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Feds Promise to Force Officers to Wear Name Tags but Otherwise Settle BLM Lafayette Square Lawsuit ‘Without Any Admission of Liability’
Aaron KellerApr 13th, 2022, 6:37 pm

Two federal agencies have agreed to settle a civil lawsuit by protesters and activists who were forced out of Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. on June 1, 2020, while protesting the death of George Floyd, Jr., the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Wednesday.

It then noted that the DOJ later “officially acknowledged that Defendant Barr ordered Lafayette Square cleared minutes before the assault started.”

“Defendant Barr issued this order following a series of statements from Defendant Trump in the days and hours leading up to this attack in which he clearly threatened to use and encouraged violence against protesters,” the lawsuit alleged
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“The federal government is committed to the highest standards for protecting civil rights and civil liberties in any federal law enforcement response to public demonstrations,” Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a statement. “These changes to agency policies for protest responses will strengthen our commitment to protecting and respecting constitutionally protected rights.”

https://www.motherjones.com/anti-racism-police-protest/2021/06/photoessay-eyes-shot-police-brutality-protests/
The Shot in the Eye Squad
After losing a retina to “less lethal” police munitions during a George Floyd protest, I decided to start a club.
Photos and Interviews by Wil Sands
June 2, 2021
It’s been a year since I was shot in the face with a tear gas canister. I remember hearing the shot. When I close my eyes I can still see the spinning aluminum canister flying toward me. Like ripples in a puddle the impact rolled through my eye, instantaneously detaching my retina. It was the eye I used to create, to document, to share—a photographer’s eye—but now all I could see through it were dancing shards of light on a background of emptiness.

I was near Lafayette Square in Washington, DC, photographing the protests that had erupted in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. But my mind immediately went to Chile, to the work I had done there in 2019, to the dozens of eyes I saw destroyed during protests in that country, and others. In that moment I knew exactly what my injury could mean.

By September 2020 at least 23 people had been blinded or partially blinded by “less lethal” munitions used by the police to disperse protests across the country. Blinding by cop, largely an international phenomenon, had arrived in force in the United States. While calls for bans on these weapons have led to limited prohibitions of their use, most police departments continue to see “less lethal” weapons as legitimate tools for crowd control.