[News] LAPD Held Down Keenan Anderson, Repeatedly Tased Him — Then Suggested His Death Was His Own Fault

[Anti-Imperialist News]

theintercept.com
<https://theintercept.com/2023/01/17/keenan-anderson-toxicology-lapd/>
LAPD Held Down Keenan Anderson, Repeatedly Tased Him — Then Suggested His
Death Was His Own Fault
Natasha Lennard - January 17, 2023
------------------------------

[image: People mourn Keenan Anderson in Santa Monica, CA on Jan. 14, 2022.
A protester takes to the streets demanding justice for Keenan Anderson who
died while in LAPD custody on Jan 3, 2023. (Photo by Jacob Lee Green/Sipa
USA)(Sipa via AP Images)]

People mourn Keenan Anderson in Santa Monica, Calif., on Jan. 14, 2022.

Photo: Jacob Lee Green/Sipa via AP

*The Los Angeles* Police Department is pushing
<https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7vazm/lapds-release-of-drug-tests-is-smearing-keenan-anderson-groups-say>
the narrative that Keenan Anderson — a 31-year-old Black teacher, who LAPD
cops held down and repeatedly tased as he begged for his life — is
responsible for his own death.

Preliminary toxicology tests, performed on Anderson’s body by the police
department itself, found traces of cannabinoids and cocaine metabolite in
his system – results that in no way mitigate the extreme violence inflicted
on Anderson by the police ahead of his January 3 death.

The drug tests were not released as part of an official autopsy; the Los
Angeles County coroner’s office is still investigating Anderson’s death and
has not yet ruled on its exact medical cause. Instead, the LAPD conducted
its own drug tests and announced the results in an unambiguous effort to
denigrate and blame its victim, the third man of color
<https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-01-11/lapd-releases-body-camera-videos-in-3-recent-in-custody-deaths>
killed by the department in the few short weeks of 2023 alone.

There’s nothing surprising about this sort of police practice. The idea
that drug possession or use by Black people creates grounds enough to
warrant police violence, even deadly violence, has undergirded half a
century of U.S. policing. Cops from the department that murdered George
Floyd attempted to blame
<https://www.vice.com/en/article/3anxzb/heres-how-prosecutors-plan-to-prove-derek-chauvin-murdered-george-floyd>
his death on the fentanyl found present in his system, too, but thankfully
without success.

If Anderson’s official autopsy undermines police claims that drugs played a
role in his death, it would be a relief, but not a victory. Instead, the
very willingness of the LAPD to release its toxicology report speaks to a
much broader problem: the certain confidence in the public’s willingness to
demonize and blame Black victims. If such racist narratives around drugs
weren’t readily available, the police department wouldn’t have bothered
releasing the toxicology results at all.

That the LAPD is confidently deploying this public relations tactic nearly
three years after Floyd’s death is a grim reflection of how little has
changed.

This should come as no surprise, either: The uprisings that followed
Floyd’s murder were met with harsh state repression in the streets, aided
by disavowals and dismissals across the media and political mainstream. The
Democratic lawmakers who knelt ludicrously
<https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/08/politics/democrats-criticized-kente-cloth-trnd/index.html>
in kente cloth to signal their anti-racist credentials are the same leaders
who have rejected every serious attempt to reckon with the racist violence
that defines U.S. policing.

The reality of U.S. policing persists as a continuous, unrepentant, and
reform-resistant threat to Black lives.

Calls to defund the police were deemed electorally radioactive, demands to
abolish the police derided as delusional, police budgets further swelled,
and impunity has continued to reign.

Police killed
<https://truthout.org/articles/police-killed-nearly-100-people-a-month-in-2022-data-shows/>
1,176 people in 2022 — more killings than in any of the last 10 years. And
while racial justice organizers and abolitionists continue to fight, the
mass rebellions of 2020 were aggressively drained of political potency by
an array of counterinsurgent forces, from mass arrests, media demonization,
and, crucially, the complete and cowardly abandonment by liberal
politicians on the city
<https://movimientopoder.org/our-work/criminalization-vs-care/?utm_source=mj-newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-newsletter-01-13-2023>,
state
<https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/21/why-more-police-funding-no-route-public-safety>,
and federal
<https://theintercept.com/2022/04/19/police-funding-democrats-gun-control/>
levels.

I don’t doubt pollsters’ findings, that voters in 2020 were turned off by
the term “defund,” but I’m not interested in relitigating debates around
electoral slogans. What matters is that the reality of U.S. policing
persists as a continuous, unrepentant, and reform-resistant threat to Black
lives.

*It should go* without saying that the presence of drug traces in
Anderson’s blood should in no way shift culpability for his death away from
the police. Anderson died following a brutal
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/01/12/keenan-anderson-police-taser-death-los-angeles/>
interaction with police officers he had flagged down to ask for assistance
after a traffic collision. Friends and relatives said Anderson was
undergoing a mental health crisis — a tragically common circumstance of
deaths in police custody.

As released body cam footage showed, Anderson was chased and pinned down in
the middle of the street. Two LAPD officers held him down, one with an
elbow on his neck, then a knee dug into his back while he was handcuffed,
and another cop stood over him with a Taser gun, shooting him with its
electric charge — directly in the back — again and again, for a total of
over 90 seconds. Anderson was then taken to hospital, where he died around
four hours later.

The presence of drugs in Anderson’s system doesn’t even mean that he was
high at the time of his interaction with police. Cocaine metabolite can
stay in a person’s system for days. More to the point, Anderson certainly
didn’t die of a cocaine overdose: These almost exclusively happen while
taking the drug, not after hours in a hospital following physical violence
and extensive electrocution suffered at the hands of police.

Even as city residents are terrorized, police consume enormous amounts of
these communities’ resources. The LAPD received
<https://la.curbed.com/2020/6/2/21277088/defund-police-los-angeles-lapd-budget>
$1.8 billion in city funding last year, 29 times higher than the city’s
housing budget, amid a perilous homelessness crisis. Bloated police
budgets have
not
<https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/21/why-more-police-funding-no-route-public-safety>
diminished crime but simply expanded the potential for police interactions
in which a civilian can be treated as criminal and face violence. Racist
police logics maintain a stranglehold over U.S. political norms. Otherwise,
it would be — as it should be — beyond doubt that the police are wholly
responsible for Keenan Anderson’s death.
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