Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black resident of Kenosha, Wisconsin, was shot in the back at point-blank range seven times by white Kenosha Police Department officer Rusten Sheskey on August 23, according to the Wisconsin Department of Justice.
Sheskey was a member of a team of officers called to Kenosha’s Wilson Heights neighborhood to respond to a domestic disturbance. Two of those officers unsuccessfully attempted to use Tasers to subdue Blake in the moments before the shooting, as reported in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Two videos of the officers’ interaction with Blake have emerged. The first, which went viral, depicts Blake’s shooting; the second shows some of what happened in the moments immediately prior as two officers attempted to force Blake to the ground.
After the shooting, Blake was transported to the hospital. The officers arrested him; Kenosha’s police chief has said he had an outstanding warrant. A knife was recovered at the scene, from the floorboard of Blake’s vehicle. Also inside the vehicle at the moment he was shot were his three young sons, according to his family’s lawyer, civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump.
The seven bullets left Blake with serious wounds, including spinal damage that may leave him permanently unable to walk, his father — also named Jacob Blake — has said. Doctors were forced to remove most of Blake’s colon and small intestines; his kidneys, liver, and arm were also damaged.
The shooting immediately sparked protests in Kenosha and intensified demonstrations against police brutality and for civil rights that have been ongoing across the US since the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The Kenosha protests briefly became violent when a 17-year-old Illinois resident armed with an assault rifle shot three protesters, killing two.
Democrats and Republicans have both used this shooting — and another fatal shooting at a Portland, Oregon, protest — as evidence of the other party’s shortcomings, with President Donald Trump saying during his Republican National Convention address that uprisings across the nation — and the violence adjacent to them — show that “No one will be safe in Biden’s America.” The president has also said “Radical Left Democrat Mayors, like the dummy running Portland, or the guy right now in his basement unwilling to lead or even speak out against crime” (referring to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden) are keeping Americans from enjoying “Law & Order.”
Biden, however, has pushed back against these claims.
“These are not images of some imagined Joe Biden America of the future — these are images of Donald Trump’s America today,” Biden said in a Philadelphia speech. “He keeps telling you, if he was president, you’d feel safe. Well, he is president — whether he knows it or not.”
Amid this rhetoric, an investigation into Blake’s shooting has been launched. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is conducting an investigation that is meant to compliment the investigation being done by the Wisconsin Department of Justice. Three officers involved — including Sheskey — have been placed on administrative leave.
Please follow this storystream for more on Blake’s shooting, protests, and the response to both.
Jacob Blake speaks out about being shot by a police officer: “It’s nothing but pain”
Protesters in Kenosha march holding a banner in support of Jacob Blake on September 1, 2020. Daniel Boczarski/MoveOn/Getty ImagesReclining in a hospital bed, Jacob Blake addressed being shot seven times by a Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officer in late August for the first time Saturday night.
In a video posted on Twitter by his family’s lawyer, civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, Blake spoke about the constant pain he experiences due to the shooting, which left him paralyzed from the waist down.
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Fabiola Cineas, Sean Collins and 1 more
The police shooting of Jacob Blake, explained
Protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 26, 2020, raise their fists at a demonstration against the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty ImagesAmid America’s summer of protests against police brutality and racism, another police shooting of a Black man has gone viral: that of 29-year-old Kenosha, Wisconsin, resident Jacob Blake.
Blake survived the shooting, and said in a video taken at the hospital where he is receiving treatment that he has been in “nothing but pain.”
Read Article >Donald Trump is inciting violence
Trump in 2017. Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty ImagesBack in July, I was emailing with Erica Chenoweth — a professor at Harvard and an expert on protest and political violence around the world — about her take on Trump’s response to the protests for racial justice. One thing she warned about was the emergence of “pro-state/far-right militias who engage in vigilante violence and terrorism, sometimes with coordination or collusion with the state.”
This has happened in other times and places — think the Ku Klux Klan’s activities during Reconstruction, or neofascist militias in Italy in the mid-late 20th century. According to Chenoweth, such alliances between political parties and far-right militants sometimes work through escalation. Street fighting tends to increase “the desire for a law-and-order candidate” among certain segments population — and right-wing political factions reap the benefit.
Read Article >Facebook banned violent militia groups. We still found plenty of them on its platform.
Protesters belonging to a group that calls itself the Three Percenters attend an alt-right rally on August 17, 2019, in Portland, Oregon. Stephanie Keith/Getty ImagesJust last week, Facebook finally banned militia groups and pages that advocate for violence on its platform. But Recode’s quick Facebook search for “militia” groups and pages on Friday surfaced more than a dozen results for national and local militia groups, most of them private, with many of them openly calling for violence against protesters.
Two of these groups that Recode accessed had a combined 25,000 members and included posts where members encouraged and celebrated shooting people involved in recent Black Lives Matter protests. Some groups did not contain “militia” in the title but still encouraged members to take up arms. One page, called the “The III% Organization,” contained overtly racist and violent posts, such as a meme comparing BLM protesters to dogs and joking about running them over with a car.
Read Article >Why police encouraged a teenager with a gun to patrol Kenosha’s streets
Police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during the current protests. Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty ImagesKyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old charged with murder in the shooting deaths of two people during the violent protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, had a run-in with the police earlier in the night — an extremely friendly one.
In footage from about 15 minutes before the shootings pieced together by the New York Times’s Visual Investigations team, you can see Rittenhouse walk up to an armored police vehicle and chat with officers. A police officer pops out of one vehicle’s hatch and tosses bottles to Rittenhouse’s associates, members of an armed militia. “We appreciate you guys, we really do,” the officer says before driving off.
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