‘My Life Will Never be the Same’: Woman Says LBPD Officer Shot Off Part of Her Finger with ‘Less-Lethal’ Round

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A woman said she is struggling with her mental health and can no longer work after one of her fingers was partially amputated as a result of being shot with a “less-lethal” projectile by Long Beach police officers during an anti-police brutality uprising on May 31.

“My life will never be the same,” Marisa Baltazar said, holding back tears during a press conference outside of her attorney’s office in East LA on Monday. “I’m not able to do basic things, help myself, cook, shower, help my daughter. I’m mentally not okay. I know I’m going to need a lot of help.”

Baltazar, who works as a hotel housekeeper, wore a white bandage on her right middle finger as she spoke.

Last week, she filed a legal claim against the LBPD seeking damages in excess of $10,000. If the claim is rejected, Baltazar can take the city to court..

The uprising, sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, attracted thousands to downtown. Baltazar says an officer shot her without warning while she was in a crowd of demonstrators gathered in the intersection of Broadway and Pine Avenue at about 7:30 p.m. Her attorneys said she was holding her cellphone at eye-level and recording video when she was struck by a projectile fired by an officer.

A fellow protester, Alyssa Bishop, who says she was about 8 feet from Baltazar when it happened, described the crowd as largely peaceful.

“We were boxed in (by police),” she said. “Occasionally there would be a water bottle thrown or something like that but the whole group of us that were protesting would turn around and say, ‘Stop that. Don’t do that.’ We were crowd controlling, but the police kept shooting.”

Videographer Scott Barker, who was also nearby, said he believes police were trying to hit people in the back of the crowd who were being unruly. He says it was during one of those volleys that Baltazar was hit.

His camera captured the immediate aftermath. When he pans over to Baltazar, she is hunched over and clutching her bleeding finger as others come to her aid and reproach police standing at the northern end of the intersection in a skirmish line.

“While on the ground in pain, she receives no help from the Long Beach Police Department, even though she is clearly bleeding,” said Antonio Gallo, one of the attorneys representing Baltazar.

Barker’s video shows blood staining the ground from Baltazar’s finger as officers are heard continuing to shoot projectiles into the crowd. Protesters are seen shielding themselves with their arms as they scream at officers to stop.

“A medic did eventually get to her and under a hail of more bullets being fired, and some individuals using their bodies to protect her, she was escorted away,” said Barker.

Baltazar was hospitalized and ultimately lost part of a finger, her attorneys said.

“Ms. Baltazar that day did not provoke anyone, did not agitate anyone, and was simply there exercising her constitutional right to peaceful assembly,” said another of her attorneys, Salomon Zavala.

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He said in shooting Baltazar, police violated their own departmental policies on less-lethal munitions, which instruct officers to only target people who are engaging in aggressive or combative behavior, and to aim only at the arms below the elbows, stomach, and legs.

“Officers in this case, however, either targeted Ms. Baltazar’s face or they fired indiscriminately into the crowds, both clear violations of their own departmental policies,” said Zavala. “It is indicative … of a police culture that encourages excessive force.”

Speaking before the City Council earlier this month, Police Chief Robert Luna said officers used less-lethal projectiles against people who were throwing bottles, fireworks, and other items at police.

“Those launchers are target-specific⁠—at only individuals who are attacking the officers,” he said.

Police say the crowd size that day grew quickly and unexpectedly from an initial estimate of 200 to over 3,000—later revised to over 5,000. Luna said officers were overwhelmed, with the department receiving nearly four times the average number of calls for service.

The police response has been criticized by both protesters and business owners, who say officers used heavy-handed tactics against peaceful crowds, but stood idle as looters raided businesses. By nightfall, city officials announced that they had called in the National Guard.

Last week, the LBPD released data showing about two-and-a-half times more people were arrested—and later released with a citation—for allegedly violating curfew during this period of civil unrest than those arrested on suspicion of burglary, looting, and other crimes.

Although often misidentified as rubber bullets, what Long Beach police shot at protesters were actually eXact iMpact 40-mm Sponge Rounds. These high-speed projectiles have a “plastic body and sponge nose,” according to the manufacturer’s website. 

Despite their Nerf gun-like name, sponge rounds can cause serious damage. They are part of a family of munitions known as kinetic impact projectiles (KIPs), which also includes rubber bullets and bean bag rounds.

Public health researchers have said that KIPs should not be used for crowd control because their potential to kill, maim, or blind is too high.

Baltazar’s attorneys called for the officer who shot their client to be arrested and charged with assault if an investigation finds the officer acted inappropriately. They also called on law enforcement agencies in LA County to end the use of KIPs against protesters.

“What happened to Marisa is connected to what happened to Andres Guardado just a couple of days ago, to Daniel Hernandez in April, to George Floyd, Rashad Brooks. It’s connected because it comes from the same mind frame of ‘us versus them’ that exists in many police departments throughout LA county,” said Pascual Torres, another of Baltazar’s attorneys.

Earlier this month, Black Lives Matter Los Angeles also called for law enforcement to stop the use of KIPs. The group filed a class action lawsuit alleging Los Angeles police officers used excessive force against peaceful protesters, including less-lethal projectiles.  

Also this month, a group of state lawmakers promised to introduce legislation to tighten regulations on how law enforcement agencies use less-lethal munitions.

“No one who is simply exercising their right to protest should face possible injury or death because officers are indiscriminately firing rubber bullets into a crowd,” said Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego) in a statement. “Breaking a city-imposed curfew is not a sufficient basis for use of rubber bullets.”

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[1] Militarily demobilized. Since WWII—which was both the death knell of European colonial empires as well as the starting shot of the American neocolonial era—Europe has had notoriously scant standing armies, and has been able to consistently slash government military spending domestically and as a percentage of their contributions to international diplomatic bodies such as the UN. This is because nowadays European nations very rarely find themselves in situations where they need to independently send their militaries abroad in order to secure trade routes, foreign resources, or privileges within markets overseas; the U.S. has been fulfilling that hard-power obligation for them for over half a century. The social results of Western Europe’s decreased militarization are striking, especially when contrasted with the U.S.: there is not a single country in Western Europe without universal healthcare, labor rights and welfare systems are strong, value is placed on corporate and financial regulation, environmental policy is lightyears ahead, and, not least of all, there is a robust governmental approach to curbing digital surveillance and reining in tech monopolies. Japan enjoys a similar arrangement with the U.S. in which it, too, is militarily demobilized yet is given full access to, and prominence in, the global economy. In the last decade there has been a reversing trend of remilitarization in some of these nations. That trend was hastened during the last four years as a result of Trump’s ultranationalist politics, but is likely to continue even after his departure in large part due to the growing bipolar geopolitical climate of competition between superpowers.

The “owner” bit of home-“owner” appears in scare quotes throughout the text for reasons that will shortly become apparent.

Nothing signals trouble quite like consensus.

More on them later.

And, anyways, what exactly remains “obvious” in an era “post-truth”?

I take as my starting position that even the “obvious” must be won.

It’s like Lenin said, you know…

Whether directly, or through a chain of investments, or through the wider speculative market in real estate.

I use “banks” in this piece as a stand-in for several sources of income that derive partly through the mortgaging of property and/or investment in institutions that have the power to mortgage property.

That is just its “ideology.”

The Ricardian “law of rent” explains that any location with an advantage over another location, can accrue an economic value, called “rent,” to the owner.

This happens without the owner needing to pitch in to create the advantage.

If the owner does pitch in, then the value accrued from that advantage cannot be called “rent.”

“Rent,” in economic terms, is only, precisely, the value accrued from that portion of the advantage for which the owner is not responsible. That is what we mean when we say, “Rent is theft.”

This does not mean places with lower property taxes ipso facto have higher property prices—and that is because the property tax is only one of the contributing factors. You could have zero taxes on land in Antarctica, for instance, and it would still sell for $0. This is why the introduction to the analogy controls for such variables.

This is the logical conclusion of believing two premises:

(1) All humans have an equal right to the Earth.
(2) Vaginal birth is a lottery system

Prop 13 is rent control for home-“owners.” You can learn more about its history and impact here.

“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare. Act 4, Scene 5

This is why the lobbyists who spend the most money to support the mortgage interest deduction are bankers, mortgagers, and realtors.

Term

Definition