If you still think men should be allowed to work in childcare, you won't by the time you've finished reading LOUISE EDMONDS' harrowing story
I survived, but only just. What was taken from me wasn't just innocence; it was safety, self-worth, trust and the freedom to grow without fear.
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The Independent
38 minutes ago
- The Independent
Brutal arrest of Black student in Florida shows benefits of recording police from new vantage point
A video that captured the brutal arrest of a Black college student pulled from his car and beaten by officers in Florida has led to an investigation and calls for motorists to consider protecting themselves by placing a camera inside their vehicles. William McNeil Jr. captured his February traffic stop on his cellphone camera, which was mounted above his dashboard. It offered a unique view, providing the only clear footage of the violence by officers, including punches to his head that can't clearly be seen in officer body camera footage released by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. Since McNeil had the foresight to record the encounter from inside the vehicle, 'we got to see firsthand and hear firsthand and put it all in context what driving while Black is in America,' said civil rights attorney Ben Crump, one of several lawyers advising McNeil. 'All the young people should be recording these interactions with law enforcement," Crump said. Because what it tells us, just like with George Floyd, if we don't record the video, we can see what they put in the police report with George Floyd before they realized the video existed.' McNeil was pulled over that day because officers said his headlights should have been on due to bad weather, his lawyers said. His camera shows him asking the officers what he did wrong. Seconds later, an officer smashes his window, strikes him as he sat in the driver's seat and then pulls him from the car and punches him in the head. After being knocked to the ground, McNeil was punched six more times in his right thigh, a police report states. The incident reports don't describe the officer punching McNeil in the head. The officer, who pulled McNeil over and then struck him, described the force this way in his report: 'Physical force was applied to the suspect and he was taken to the ground.' But after McNeil posted his video online last month and it went viral, the sheriff's office launched an internal investigation, which is ongoing. A sheriff's office spokesperson declined to comment about the case this week, citing pending litigation, though no lawsuit has been filed over the arrest. McNeil said the ordeal left him traumatized, with a brain injury, a broken tooth and several stiches in his lip. His attorneys accused the sheriff's office of trying to cover up what really happened. 'On Feb. 19, 2025, Americans saw what America is,' said another of McNeil's lawyers, Harry Daniels. 'We saw injustice. You saw abuse of police power. But most importantly we saw a young man that had a temperament to control himself in the face of brutality.' The traffic stop, he said, was not only racially motivated but 'it was unlawful, and everything that stemmed from that stop was unlawful." McNeil is hardly the first Black motorist to record video during a traffic stop that turned violent — Philando Castile 's girlfriend livestreamed the bloody aftermath of his death during a 2016 traffic stop near Minneapolis. But McNeil's arrest serves as a reminder of how cellphone video can show a different version of events than what is described in police reports, his lawyers said. Christopher Mercado, who retired as a lieutenant from the New York Police Department, agreed with McNeil's legal team's suggestion that drivers should record their police interactions and that a camera mounted inside a driver's car could offer a unique point of view. "Use technology to your advantage," said Mercado, an adjunct assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. 'There's nothing nefarious about it. It's actually a smart thing in my opinion.' Rod Brunson, chairman of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, said he thinks it's a good idea for citizens to film encounters with police — as long as doing so doesn't make the situation worse. 'I think that's a form of protection — it's safeguarding them against false claims of criminal behavior or interfering with officers, etc.,' Brunson said. Although the sheriff's office declined to speak to The Associated Press this week, Sheriff T.K. Waters has spoken publicly about McNeil's arrest since video of the encounter went viral. He pushed back against some of the allegations made by McNeil's lawyers, noting that McNeil was told more than a half-dozen times to exit the vehicle. At a news conference last month, Waters also highlighted images of a knife in McNeil's car. The officer who punched him claimed in his police report that McNeil reached toward the floor of the car, where deputies later found the knife. Crump, though, said McNeil's video shows that he 'never reaches for anything,' and a second officer wrote in his report that McNeil kept his hands up as the other officer smashed the car window. A camera inside a motorist's vehicle could make up for some shortcomings of police bodycams, which can have a narrow field of view that becomes more limited the closer an officer gets to the person being filmed, Mercado said. However, after the police murder of Floyd, some states and cities debated how and when citizens should be able to capture video of police. The Constitution guarantees the right to record police in public, but a point of contention in some states has been whether a civilian's recording might interfere with the ability of officers to do their job. In Louisiana, for example, a new law makes it a crime to approach within 25 feet (7.6 meters) of a police officer in certain situations. Waters acknowledged those limitations at a news conference last year, as he narrated video of a wild brawl between officers and a fan in the stands at EverBank Stadium during a football game last year between the universities of Georgia and Florida. The sheriff showed the officers' bodycam videos during the start of the confrontation near the top of the stadium. But when the officers subdued the suspect and were pressing against him, the bodycam footage didn't capture much, so the sheriff switched to stadium security video shot from a longer distance away. In McNeil's case, the bodycam video didn't clearly capture the punches thrown. If it had, the case would have been investigated right away, the sheriff said. For the past 20 years, Brunson has been interviewing young Black men in several U.S. cities about their encounters with law enforcement. When he first began submitting research papers for academic review, many readers didn't believe the men's stories of being brutalized by officers. ' People who live in a civil society don't expect to be treated this way by the police. For them, their police interactions are mostly pleasant, mostly cordial," Brunson said. 'So it's hard for people who don't have a tenuous relationship with the police to fathom that something like this happens,' he said. "And that's where video does play a big part because people can't deny what they see.'
Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Secret Service ex-director who quit after Trump assassination attempt faces fresh humiliation
Kimberly Cheatle, the former Secret Service director who resigned in disgrace following the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump, has suffered a new professional blow after receiving news her security clearance will not be renewed. The decision by the Secret Service, first reported by RealClearPolitics came after a wave of fierce opposition from Republican lawmakers, including Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), who led a sweeping investigation into the agency's catastrophic failures at Trump's July 2024 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. 'Following the security debacle in Butler, the former director of USSS made the right decision to resign,' Johnson said. 'I see no reason for her security clearance to be reinstated.' Cheatle, handpicked by then–First Lady Jill Biden in 2022, had previously led the agency through what congressional investigators later described as one of the most glaring security breakdowns in presidential protection in modern history. Trump narrowly survived the July 13, 2024, shooting after a bullet grazed his ear, while a local firefighter, Corey Comperatore, was killed and two others were wounded in the chaos. Cheatle stepped down just 10 days later following intense pressure from lawmakers who demanded accountability over a security detail that failed to station an officer on the rooftop where the gunman had positioned himself, among other lapses. The revocation of her clearance is not only a personal humiliation for Cheatle, but also a stark departure from past practice. For decades, the Secret Service has routinely renewed security clearances for its former directors, maintaining open channels for consultations on national security issues. But under new Director Sean Curran, a Trump loyalist and the former head of the president's protective detail, that tradition has now ended. 'Director Curran has been modernizing the intelligence apparatus within the agency,' a Secret Service spokesperson said. 'During that process, he has determined that not all former directors will have their clearances renewed.' The process to renew Cheatle's clearance was already underway until RealClearPolitics inquired about Johnson's objections. Soon after, the agency seemed to reverse course. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee), a Judiciary Committee member who jointly investigated the Butler debacle, offered no sympathy. 'Kim Cheatle disgraced the Secret Service by failing to prevent a horrifying attempt on President Trump's life,' Blackburn said in a statement. 'Not only did she oversee one of the greatest security failures in our nation's history, but she also stonewalled congressional oversight and ran away from my colleagues and me when we confronted her. 'Under no circumstances should she be allowed to regain her security clearance, and it is shameful she would even try.' On the one-year anniversary of the Butler rally, Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), now chair of the Homeland Security Committee, issued a scathing report accusing Cheatle of lying to Congress when she claimed under oath she had not denied requests for increased security for Trump. Cheatle, speaking through her attorney, denied the accusation in a rare public statement. 'Any assertion or implication that I provided misleading testimony is patently false and does a disservice to those men and women on the front lines who have been unfairly disciplined for a team, rather than individual, failure.' And it appears this may not be the last of it. House Oversight Chair Rep. James Comer has said a criminal referral is still on the table. 'If stark evidence of an intentional effort to deceive arises... this Committee will respond,' an Oversight aide said. 'Whether or not Ms. Cheatle's testimony meets the legal definition of misleading Congress, it's clear she failed in her mission leading the agency and appropriately resigned.' According to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released in July, the Secret Service received classified warnings about a possible Iranian threat to Trump 10 days before the Butler rally but that intelligence that was never passed to agents securing the site. The report, commissioned by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), reinforced suspicions that Cheatle's office had treated Trump more like a former president than a current presidential candidate, despite clear evidence that he was a high-value target. Multiple Secret Service insiders said Cheatle's team had repeatedly denied Curran's requests for additional counter-sniper support and other heightened security assets during the 2024 campaign. Cheatle's fall is just one part of a much larger shake-up in the US intelligence world under Trump's second term. Within 24 hours of retaking office, the president signed an executive order revoking the clearances of dozens of former intelligence officials including the now-infamous '51 spies who lied' who had signed a 2020 letter dismissing the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story as 'Russian disinformation.' Among those stripped of access: John Brennan, James Clapper, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and John Bolton. In March, Trump went further, ordering the suspension of clearances for the Democratic-aligned law firm Perkins Coie, which was central to commissioning the now-discredited Steele dossier during the 2016 election. A federal judge has since blocked that order, but DOJ lawyers are appealing. National security attorney Sean Bigley said the revocations reflect a reform that is long-overdue. 'You have all of these former government bureaucrats, who are continuing to have access to the highest level of classified information... and then they can go and take that continued insider access and make themselves a hot commodity in the private sector or on the cable news circuit,' Bigley told RCP. 'That's not what security clearances are supposed to be used for – it's a fringe benefit that should be pulled.' Despite Cheatle's ousting, Trump has publicly taken a more tempered tone toward the Secret Service rank-and-file. 'They should have had communications with the local police... So there were mistakes made,' Trump said in an interview last month with Fox News. 'But I was satisfied in terms of the bigger plot... And I have great confidence in these people... They had a bad day. And I think they'll admit that.' Last month, the agency suffered another embarrassing episode when a Secret Service agent tried to sneak his wife onto an Air Force One flight during Trump's overseas trip to Scotland.
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Police continue to search for Montana gunman who killed four people in a bar
Authorities continued to search Saturday afternoon for the man accused of killing four people at a Montana bar. Local, state and federal law enforcement were looking for 45-year-old Michael Paul Brown, a US army veteran who lived in a small town, Anaconda, next to The Owl Bar, where on Friday morning he allegedly opened fire and killed a bartender and three patrons. Officials located Brown's abandoned white truck according to Lee Johnson, Montana division of criminal investigation administrator. They concentrated their search in the mountains west of Anaconda, a town of less than 10,000 residents that was centered around a copper processing facility. 'This is a small, tight-knit community that has been harmed by the heinous actions of one individual who does not represent what this community or Montanans stand for,' Johnson said. On Friday night, nearby residents were encouraged to stay inside their homes and be on high alert as law enforcement believed Brown was armed and dangerous, Johnson said. But on Saturday afternoon, Bill Sather, the Anaconda-Deer Lodge police chief, told residents it was 'OK to go about your business in town' but to use caution and report anything suspicious to law enforcement. Authorities released a photo of Brown, who is 5ft 10in tall; weighs about 170lbs; and has blue eyes and brown hair, according to USA Today. The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were assisting local and state police with the search, according to posts on X. As of Saturday afternoon, law enforcement had not released the names of the victims. Brown served in the US army as an armor crewman from 2001 to 2005 and was deployed to Iraq from early 2004 until March 2005, according to an army spokesperson. He was in the Montana national guard from 2006 to March 2009 and left military service in the rank of sergeant. 'This isn't just a drunk/high man going wild,' Brown's niece, Clare Boyle, wrote in a Facebook message to the Associated Press. 'It's a sick man who doesn't know who he is sometimes and frequently doesn't know where or when he is either.' Montana ranked second worst in the country in terms of prevalence of mental illness and access to care, according to the non-profit Mental Health America. Two-thirds of adults in Montana also lived in homes with guns, the highest rate in the country, according to a 2016 study from RAND, a thinktank. The owner of the Firefly Café in Anaconda told the Associated Press that she locked up her business after a friend alerted her to the shooting. 'We are Montana, so guns are not new to us,' Barbie Nelson said. 'For our town to be locked down, everybody's pretty rattled.' Associated Press contributed reporting
