A Vermont mother has filed a lawsuit alleging that police used excessive force and discriminated against her unarmed Black son with behavioral and intellectual disabilities.

What happened next that evening in May 2021 is the basis for a lawsuit by the mother alleging that Burlington police used excessive force and discriminated against her unarmed son, who is Black and has behavioral and intellectual disabilities.

After he failed to hand over the last of the stolen e-cigarettes, two officers physically forced him to do so, then Cathy Austrian’s son was handcuffed and pinned to the ground as he screamed and struggled, according to a civil lawsuit filed Tuesday and police body-camera video shared with The Associated Press by the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont.

The teen eventually was injected with a ketamine, a sedative, then taken to a hospital, according to the lawsuit and video.

  • Sagifurius@lemm.ee
    223·
    10 months ago

    You live in a country with the fucking RCMP and yet have let the media convince you their institutions are scary.

    • herrcaptain@lemmy.ca
      153·
      10 months ago

      I’m not saying the RCMP (or local cops) are much better, and we have plenty of our own problems. These days those mainly stem from the import of MAGA-style “conservatism,” and I’ll admit that things have been getting noticeably worse around here.

      That said, we don’t have school shootings pretty much every week, insane amounts of gun violence, the overreach of homeland security (my biggest reason for not wanting to set foot down there - crossing the border), people having to mentally run a cost/benefit analysis if they need to go to the hospital, talk of civil war, half our political representatives being clinically insane (here it’s a little less), people going to jail for weed (a small bit of good that’s happened here during a period of general backslide), the alphabet agencies (the RCMP has historically done some heinous shit but it’s child’s play compared to the CIA), the fact that a rapist who actively says he wants to destroy democracy has a very good chance of becoming president again, etc, etc, etc.

      So yeah, I’ll happily stay in the country with the RCMP.

    • SkepticalButOpenMinded@lemmy.ca
      92·
      10 months ago

      Canadian cops are scary too, but it’s not even close. US cops are five times more likely to kill. And Canadian cops don’t have qualified immunity.

      • Sagifurius@lemm.ee
        33·
        10 months ago

        And yet when they run 14 year olds over with their cruiser in a school playground nothing happens.

        • SkepticalButOpenMinded@lemmy.ca
          3·
          10 months ago

          I did a quick search for this but nothing came up. Do you have a link to an article?

          Cars are the number one killer of children in Canada. We tolerate a disgusting amount of preventable traffic accidents in Canada, but comparing that to killing children by shooting them or putting them into deadly chokeholds is nonsensical.

              • Sagifurius@lemm.ee
                24·
                10 months ago

                There’s also no articles about the 14 year old kid shot in the back by a RCMP officer in a local town no matter how much I google, but I know that happened too, so why don’t you go ahead and google some obscure local things you know happened and see if there’s any documentation.