'Blinded by police': my search for fellow survivors of an alarming trend
I heard the gun go off and turned my head toward the sound, just in time to watch the spinning aluminum canister slam into my brow. Everything went black. I stumbled. When I regained my balance and opened my eyes, the sight in my right eye was gone. Something in my head told me the teargas canister was the last thing I’d ever see clearly.
It was 30 May 2020. George Floyd’s death was still headlining most news reports. The country was finally (rightly) paying attention to police killings. Meanwhile, during the protests that followed, another less deadly but still alarming trend was developing: “blinding by police”.
According to Shot in the Head, a report released in September 2020 by Physicians for Human Rights, during the protests between 26 May and 27 July of last year, US law enforcement officials shot 115 people in the head with “less lethal weapons”. Of these victims, at least 30 suffered permanent ocular damage.
As a professional photojournalist, I’d been covering the protests outside the White House when I was shot. It’s perhaps needless to say that any eye-related injury is basically a photographer’s worst nightmare, tantamount to a musician going deaf.
While I dealt with the aftereffects of my own injury and tried to make sense of what had happened, I came up with a new mission for myself: I set out to meet as many of the other people blinded by the police as I could.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/02/police-shootings-less-lethal-eye-vision