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<h2><a
href="http://sfbayview.com/2016/01/us-police-are-killing-people-with-war-crimes-ammunition/"
title="US police are killing people with war-crimes ammunition">US
police are killing people with war-crimes ammunition</a></h2>
<div class="date">January 25, 2016<br>
<b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://sfbayview.com/2016/01/us-police-are-killing-people-with-war-crimes-ammunition/">http://sfbayview.com/2016/01/us-police-are-killing-people-with-war-crimes-ammunition/</a></small></small></small></b><br>
</div>
<p><strong><em>by Robert Wells </em></strong></p>
<p>Virtually every person shot to death by police handguns in the
U.S. in the last 20 years has been killed with a bullet that
international law has declared to be a war crime.</p>
<div id="attachment_60562" style="width: 410px" class="wp-caption
alignright"><a
href="http://sfbayview.com/2016/01/us-police-are-killing-people-with-war-crimes-ammunition/hollow-point-dum-dum-bullet-before-and-after-firing-and-impact/"
rel="attachment wp-att-60562"><img class="wp-image-60562"
src="cid:part2.07090307.06070501@freedomarchives.org"
alt="Hollow-point dum-dum bullet before and after firing and
impact"
srcset="http://i1.wp.com/sfbayview.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Hollow-point-dum-dum-bullet-before-and-after-firing-and-impact.jpg?resize=284%2C300
284w,
http://i1.wp.com/sfbayview.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Hollow-point-dum-dum-bullet-before-and-after-firing-and-impact.jpg?w=473
473w" sizes="(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px" height="423"
width="400"></a>
<p class="wp-caption-text">Hollow-point dum-dum bullet before and
after firing and impact</p>
</div>
<p>In 2011, the police force of the Oakland Unified School District
shot and killed 20-year-old Raheim Brown. Revisiting the case in
2015, Raheim’s mother Lorianne Davis determined with photographs
obtained from the police – and the Oakland Teachers for Mumia
determined with material from a California Public Records Act
demand – that Raheim Brown had been killed with a fusillade of
high-velocity hollow-point Black Talon dum-dum bullets, which are
the standard service ammunition of the Oakland Schools police and
of virtually every police agency in California and the nation.</p>
<p>The dum-dum bullet is a soft lead slug with a hollow-point and a
copper coated base. When it hits, the impact causes the lead to
mushroom back over the copper jacket, expanding the bullet to
roughly .60 caliber in the first two inches of flesh. This violent
expansion, and the extremely high velocity, gives the bullet an
explosive effect in the victim.</p>
<p>Not willing to leave bad enough alone, in the 1990s the
Winchester Arms Co. “enhanced” the dum-dum, running copper strips
up the side to the lip of the hollow-point (the soft lead can
still be seen down inside). When this spinning bullet hits, and
erupts, it splays into six razor-sharp claws that tear their way
through the body. Winchester christened this bullet the “Black
Talon”; The New York Times calls it “the razor-fingered bullet” in
a Nov. 13, 1993, editorial.</p>
<p>Cops estimate that 99 percent – that is, all – of the police
agencies in the U.S. use the high-velocity half-jacketed
hollow-point dum-dum bullet as their standard handgun ammunition.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #800000;">Virtually
every person shot to death by police handguns in the U.S. in the
last 20 years has been killed with a bullet that international
law has declared to be a war crime.</span></h3>
<p>In the 1960s, most of the police agencies in Los Angeles County
used the dum-dum; by now they essentially all do. As the chief
surgeon of the jail ward, Dr. Margaret McCarren of the L.A.
County-USC Medical Center had more experience at the time with
gunshot victims of high-velocity dum-dums than any other doctor in
the country.</p>
<p>“In my experience,” she wrote in 1969, “the type of wounds caused
by these bullets is definitely more severe and represents a
radical change from the type of wound inflicted by the old type
bullet. The high-velocity hollow-point bullet shatters the flesh.”</p>
<p>She compared the effect of the dum-dum to “an explosive charge
going off inside the victim’s body.” A doctor in New York State
who performed an autopsy on a dum-dum victim said the internal
shock had been so great that it was impossible to distinguish one
organ from another.</p>
<p>It was the “shattering of flesh” that Dr. McCarren referred to,
the gross physical destruction caused by the dum-dum, that led to
the bullet being banned in international warfare.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #800000;">Cops
estimate that 99 percent – that is, all – of the police agencies
in the U.S. use the high-velocity half-jacketed hollow-point
dum-dum bullet as their standard handgun ammunition.</span></h3>
<p>The dum-dum gets its name from the old British arsenal in the Dum
Dum suburb of Calcutta, where in the 1850s the noses of bullets
were clipped off to make them expand. By 1874, the Declaration of
Brussels had prohibited the use in warfare of “weapons,
projectiles or substances calculated to cause superfluous
injuries.”</p>
<p>At the Hague Conference of 1899, a declaration was adopted
stating that “the contracting parties agree to abstain from the
use of bullets which expand or flatten easily in the human body,
such as bullets with a hard envelope which does not entirely cover
the core, or is pierced with incisions” – the classic dum-dum,
used by police everywhere in the United States.</p>
<p>After ratification by Congress, the Hague Declaration was signed
into law by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1909, becoming part of
the United States Statutes at Large (61st Congress, 36 Stat.
2277).</p>
<p>In the 1960s, when the dum-dum bullet first came on the market in
pistol calibers, cops everywhere considered themselves to be at
war with the Black community: The COINTELPRO campaign, directed
from the very highest levels of American government, was an actual
shooting war against Black people.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, even while admitting that the dum-dum bullet was an
international war crime, police agencies all across the country
rushed to adopt it as their standard service ammunition, with the
excuse that there was nothing illegal about it domestically.</p>
<p>Even so, they tried to keep it quiet. “This is a tough subject,”
said one manufacturer. “A lot of minority groups might object. We
like to keep the discussion within law-enforcement circles.”</p>
<p>Police resist the word “dum-dum” because they know it’s a term of
revulsion to most Americans. But any high-velocity, soft-nose,
half-jacketed hollow-point bullet designed to expand or flatten
easily in the human body is exactly the bullet condemned for use
against human beings by international law. It’s a dum-dum.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #800000;">Even
while admitting that the dum-dum bullet was an international war
crime, police agencies all across the country rushed to adopt it
as their standard service ammunition, with the excuse that there
was nothing illegal about it domestically.</span></h3>
<p>The police rationale for using the dum-dum is that it’s “safer” –
it will not “exit a suspect” and go on to hit an “innocent
civilian.” It’s doubtful this was much of a problem even in the
‘60s, but today, with the six-shot police revolver replaced by the
semiautomatic sidearm with a clip holding 15 or more bullets,
police shooting doctrine is now to unload dozens of rounds at a
time at a suspect.</p>
<p>Amadou Diallo was killed in New York with 19 bullets – police
shot at him 44 times; in 2010 Stockton police killed James Rivera
Jr. with 19 bullets – they shot at him 48 times; in an incident in
Queens, police fired 284 times and succeeded in knocking over one
civilian; just this August, Stockton police opened up on bank
robbers and a hostage with 600 shots. That’s a lot of dum-dum
bullets flying around the neighborhood without ever “exiting a
suspect.”</p>
<p>The other police rationale, more to the point, is that the
dum-dum is more likely to kill. What seems to be another police
doctrine, called the same thing everywhere in the country –
“bleeding out” – is to leave a gunshot victim unattended on the
ground for hours: Michael Brown in Ferguson, Kenneth Harding Jr.
in Bayview Hunters Point, Filiberto Ojeda Rios in Puerto Rico …</p>
<h3 style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #800000;">The
other police rationale, more to the point, is that the dum-dum
is more likely to kill.</span></h3>
<p>In fact, the police shooting dum-dum bullets is completely
indefensible; there is nothing that can be said about it that
could make it legitimate. Once any Black Lives group made certain
that their local police used the dum-dum – the odds are 99 to 1;
in this state they could use a document demand under the
California Public Records Act – it would be a worthwhile reform to
campaign to get the bullet out of the policeman’s gun, even while
he’s still shooting. Especially while he’s still shooting.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #800000;">The
police shooting dum-dum bullets is completely indefensible;
there is nothing that can be said about it that could make it
legitimate.</span></h3>
<p>Along with reform is the political question: Cops’ rushing to
adopt the dum-dum while in an open state of war against Black
America, knowing full well the bullet is a war crime and making
excuses, is an example of the vindictive and genocidal attitude of
white America toward Black people.</p>
<p>By challenging the police dum-dum, the Black Lives movement could
assert, even by implication, that Black people, under assault from
racist police and the white supremacist state, should be entitled
to at least some of the protections of international law.</p>
<p><em>Oakland Teachers for Mumia – Jack Gerson, Bob Mandel and Bob
Wells, all retired – were among the organizers, along with
teacher Craig Gordon, of the controversial 1999 Oakland Schools
Teach-in on Mumia Abu-Jamal and the death penalty. Over the
summer of 2015, they and Craig Gordon pressured the school
district into reinstating an OUSD social justice website called
“Urban Dreams” that the school administration had taken down
because of intimidation by the Fraternal Order of Police and Fox
News. As a news reporter in the 1960s, Bob Wells broke the first
story about the police dum-dum. Contact him at </em><a
href="mailto:communard3@gmail.com"><em><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:communard3@gmail.com">communard3@gmail.com</a></em></a><em>.</em></p>
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