Police officer who fatally shot unarmed 22-year-old Glenwood Pysher IV faces voluntary manslaughter charge

A Pennsylvania police officer was charged on Tuesday with voluntary manslaughter for last week’s fatal shooting of a college student who was looking for his friends late at night and went to the wrong house.

Police body-camera video reviewed by investigators showed the officer yelled: “Drop to the ground,” then: “Stop or I’ll ...”. Before he finished the sentence, he fired two shots at the man who was unarmed and had his hands in the air. He hit 22-year-old Glenwood Earl Pysher IV twice in the chest, killing him.

Senatobia, where white officer shot and killed Kohen Wiley, terminates chief who reportedly used racist slurs in texts

Late Tuesday, the city of Senatobia, Mississippi fired its police chief, Harold Vanderford, after it was reported that Vanderford regularly used racist slurs against Black people in his text messages. The town, which is about 40% Black, made national news earlier this year after a white officer fatally shot and killed Kohen Wiley, a one-year-old Black baby, while responding to a shoplifting call at Walmart. Officers fired into a vehicle, shooting the driver and killing the toddler, who was being held in his mother’s arms.

Though Vanderford submitted a resignation letter earlier on 1 September, the city’s board of aldermen unanimously voted to reject it and to terminate the officer instead. Vanderford’s firing came just under a week after the city wrote in a statement that, despite the messages, he would “continue to serve the City with the confidence that was placed in him at the time that he was appointed as Chief”.

Pamela Cisneros, 49, was wielding two knives when she stabbed a woman, who died in the hospital, and a man

New York City police shot and killed a woman Monday after she stabbed two people in Times Square, city authorities said during a press conference.

Jessica Tisch, the New York City police commissioner, described the stabbings as “random and unprovoked” acts carried out by a woman with previous mental health problems.

Donkey named HeeHaw was shot and killed as authorities reportedly looked on property in search of a missing person

A police officer in the US state of Georgia was placed on leave after a family’s pet baby donkey was shot and killed during an early-morning search on their property.

The animal’s owner, Hannah Israel, said officers were at her pasture without notification or permission at about 12.45am on Sunday, reportedly looking for a missing person when they encountered the small male donkey named HeeHaw.

Jose Carlos Hoyoz-Munoz was arrested after a family altercation and restrained for ‘combative’ behavior

A cadre of Los Angeles police officers beat and restrained a handcuffed man in July, minutes before he was found dead in a jail cell, according to newly released body-cam footage.

On 15 July, Jose Carlos Hoyoz-Munoz, 58, was found unconscious in his cell at the Van Nuys regional jail. At the time, the LAPD said two use-of-force incidents had occurred, without specifying the nature. In the video released on Friday, the department said three use-of-force incidents occurred.

Officials said Tyrin Johnson turned toward guard members with gun while running as report shows he was shot in back

Tennessee national guard members assigned to a federal anti-crime taskforce in Memphis fatally shot an armed 20-year-old man in the back, according to an autopsy report obtained by the Associated Press, contradicting police accounts that said the man was facing the troops when they fired.

Authorities have said that Tyrin Johnson turned toward guard members with a gun while running from them in the early morning hours after the Fourth of July holiday in Memphis when he was fatally shot in the chest.

A cousin says death of Sean Grayson in prison ‘doesn’t give Sonya back her life or return her’ to her children

The death in prison of the former Illinois sheriff’s deputy convicted of murder after fatally shooting Sonya Massey in her home “doesn’t feel like justice to me”, a cousin of the woman has said in an emotional statement.

“It doesn’t give Sonya back her life or return her back to her [two] children”, who were aged 15 and 17 at the time of the killing, Sontae Massey wrote in the statement on Monday. Referring to Sonya Massey’s mother, the statement continued: “It doesn’t give my aunt back her daughter. And it doesn’t give our family the accountability were still waiting for …

Video posted on social media shows three people climbing out of sewer system at 4am, months after similar reports

New York City’s police department (NYPD) says it is investigating a recent video of three people emerging from a manhole in the latest such episode to cause mystery.

Posted to TikTok on Friday, the video showed three people – one after the other – climbing out of a manhole at 4.19am on 18 August wearing headlamps and black overalls near Madison Square Garden.

Sean Grayson, who was diagnosed with stage three colon cancer in 2023, was serving a 20-year sentence for second-degree murder

The former Illinois sheriff’s deputy convicted of fatally shooting Sonya Massey in her home after she reported a possible prowler to 911, has died, his attorney said on Sunday.

Sean Grayson died on Sunday, lawyer Daniel Fultz – who represented the ex-Sangamon county deputy at his trial – told NBC News and CBS News.

Omaha police agreed to stop carrying electric shock gloves in the halls of state’s largest public school district

Omaha police recently agreed to stop carrying gloves that can deliver electric shocks to students in the halls of Nebraska’s largest public school district.

The decision affecting most Omaha middle and high schools came after the Associated Press first revealed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s plan to give officers the “Gloves” – or “generated low output voltage emitters”. The devices have also been used in recent years by some jails.

Despite policy victories over Flock, Americans are finding themselves under similar monitoring by a new company – or unable to remove the original cameras

Activists in Colorado thought they would be celebrating a victory against mass surveillance in December when the Longmont city council decided to let a contract with Flock Safety lapse.

But that excitement was cut short only months later when lawmakers voted to approve a new vendor to install automated license plate readers (ALPRs) on the city’s streets.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s co-opting of conservative language to discuss a movement against state-sanctioned killings of Black people is damning

August has brought us a referendum on “Woke 1” – a term that reductively brands 2020’s social justice movement – as prominent liberal voices reflect on that time period with disappointing hindsight. During a recent appearance on ABC’s This Week, when asked about 2020-era demands to abolish prisons and police, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the US congresswoman from New York, abandoned her previous support of the “defund the police” movement, and instead joked: “Woke 1 was crazyyyyy.”

Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist, implied that the still-resounding calls for municipalities to reduce police budgets and to divert aid to poor communities were worth advocating for during the 2020 uprising, but are now “crazyyyyy”. In 2020, she noted that “a lot of people cannot fathom what an abolitionist America looks like. Tell them it looks like a suburb. Affluent white communities already live in a world where they choose to fund youth, health, housing more than they fund police.” But she has since backtracked on that idea.