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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://theintercept.com/2023/01/17/keenan-anderson-toxicology-lapd/">theintercept.com</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">LAPD Held Down Keenan Anderson, Repeatedly Tased Him — Then Suggested His Death Was His Own Fault</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Natasha Lennard - January 17, 2023<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2023/01/AP23015532695308.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1024&h=683" alt="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)" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="392" height="261"></p><p class="gmail-caption"><font size="1">People mourn Keenan Anderson in Santa Monica, Calif., on Jan. 14, 2022.</font></p><font size="1">
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Photo: Jacob Lee Green/Sipa via AP</font></p></div><div><p><u>The Los Angeles</u> Police Department is <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7vazm/lapds-release-of-drug-tests-is-smearing-keenan-anderson-groups-say">pushing</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-01-11/lapd-releases-body-camera-videos-in-3-recent-in-custody-deaths">third man of color</a> killed by the department in the few short weeks of 2023 alone.</p>
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<p>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 <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/3anxzb/heres-how-prosecutors-plan-to-prove-derek-chauvin-murdered-george-floyd">blame</a> his death on the fentanyl found present in his system, too, but thankfully without success.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/08/politics/democrats-criticized-kente-cloth-trnd/index.html">ludicrously</a>
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.</p></div><blockquote><span></span><p>The reality of U.S. policing persists as a continuous, unrepentant, and reform-resistant threat to Black lives.</p></blockquote><div><p>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.</p>
<p>Police <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/police-killed-nearly-100-people-a-month-in-2022-data-shows/">killed</a>
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 <a href="https://movimientopoder.org/our-work/criminalization-vs-care/?utm_source=mj-newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-newsletter-01-13-2023">city</a>, <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/21/why-more-police-funding-no-route-public-safety">state</a>, and <a href="https://theintercept.com/2022/04/19/police-funding-democrats-gun-control/">federal</a> levels.</p>
<p>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.</p></div><div><p><u>It should go</u>
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 <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/01/12/keenan-anderson-police-taser-death-los-angeles/">brutal</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Even as city residents are terrorized, police consume enormous amounts of these communities’ resources. The LAPD <a href="https://la.curbed.com/2020/6/2/21277088/defund-police-los-angeles-lapd-budget">received</a>
$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 <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/21/why-more-police-funding-no-route-public-safety">have not</a>
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.</p></div></div></div></div>
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