09/14/15 – Keegan Stephan – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
All right, our next guest today is Keegan Stephan.
You can find him at keegan.nyc.
I didn't know that that was a thing. keegan.nyc.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm well.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
And I also want to direct everybody over to Keegan's Twitter feed, where he tweets, twitter.com slash Keegan NYC, Keegan NYC.
And you should do a great job of keeping track of police violence against American civilians here.
I've been following you for, I don't know, I guess about a year or so.
And you're always very helpful in keeping me up to date, although I can't really claim I'm up to date, as up to date as I can possibly be.
But I think there's just almost no keeping track of the amount of innocent people shot down by cops in this country.
But anyway, I appreciate you joining us to try to cover them as best we can.
No problem.
Glad to be here.
All right.
So tell me, who's Natasha McKenna?
Natasha McKenna is a woman who was arrested.
She was mentally ill.
She was taken into a prison and detained.
She was then killed by several police officers that went into her cell in full sort of hazmat gear.
And her last words were, you said you weren't going to kill me.
And there's actually extremely brutal video of the whole encounter of the police approaching her in the cell and holding her down.
It's really grisly and hard to watch.
Everyone listen to this for just one second here.
Totally.
There you go.
Her last words, you promised you wouldn't kill me.
I didn't do anything.
And then it's the rapid reaction force thing, just like a Guantanamo Bay where whenever the cell extraction team.
And like you say, they're dressed up in this hazmat gear.
It looks like mob gear from Desert Storm in 1991, back when Saddam Hussein actually still did have some chemical weapons that Ronald Reagan had given him.
And I just imagine any person, but especially someone, you know, a paranoid schizophrenic being stomped and suffocated and murdered to death by guys dressed up like these monsters out of some paranoid schizophrenic nightmare of some dystopian totalitarian future.
It's just crazy.
You can't look at that and think of any other thing other than some nightmare out of the Nazis or a science fiction movie or something.
Yeah, it definitely looks like a dystopian future.
And it actually very much feels like it, too.
As the video goes on, you know, they hold her down.
And even though she's just one woman and they have five officers holding her down, they proceed to tase her while she's held down.
And they tase her four times in the video.
And that ends up being the cause of death.
You know, they call it excited delirium, which is a term that has been proven to be manufactured by taser, the company that produces these weapons, which they say are nonlethal, but have actually resulted in at least a dozen deaths in custody or during arrests that I've seen this year.
Yeah.
And you think about that, too, just right there.
Sorry to interrupt.
But that would never work on anyone except a court system or a newspaper man that, hey, you know, if you electroshock torture somebody to death, well, you know, there's a millisecond between the tasing and the dying.
And so, therefore, the heart failed.
Yep.
That heart, it just up and failed.
And it wasn't the taser that tased that heart to failure.
It was the heart's fault.
Excited delirium, the maybe could be argued is the reaction to being tased, but is some supposedly degree of separation between the tasing and the dying.
I mean, what kind of load of crap is that?
Yeah.
And, you know, taser has spent a lot of money doing sort of scientific studies proving that the cause of death is excited delirium.
And they actually will hire experts to go into court when officers are being sued for being sued or being tried for for crimes for killing someone with the taser and say that, you know, argue that it's not the taser that killed them, arguing that it wasn't the fault of the officer that killed them, that it was this invented thing called excited delirium, which did not exist as a diagnosis until the taser, or at least it wasn't widely used.
It was used like predating the 1920s and then it disappeared from the vocabulary and now it's back again and being used really widely in response to taser deaths.
Unbelievable.
And seriously, everyone, please go and look at this footage.
You can find it on Keegan's Twitter feed.
You can find it on my Twitter feed this morning as well.
Slash Scott Horton show or slash Keegan NYC.
And it's brutal.
But, you know, come on.
I mean, actually, I guess you can't actually see your face when they're murdering her, whatever.
So many people dogpiling on top of her.
It's not the most gruesome thing.
What's what's the most shocking about it?
We see so many innocent people, especially blacks, murdered by cops.
The most shocking thing about it is the costumes of the murderers in this one.
We're like, where do these people get off?
How do they convince themselves that this is how you attack a woman suffering from paranoid schizophrenia?
And what do they do?
It's baffling as to why they didn't have psychologists come in and talk to her, try to remove her in a peaceful way, and instead decided to gear up.
I really feel like it's an extension of the militarization of police forces, you know, even when they're handling our sort of most most delicate Americans.
Well, now, so these guys are all going on trial, right, for murdering this helpless woman?
Uh, no, they they're, they're pretty much all being exonerated before any sort of trial.
The the, you know, the cause of death was listed as an accident, not even a homicide.
They're pretty much getting off on the fact that it was, you know, caused by excited delirium and not by by by them holding her down and tasing her until her heart stopped.
Excited delirium, amazing.
Who's Felix Kumi?
Um, I'm unfortunately not in front of a computer.
Can you refresh me on the case?
Yeah, yeah.
He's the innocent bystander in the in the gun control entrapment scheme there.
Yeah.
So this this is a case that's been really bothering me.
You know, I'm local in New York City.
And, you know, so I the the police force that I watch sort of most closely is the NYPD.
And so the NYPD was involved in a and trying to purchase illegal handguns just north of the Bronx, actually.
So in Westchester County and the person that this officer had routinely bought guns from, he was buying them from again.
And apparently the person who he had bought guns from got into the back of his car and threatened, put a gun to put a gun.
What the officer said was a gun to his head and took fourteen hundred dollars cash from him and then fled from the vehicle.
The cop then got out of the car and fired 14 to 20 shots in this small town north of the Bronx.
And he hit the perpetrator who turned out not to even have a real gun.
It was a fake gun.
And he also shot an innocent bystander, Felix Kumi, two times in the chest, killing him.
So obviously, this is very disturbing use of force from from an NYPD officer.
There's actually, you know, a Supreme Court case that says officers are not allowed to fire at fleeing suspects, that it is a violation of their constitutional rights.
And I think this case exemplifies why, you know, you're putting innocent bystanders at risk.
You don't know what the actual threats are.
If someone's fleeing, there are better ways to handle it.
You know, that cop had a radio.
There are cops all over.
This is New York City.
This could have been dealt with every other way besides shooting and injuring this person who, you know, ends up wasn't guilty of a violent crime and killing an innocent bystander who had children and grandchildren.
Well, you know, the thing is, too, is if they wanted to claim that, well, I don't think they could really claim this, that they thought he would be a danger to the general public just because he robbed a cop, undercover cop who he didn't know was a cop.
That doesn't imply that he's, you know, about to go on a mass murder spree of innocent strangers or anything like that.
But even if we accepted that argument and he had to stop him still, you don't shoot unless you have a clean shot.
You don't spray 14 to 20 shots from a handgun down the street in New York City, for Christ's sake.
This cop obviously was just throwing a temper tantrum is all.
Yeah.
And, you know, this it also brings up another another point about police accountability in New York right now.
You know what?
That's that's a perfect place to pick up this conversation.
On the other side, there's a very important questions there about accountability and especially in New York.
It's Keegan Stephan at Keegan at Keegan NYC.
We'll be right back after this.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm talking with Keegan Stephan about the police state.
He's at Keegan dot NYC and you follow him on Twitter.
Twitter dot com slash Keegan NYC.
Keeping up with police abuse in the Black Lives Matter movement and all that.
So now accountability, you said the magic word when we were right, we were going out to break there and something a little bit different happened in New York recently where the governor announced that he was going to appoint a guy who somehow there were going to be some independent investigations of at least some police killings.
But then it seems like maybe that didn't pan out to be all what it was cracked up to be in the first place.
I'm not sure.
Can you tell us about it?
Yeah, it's really heating up right now.
So what happened was that there was a strong push from the Black Lives Matter movement picking up on police accountability movements from the past that have been asking for a special prosecutor to look into all police killings.
So this would, you know, it would pick up these cases in which people are obviously concerned rightfully that local DAs who constantly work with the police on all sorts of other cases don't prosecute cases of cops killing people as critically as they could.
You know, we've seen non-indictments across the country in cases where, you know, it looks very clear on video that someone is innocently killed by a cop such as Eric Garner.
So Governor Cuomo, to his credit, you know, brought this before the legislator and was trying to get a bill passed to create a special prosecutor, it's called, to prosecute all cases where the police kill New Yorkers.
Unfortunately, it didn't pass.
There was no bill passed.
So he signed an executive order saying that the attorney general would take over all cases where police kill unarmed New Yorkers.
So it was a bit of a compromise, only unarmed, and the term unarmed is undefined.
But it was very clear on the fact that the AG would have to take over the investigation from local prosecutors anytime a cop kills an unarmed New Yorker.
This got tested very quickly when one local prosecutor actually requested that the AG investigate a killing that happened three months before the bill was signed.
Then we had Cuomo and the AG say that they were not going to investigate this case because the executive order was not grandfathered.
It was only going to apply to cases that happened afterward.
This was, you know, disappointing, obviously.
And then the case we were just talking about, Felix Cumie, the innocent bystander that was killed by an NYPD officer, obviously fits the bill.
This innocent bystander was unarmed.
A local prosecutor is going to be taking up the case and, you know, the AG should be taking it up.
We should have a special prosecutor who's going to look into it who doesn't have to work with the NYPD regularly.
Unfortunately, the very next day after the shooting, the attorney general said that he would not be taking over the investigation sort of mysteriously.
And myself and some other people, you know, raised this objection.
Why is he investigating?
This is exactly what he's supposed to be investigating.
And then Cuomo made an announcement sort of inexplicably augmenting his executive order or disagreeing with his own executive order, saying that they would only be investigating when they thought that there was a conflict of interest.
So that's that's extremely disappointing.
It seems like another term without a definition there or one that's malleable enough.
And I, you know, I'm going to argue that it's it'll sort of be used exactly when it shouldn't be used.
So what's what's been happening ever since the executive order was signed is local DAs have been voicing their objections to the executive order, you know, saying that they they can handle their own cases.
And, you know, you could argue that it's because they want to keep on good terms with their local police.
And so anytime there's an objection, it looks like the AG is going to back off and not investigate.
And those are the exact cases when he should be investigating, when there probably is a conflict of interest.
So so it seems like this is sort of this has not been the greatest move for accountability.
We need a much stiffer law.
And that is something that we're going to be pushing for this coming legislative session.
You know, they they're going to have to or there there will probably be a proposal to pass a law that will replace the executive order.
And we need to make sure that it is stronger in its language, that it defines all of these terms such as unarmed or eliminates that term entirely, and that it that it mandates that the AG absolutely has to investigate all of these killings and can't pick and choose and let local prosecutors stay on the case when it is a conflict of interest.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, that's exactly the thing.
I was even talking with a friend of mine who's a lawyer who works with the state legislature here in Texas.
And, you know, my idea was it should be automatic that not necessarily a special prosecutor at the state level, but just, you know, the state government has a system where a county district attorney from another county in the same state or parish or however it works in whatever Commonwealth or whatever state people live in.
But basically the same thing.
Yeah.
From another district, a prosecutor.
And it's automatic.
And I saw where actually there's kind of the I forgot what it's called, the agenda action items that were put out by part of the Black Lives Matter movement where they called for bringing in the FBI to investigate each one of these the way they do now when it's a suspected civil rights violation.
And that seemed to me like the very kind of worst way to solve this.
And that's I mean, the FBI, these are the worst people in the whole wide world.
We don't want them.
What you want, though, is like you're saying, a D.A., a prosecutor, because, hey, you know, murder is a state crime.
That's not a federal issue.
It is a state issue.
But there's this huge conflict of interest.
And, of course, all you got to do is you just create a random lottery of state district attorney's offices.
And then, you know, that district attorney has to appoint one of his assistant D.A. to go and run the investigation.
And then maybe, you know, you'd have to work out the details with the cops.
But anyway, the point of my story is I'm sorry, I'm trying to get to it, but I'm taking too long.
My friend, the lawyer that works with the state legislature says, yeah, we do stuff like this all the time.
We have separate outside jurisdiction type investigations all the time.
The Travis County government here in Texas has a special unit that's just for state level political corruption because it's the state government is in Travis County.
And then he compared it to that and a few other things.
So this is totally doable.
This is totally doable.
All we got to do is get it, have our eye on the ball about what exactly the plan is.
And asking the Justice Department to come and help is not the solution.
You know, first we count how many black people were burned to death at Waco and then we get back to asking the FBI for help.
Yeah.
You know, I think what we've learned here in New York is that there's not only a conflict of interest when you have a local prosecutor looking into the police department they have to work with every day.
You also have a conflict of interest every time you involve the political structure.
So we really need to find a special prosecutor that is divorced from the political structure.
So having the attorney general, the state attorney general do it here is this political hotbed.
You know, all politicians, they don't want to go against the police union.
They don't want the police union upset about them.
So they're also not doing the best job.
And it was never the intent of the Black Lives Matter movement or the civil rights movement before them here in New York to have the AG be the special prosecutor.
They wanted someone who was divorced from the political process.
So when we're looking at this bill that might get drafted in the next legislative session, we also need to find out who that special prosecutor is and find out systems in which they can be divorced from the political system as well as the police department that they're investigating.
Yeah, man, we need to get also and it would differ.
It would have to differ state by state.
But the lawyers really could work this out and get some real model legislation written for all 50 states that here's what we're going to do.
Here's how we're going to solve it.
And and no well-meaning person on the other side could really object.
I mean, it's not like cops everywhere have a real reason to mistrust the DA's from the next county over, do they?
If they're not, you know, doing anything wrong, what do they have to worry about?
But it'll make us feel better.
You know?
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
But I think there's no there's no end to what police unions will object to at this point.
They've they've been objecting to every other level of accountability so far.
All right.
And now.
So I'm sorry.
In a couple minutes here, I want to kind of get back to the list here a little bit.
I'm glad we talked about that, though, because that's the most important part of this is, you know, the actual accountability and all that.
But can you tell us about some more of these people who were killed by the cops?
I got this whole list here from going down your Twitter feed.
It's hard to keep track of them.
Well, tell me about the two skaters that got shot by a cop.
We're supposed to believe they were trying to beat him to death with their skateboards in Olympia, Washington.
Is that it?
Yeah.
I mean, that's that's.
Yeah, the it's called the Olympia shooting.
If you want to learn more about it, you can definitely get a lot of information by searching in the hashtag Olympia shooting.
And yet it happened in Washington.
Two black stepbrothers allegedly stole beer from a store.
They they actually left it there.
And then and then we're, you know, leaving, apparently going home.
But a police officer pulled over, seeing seeing them and on the side of a highway, got in, engaged them and shot them, shot them both.
And the cop says that they were threatening him with a skateboard.
There is no accusation that they made any contact with him, with the skateboard.
And yet he shot them, both of them.
And the D.A. announced last week, I believe it was, that he was not going to press any charges against the officer for shooting them.
No excessive force charge, no reckless endangerment charge, nothing but that he was going to charge both of the both of the brothers for assault with a deadly weapon.
And he argued that the skateboard was a deadly weapon.
So obviously, double standard of justice there, it feels like.
Well, at least they're still alive so that I guess eventually they'll be able to tell their side of the story.
Something tells me it's not going to sound too much like what the cops are saying here.
All right.
I'm sorry we're out of time.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
I hope we can do this again soon.
Absolutely.
All right.
So that is Keegan Stefan.
He's at Keegan dot NYC and follow him on Twitter slash Keegan NYC.
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