatant disregard for due process rights and frequently making headlines for their brutality.
I never thought that the United States descent into a police state would involve the extrajudicial killing of a Veteran's Administration nurse. It's particularly terrifying to this nurse that US immigration police have shot to death Alex Pretti, RN. A Veteran's Administration ICU nurse, Pretti is said to have been volunteering in sub-zero Minneapolis cold because he cared about his neighbors and co-workers as much as he did his critically ill patients.
The Stasi, the secret police, were legendary for their data files. Their work was based on instilling fear, and they induced stunningly amazing numbers of East Germans into informing on their neighbors. Something along the lines of 1 in 6 East Germans were informants, whether out of fear or out of approval of what the East German government was doing.
What's striking is less that the federal government is using Bible verses in its promotional videos than that the agency doing the recruiting is Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The videos, set to music, include militaristic images. They show heavily armed agents in tactical gear, weapons drawn, donning masks, looking through night-vision goggles, zip-lining from helicopters, breaking down doors, and conducting nighttime raids.
We look at the protesters in Iran, and they are patriots; they are people who are trying to overthrow a repressive regime, Trent said. Here, if you have protesters, they should be shot in the face, and anybody that does should have absolute immunity. Trent added, So, what's funny to me is, when is violence, when is protest, when is this all acceptable?
In late November and early December 1999, the World Trade Organization convened in Seattle for a round of conferences and negotiations. Tens of thousands of protesters hit the streets to meet them, including labor activists alarmed by the post-NAFTA landscape of the US, as well as environmentalists dismayed at eroding standards of ecological care under the kinds of agreements the WTO was arranging. They in turn encountered a police response more vicious than many anticipated, particularly once the protests threatened to shut down the conference.
Race and racism are defined and developed differently in different cultures. In the US, I define racism as white supremacy. It was invented by white people in the Jamestown colony, expanded to a global overview of people by European taxonomists, and keeps coming back after attempts to rid the world of the concept-either by reducing non-white people to lesser social status or standing with each change in US governance standards. It is a subjective idea.
Footage emerged of the Irish activist being repeatedly punched in the face by police at a protest in Berlin against "the deliberate killing of journalists in Gaza" on Thursday. A series of videos posted by IrishBlocBerlin on Instagram show Kitty O'Brien clutching their nose before lifting their bloodied hands to German police while shouting: "Their blood is on your hands." The footage then shows the activist being dragged from the crowd by two police officers.
Guards at Florida's Alligator Alcatraz immigration jail deployed teargas and engaged in a mass beating of detainees to quell a mini-uprising, it was reported on Friday. The allegations, made by at least three detainees in phone calls to Miami's Spanish language news channel Noticias 23, come as authorities race to empty the camp in compliance with a judge's order to close the remote tented camp in the Everglades wetlands. The incident took place after several migrants held there began shouting for freedom after one received news a relative had died, according to the outlet. A team of guards then rushed in and began beating individuals indiscriminately with batons, and fired teargas at them, the detainees said.
