Police proudly disperse peaceful "roaches" with rubber bullets

Maybe I should start keeping track of events by which Amendment they break. File this one under the First. A woman is at a peaceful protest against, of all things, totalitarianism in the US:

Videotaped footage of the protests shows Ritter standing next to a police officer using a bullhorn to announce that the protests would be permitted to continue as long as they remained peaceful.

Ritter is later seen on the tape walking away from a line of officers when she is apparently shot in the leg with a rubber bullet.

She then turns toward the officers and asks, "Did you shoot me? A lady in a suit? Who has been walking peaceably in front of you for half an hour and you shot me when my back was turned?"

Ritter turns to a crowd of protesters and says, "Well, you all saw it. They have been watching me for a half hour. They know I'm not armed." At the request of a photographer, she displays for the camera a fresh welt on the back of her leg, where it appears she has just been shot by a rubber bullet.

An audible barrage of rubber-bullet fire follows, as protesters are heard screaming in fear and pain, and yelling at officers, "What the [expletive] was that? Why did you do that to us?"

The camera then finds Ritter again, crouched alone in the street under her sign as rubber bullets continue to fly around her. She said a rubber bullet pierced her foam-board sign and struck her forehead.

A civilian review board investigated law enforcement response to the protests and found no criminal misconduct. [or course]

In a bizarre turn of events, someone videotaped the police watching the video of the woman being shot:

"The lady in the red dress," Kallman says on the tape, to cheers and laughter. "I don't know who got her, but it went right through the sign and hit her smack dab in the middle of the head." Another officer can be heard off-camera, asking, "Do I get a piece of her red dress?" Ritter said the tape had completely changed her take on what had happened to her that day.

Not only are they not sorry for what they did, they think it was hilarious, and referred to the crowd as “roaches”.

Feel good about your right to peaceably assemble and express free speech?

File under: First Amendment