Non-Lethal Force Still Pretty Painful in Anaheim Protests
Non-lethal projectiles like beanbags, rubber bullets, and pepper balls still leave a hell of a mark, and those marks are becoming a large part of the story of Anaheim's ongoing police brutality protests as people share them on Twitter. Some of the photos circulating most widely appeared on the Los Angeles Times' blog post about the protest that raged from 4 p.m. Tuesday to about 2 a.m. PST Monday. An AP video showed police opening fire with their non-lethal projectile guns as they stood down protesters. And the AP and CBS reported on Saturday that police fired rubber bullets and released dogs onto a crowd of people that included a woman and her baby.
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This image of an alleged beanbag-induced welt from Tuesday night's protest has been making its way around Twitter, in this case via user @guelo:
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So has this shot of a protester with a wound in the back of his head, which Twitter user Geoffrey Giraffe shared, saying the man was running away from cops.
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AP published this video on Wednesday of police firing their nonlethal projectiles at protesters:
The protesting overnight Tuesday was some of the most intense yet, as demonstrators broke shop windows, lit fires, and threw rocks, leading to 24 arrests. Police have had to deal with them daily since an officer shot Manuel Diaz during a chase on Saturday. Diaz was reportedly unarmed, but ran when officers tried to question him, and they shot him in the ensuing chase. Since then, the intensity of the protests has grown. Unlike the weekend's unrest, which saw five arrests as about 100 protesters set fire to dumpsters and threw rocks at police. The protests on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning involved more than 500 people and 250 police officers, and though most were peaceful, The Associated Press' Amy Taxin and Gillian Flaccus reported. Police Sgt. Bob Dunn "says a police officer, two members of the media and some protesters were injured, but nobody was hospitalized." Protesters threw chairs through the window of a Starbucks, NBCNews.com reported, and they smashed other windows in the same strip mall. "At one point, police shut down a gas station when protesters were seen filling canisters with gas," Dunn told The AP. It sounds like a scary scene on both sides, as police try to keep order and protesters try to keep out of the way of beanbags and rubber bullets.
