A 21-year old anti-ICE protester has been left permanently blinded in California after a Department of Homeland Security agent shot him in the face with a nonlethal round at point-blank range on Friday.
Kaden Rummler can be seen on video rushing to help a fellow protester at Civic Center Plaza in Santa Ana before being shot by a federal agent. He crumples to the ground in a heap, covering his face before an officer drags him away by his hoodie. Rummler’s aunt said he was left with a fractured skull and shards of plastic, glass, and metal stuck all throughout his eyes and face, and would have died if not for the six hours of surgery he went through.
“That could have cost him his life,” Jeri Rees told the Los Angeles Times. “But now, for the next six weeks, he can’t sneeze or cough because it could do a lot of damage.… The other officers were mocking him, saying, ‘You’re going to lose your eye.’”
It’s a classic cop tactic: raise the level of violence, then use the inevitable and justified matching rise in violence and defensive behaviour from protesters to justify more police violence.
French newspaper le Monde Diplomatique had an article some years back about this with a smoking gun type quote, from an unnamed former high ranking French police officer, along the lines of “it us, the police institutions, that set the level of violence, and we perfectly know it” (the conclusion from this officer was that therefore police should refrain from any unnecessary violence and only use absolutely necessary violence).
Truth. Say it as often as you can, because there are people commenting here constantly urging others to protest violently. It’s the worst thing we could do.
It’s the same here in the US, and this is why the regime has picked Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon to begin with: because those two cities had the most violence in 2020-2023 following the killing of George Floyd. But Portland has learned, and kept their protests non-violent, which is what the judge cited as her reason for declaring the presence of the National Guard there illegal in November. It’s the very first paragraph, and thereafter she calls the order illegal:
https://www.opb.org/pdf/FINDINGS OF FACT AND CONCLUSIONS OF LAW_1762564569662.pdf