had died of suffocation in March after police officers had placed his head in a hood<\/a> and pinned him to the ground. The public had never been told about the death, but that would change if police body camera footage of the encounter got out.<\/p>\n\u201cWe certainly do not want people to misinterpret the officers\u2019 actions and conflate this incident with any recent killings of unarmed Black men by law enforcement nationally,\u201d a deputy Rochester police chief wrote in an email to his boss. \u201cThat would simply be a false narrative, and could create animosity and potentially violent blowback in this community as a result.\u201d<\/p>\n
His advice was clear: Don\u2019t release the body camera footage to the Prude family\u2019s lawyer. The police chief replied minutes later: \u201cI totally agree.\u201d<\/p>\n
The June 4 exchange was contained in a mass of city documents released on Monday that show how the police chief, La\u2019Ron Singletary, and other prominent Rochester officials did everything in their power to keep the troubling videos of the incident out of public view, and to prevent damaging fallout from Mr. Prude\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n
In a police report on the confrontation, marking a box for \u201cvictim type,\u201d an officer on the scene listed Mr. Prude \u2014 who the police believed had broken a store window that night \u2014 simply as an \u201cindividual.\u201d But another officer circled the word in red and scribbled a note.<\/p>\n
\u201cMake him a suspect,\u201d it read.
<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
If the people who enforce<\/b> your laws routinely lie to protect themselves from<\/b> the law, you do not have law enforcement, you have a criminal gang. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rule 2 is, “See rule 1.” Case in point? When the Rochester mayor and chief of police claimed that a woman from Alaska was an, “Outside Agitator,” he a woman from Alaska who was a student at the University of Richester: After the upheaval of the protest on Sept. 5 in downtown Rochester, police announced …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[368,364,387,526,590],"class_list":["post-176044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-corruption","tag-evil","tag-hypocrisy","tag-law-enforcement-misconduct","tag-protests"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176044"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176044\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}