New York City Police DepartmentBy Morgan Winsor, ABC News
(NEW YORK) — A man has been arrested for allegedly attacking Asian Americans on three separate occasions in New York City, police told ABC News.
Joseph Russo, 27, was taken into custody Wednesday and charged with multiple counts of assault as a hate crime and aggravated harassment as a hate crime in connection with all three incidents, according to the New York City Police Department.
The first incident occurred in the Gravesend neighborhood of Brooklyn on March 5 at around 9:20 a.m. local time. Russo allegedly pushed a 64-year-old Asian American woman on a sidewalk, knocking her down. The woman suffered pain to the left side of her body but refused medical attention at the scene, police said.
The second incident happened near the Madison neighborhood of Brooklyn on March 22 at around 7:45 a.m. local time. Russo allegedly grabbed a 32-year-old Asian American woman on a sidewalk and pulled her hair, causing pain to her head and neck. The woman refused medical attention at the scene, according to police.
The third and most recent incident occurred in the Homecrest neighborhood of Brooklyn on Monday at around 11:15 a.m. Russo allegedly shoved a 77-year-old Asian American man who was looking at vegetables for sale in front of a market. The man fell to the ground and suffered some bruising to his arm but refused medical attention at the scene, police said.
The attacks were the latest in a spate of violence targeting Asian Americans in New York City and across the nation. The coronavirus pandemic and its suspected origins in the Chinese city of Wuhan is cited as having led to a fresh onslaught of anti-Asian discrimination in the United States that has waged on for over year.
From March 19, 2020, to Feb. 28, 2021, there were more than 3,795 hate incidents, including verbal harassment and physical assault, against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States that were reported to Stop AAPI Hate, a nonprofit organization that tracks such incidents.
In recent weeks, the New York City Police Department has ramped up patrols in predominately Asian communities. Asian American officers are also working undercover in areas that have had hate crimes, police said. One of those undercover officers was able to step in and make an arrest during an anti-Asian incident in the Chinatown neighborhood of Manhattan on Tuesday, marking the first arrest by the new initiative, according to police.
(WASHINGTON) — Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky anticipates that all schools will be fully in person and no longer remote in September 2021.
“We should anticipate, come September 2021, that schools should be full-fledged in person and all of our children back in the classroom,” the CDC director told ABC News Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton during an Instagram Live conversation on ABC News.
She said that parents and teachers should anticipate this regardless of whether children are vaccinated or not. “We can vaccinate teachers, we can test, there’s so much we can do,” she said.
Asked when she expects children will become eligible to get vaccinated, Walensky said by mid-May. Pfizer recently released promising data indicating its vaccine is safe and effective for children ages 12 to 15.
“Mid-May maybe we’ll be able to have a vaccine from Pfizer that we’ll be able to do down to 12,” she said, pending Food and Drug Administration authorization for that age group.
She expects Moderna will soon follow Pfizer because those studies are currently underway. She said she is hopeful that by summertime there will be two vaccines available for children 12 and up. Johnson and Johnson Is expected to start their pediatric trials in the months ahead.
Walensky doesn’t anticipate the vaccine will be authorized for children younger than 12 before the end of the year.
Walensky’s comments came shortly after she said during a White House briefing that the more contagious variant of coronavirus that originated in the U.K., the B.1.1.7 variant, has become the dominant strain in the U.S.
All three vaccines authorized in the U.S. — Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson — are believed to work well even against the U.K. variant.
Walensky stressed that the multiple COVID variants are serving to reinforce her goal of wanting a large portion of the U.S. population to get vaccinated.
“My goal is to have people want to roll up their sleeves and get vaccinated,” she said.
Asked if she agrees that 85% is the percentage of the population that should be vaccinated, in agreement with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Walensky declined to put a number on it. She said estimates on the right percentage for herd immunity vary dramatically.
“[It] depends on how transmissible the virus is, and that we estimate that number based on the transmissibility. … What we know is that transmissibility is actually a little bit of a moving target, because with more variants, some of these variants are more transmissible. So the more transmissible the variant, the more likely we’re going to need a larger proportion of the population vaccinated,” she said.
During a White House briefing last week, Walensky urged caution amid fears of a fourth wave. Then days later, the CDC updated its guidance on travel for fully vaccinated people. The guidance said that fully vaccinated people can travel within the U.S. without COVID-19 testing or quarantines as long as they continue to take precautions like wearing a mask, socially distancing and washing their hands.
Asked about the “confusing” messaging by Ashton, Walensky said “sometimes the messages are complex” and that people working in public health aren’t treating individuals, they are treating the population.
“We need to be able to offer people who are vaccinated things that they are able to do if we want people to come forward and get vaccinated: visit with their loved ones, visit their grandchildren, perhaps travel on a plane at lower risk. That’s an individual message,” she said. “While we have fully vaccinated 19% of the population, 80% of the population remains unvaccinated and that is certainly enough to cause a surge. And so on a population level, we still very much need to practice good public health measures — masking mitigation, distancing.”
She still stood behind President Joe Biden’s comments that the Fourth of July holiday will look a little more normal.
“I would say still practice the mitigation strategies, still mask, still distance, try and keep the crowds to a minimum,” Walensky said. “Because I really do think that when we get most of this country vaccinated, we can get back to a healthier, more normal evening at the baseball field.”
(MINNEAPOLIS) — Law enforcement colleagues of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin largely have disagreed with the actions he took to restrain George Floyd.
Several current and former members of law enforcement have testified in the trial of Chauvin, who faces charges of manslaughter, second-degree murder and third-degree murder in Floyd’s death. Here’s what they’ve said so far:
Chauvin’s supervisor: Knees can be used as a restraint only until a subject is handcuffed and under control
Sgt. David Pleoger, now retired, had been Chauvin’s supervisor since 2008 and was working as his supervisor on the night of May 25, the day Floyd died.
Pleoger was first notified of the incident from 911 dispatcher Jena Scurry, who testified on Day 1 of the trial that she called him after sensing that something was wrong while watching the incident unfold on a fixed police camera.
After Pleoger spoke to Scurry, he called Chauvin on his cell phone.
“I was going to call you and have you come out to our scene here,” Chauvin is heard saying to Pleoger in footage from his body camera played in court. “We just had to hold the guy down. He was going crazy … wouldn’t go in the back of the squad.”
Chauvin then turned his body camera off, which Pleoger testified is allowed by department policy at that point because it was a private conversation.
When Pleoger arrived on the scene, he is seen in his own body camera footage telling Chauvin to gather the witnesses, to which Chauvin replied that would try but that the witnesses were “hostile.”
Pleoger testified that he, Chauvin and former officer Tou Thao, the officer on the scene who monitored the bystanders, went to the hospital.
It wasn’t until the former officers were notified that Floyd had died that Pleoger began asking Chauvin more questions and learned that he had restrained Floyd by kneeling on his neck. Chauvin did not say how long he kept Floyd in that position, Pleoger said.
Pleoger said that department policy did allow officers to use a knee to restrain a subject but only until that subject is handcuffed and under control.
“When Mr. Floyd was no longer offering up any resistance from the officers, they could have ended the restraint,” Pleoger said. Department homicide unit chief: Subjects need to get off their chest ‘as soon as possible’
Lt. Richard Zimmerman, head of the homicide department for the Minneapolis Police Department, testified that he has the most seniority of any officer in the department.
When Minnesota Assistant Attorney General Matthew Frank asked Zimmerman whether he had been trained to kneel on the neck of someone who is handcuffed, Zimmerman responded, “No. If your knee is on a person’s neck, that can kill them.”
Zimmerman added, “Once a person is cuffed, the threat level goes down all the way. They’re cuffed. How can they really hurt you?”
Frank also asked Zimmerman what Minnesota Police officers are trained to do when they have someone in the prone position, when they are lying on their stomachs.
“Once you handcuff someone, you need to get them out of the prone position as soon as possible because it restricts their breathing,” Zimmerman answered. “You need them off their chest.”
Zimmerman was among a group of 14 Minneapolis Police officers who signed an open letter to the community in June condemning Chauvin’s actions. Police Chief Medaria Arradondo: Chauvin’s actions ‘certainly not part of our ethics and values’
Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo testified that it was close to midnight on May 25 when one of his deputy chiefs alerted him that Floyd had died.
Prosecutor Steve Schleicher pressed Arradondo on whether Chauvin’s actions followed department policies. Arradondo replied that applying “that level of force” administered to a person in the prone position and handcuffed behind their back is “in no way, shape or form” part of department policy.
“It is not part of our training, and it is certainly not part of our ethics or values,” Arradondo said. Inspector Katie Blackwell: Chauvin used an ‘improvised position’ on Floyd
Minneapolis Police Department Inspector Katie Blackwell, who was in charge of training at the time of Floyd’s death, testified that she’s known Chauvin for 20 years and even selected him to be a field training officer at one point.
When Schleicher showed Blackwell a still from a video taking by witness Darnella Frazier in which Chauvin is seen kneeling on Floyd’s neck, he asked whether it was a training technique taught by the department when she was overseeing that unit.
“It is not,” Blackwell responded.
When Schleicher asked, “Why not,” Blackwell noted that it was an “improvised position.”
“I don’t know what kind of improvised position that is,” she said. “It’s not what we train.”
Department crisis intervention coordinator: ‘Immediate goal’ of officers should be seeking medical attention for persons in crisis
Minneapolis Police Department Sgt. Ker Yang, a 24-year veteran of the department who currently serves as its crisis intervention training coordinator, testified that Chauvin participated in a 40-hour crisis intervention course in 2016 in which officers are given opportunities to recognize a person who may be in crisis and how to deal with them.
The department’s critical decision-making model includes applications for use of force and crisis training, Yang said.
Yang explained that a “crisis” could be a situation “that is beyond a person’s coping mechanism, and beyond that, what is beyond their control.”
“Sometimes they don’t know what to do,” Yang said. “And we train them to assist a person to bring them back down to their pre-crisis level.”
Yang stated that it’s important for officers to reassess whether circumstances change during a situation, adding that if the person in crisis is in need of medical attention, it should “be the immediate goal” for officers to help provide it.
During training, it’s common “to slow things down and re-eval and reassess” going through the model, Yang said.
“I provide this training because I believe it does — it works,” Yang said.
When a defense attorney emphasized that a crisis includes people other than the suspect, including bystanders who could also present a threat, Yang agreed that the risk to the officer is greater as the intensity of the crisis grows.
Yang also said this could mean that there are multiple crises happening simultaneously, as well as the fact that a crisis that may “look bad” to a bystander may still be a lawful necessity. Use-of-force instructor: A knee to the neck is not a trained restraint
Lt. Johnny Mercil, a use-of-force instructor at the Minneapolis Police Department, developed an annual in-service training program that Chauvin took in 2018.
Mercil testified that when trying to control a subject, officers are trained to apply the concept of “proportionality,” which is to “use the lowest level of force possible to meet those objectives” in order to keep all parties safe.
As the level of resistance increases, the level of force can subsequently increase, Mercil said.
Officers are trained to de-escalate situations as the level of resistance decreases and are trained to know that some parts of the body are more prone to injury, such as the neck and the head, Mercil said.
Minneapolis Police Department policy includes two types of neck restraints, which are done by “slowing the blood flow to and from the brain, with the intent to gain control of the subject,” Mercil said.
The conscious neck restraint involves wrapping somebody up but leaving the subject conscious, Mercil said, adding that this method often works to gain compliance. The unconscious neck restraint involves applying pressure until the person who is not complying becomes unconscious and “therefore compliant,” Mercil explained.
When prosecutors showed Mercil a photo of Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck, Mercil stated that the technique shown is not and has never been an authorized restraint technique taught by the Minneapolis Police Department.
Mercil added that while the technique Chauvin used is not technically an unauthorized use of force under the department’s policy, he believes the technique wouldn’t be authorized because Floyd was under control and handcuffed.
When questioned by the defense, Mercil said that while department training does teach the use of body weight to control a subject, they also “tell officers to stay away from the neck when possible, and if you’re going to use body weight to pin, to put it on their shoulder and be mindful of position.”
When shown images of different angles of Floyd’s arrest, Mercil stated that the image did not appear to show a neck restraint but rather a prone hold that an officer may apply with his knee. Mercil also agreed that the still images at one point appear to show Chauvin’s shin to be across Floyd’s shoulder blade.
Mercil later said that he did not believe it would be appropriate to hold a subject in that prone restraint position for an extended period, especially after the subject stopped resisting or didn’t have a pulse.
Mercil joined the department in 1996 as a cadet. He is currently on medical leave. Department medical support officer: Officers are trained to begin CPR immediately if they don’t detect a pulse
Nicole Mackenzie is the department’s medical support officer and worked as an EMT before joining the police force, and she’s involved with the medical training officers receive. She testified that officers are trained to begin CPR immediately if there is no pulse detected on a subject.
When Schleicher asked about a phrase officers are heard telling Floyd in the video — “If you can talk, you can breathe,” — Mackenzie replied: “That would be incomplete to say. Someone can be in respiratory distress and still able to vocalize it.”
Mackenzie added, “Just because they can talk doesn’t mean they can breathe adequately.” LAPD use-of-force expert: Chauvin’s force ‘excessive’
LAPD Sgt. Jody Stiger, a use-of-force expert hired by prosecutors, testified that the force Chauvin used was “excessive.”
Stiger said officers initially were justified in using force against Floyd, when he was resisting getting in the back of the squad car, but “once he was placed in the prone position on the ground, he slowly ceased his resistance. At that point, the officers should have slowed down or stopped their force.”
Stiger is expected to continue his testimony Wednesday morning.
(CHICAGO) — A 1-year-old is in grave condition after he was shot in the head during an apparent road rage incident in Chicago, officials said.
The shooting occurred around 11 a.m. local time Tuesday on Lake Shore Drive, police said.
Shots were fired for approximately two blocks along the expressway, during which a nearly 2-year-old child was struck in the head, Cmdr. Jake Alderden of the Chicago Police Department’s 1st District told reporters during a press briefing a few hours after the incident. Multiple shell casing were recovered across those two blocks, he said.
The drivers appear to be “completely unknown to each other,” Alderden said.
“There was a dispute possibly over somebody not letting somebody into a lane of traffic,” he said.
The vehicle carrying the child continued driving before crashing shortly after on Lake Shore Drive.
A good Samaritan took the toddler and other occupants of the car to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, police said. From there, he was transferred to Lurie Children’s Hospital, where he was in critical condition, Alderden said.
Police recovered a handgun from the crashed car and are determining if it was fired during the incident, the commander said.
The police district plans to release a description of the car involved in the incident, Alderden said.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot said that detectives have a suspect and are “actively pursuing the other car.”
“Obviously any time anyone is shot in Chicago it is tragic, particularly when it is a child,” the mayor said during a press briefing Tuesday afternoon. “This was simple, but stupid, road rage.”
The victim was receiving full critical care support, including the use of a ventilator, in the pediatric intensive care unit, Lurie Children’s Hospital officials said Tuesday afternoon.
“He is in grave condition,” Associate Chief Medical Officer Dr. Marcelo Malakooti told reporters during a press briefing outside the hospital. “It’s a very serious bullet injury.”
The child was believed to have suffered one bullet wound and sustained a brain injury, Malakooti said.
“It’s a very tenuous situation,” he said. “It can change hourly for us.”
Ja’Mal Green, a Chicago community activist, is offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the gunman.
“This should not be our reality,” Green, who is the father of a 2-year-old, said at a media event Tuesday. “We have to bring this horrible person to justice.”
(FREDERICK, Md.) — Two people have been injured in a shooting at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, on Tuesday morning, police said.
The condition of the victims is unknown at this time, a law enforcement source told ABC News.
The suspect is “down,” Frederick police said. It’s unclear of the suspect’s condition.
Tommy Lamkin, a spokesman for the Naval Medical Research Center at Fort Detrick, confirmed that the shooting involved at least two Navy medical personnel.
“We are aware of an active shooter at Fort Detrick, Maryland that has involved at least two Navy Medical Personnel. Local Police have responded to the incident and they are holding a briefing at 10:30am,” Lamkin said
Navy Public Affairs also issued a statement confirming “there was an active shooter incident at Fort Detrick, MD involving U.S. Navy Sailors. We will continue to update with additional details as the situation evolves.”
The incident is no longer considered an active shooter threat, the source said.
Special agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives along with a K-9 team are being sent to the scene, the agency said.
ATF Special Agents and K-9 team are responding to a critical incident in Fredrick, MD to assist our law enforcement partners. More information will be provided by the lead investigating agency when available. pic.twitter.com/27HyLhT8jh
New York City Police DepartmentBy Morgan Winsor, ABC News
