Seattle activist pepper-sprayed while talking on phone sues city and police

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Seattle activist pepper-sprayed while talking on phone sues city and police

Oliver Laughland
Thursday 29 January 2015 21.52 GMT

A Seattle high school history teacher who was pepper-sprayed by police as he walked home from a Black Lives Matter rally on the Martin Luther King holiday is suing the city and the police for $500,000.

Newly released video shows the moment Jesse Hagopian, a popular city activist who had earlier addressed the rally, was sprayed directly in the face by a white female police officer as he talks on his mobile phone and appears to be be walking away from the police line.

Hagopian’s lawyer, James Bible, said the use of force was unprovoked.

“His eyes were burning, his nostrils were inflamed, his ear was burning,” Bible told the Guardian, adding that Hagopian had been on the phone to his mother at the time the incident occurred. Hagopian had planned on returning home to celebrate the second birthday of his child.

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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jan/29/jesse-hagopian-pepper-sprayed-seattle-black-lives-matter-rally-sues

[99th_Monkey]

1. I wish all these settlements triggered by bully & killer-cops

were paid out of the police retirement funds & pensions, rather than General Funds of cities already
struggling to keep their infrastructures in repair and their schools open.

Now THAT would have an immediate effect of stopping all the police abuse
of unarmed innocent citizens in a heart-beat.

[petronius]

2. That cop should be charged with assault, and the ones next to her who

failed to intervene or react should be fired (if there's no way to charge them as well). A lawsuit isn't enough - the people pay it anyway, not the police...

[Warren Stupidity]

3. For a while I was embarrassed by our use of this term in the 60's and 70's:

"Fucking Pigs."

These fucking pigs have to be put back in their fucking pig pens.

[uppityperson]

4. Good. That cop keeps screaming "stand back" and randomly spraying people

No call for wtf she was doing.

[Downwinder]

5. The woman in the video with him should also get $500,000

[ybbor]

6. WTF

How in the hell could she have felt threatened? What a fucking POS!

[Liberal_in_LA]

7. totally unprovoked. she sprayed him because she could

[LittleBlue]

8. Looks like an unprovoked attack against 2 people

I hope he and the woman behind him both get a good settlement from this. Shocking.

[Orrex]

11. Unprovoked? Are you kidding?

A black man was talking on a cellphone. That's a capital crime in some jurisdictions!

[Orrex]

10. I hope that the woman in the blue scarf sues, too.

[frylock]

12. fuck tha police