“Officers threw flash bangs and tear gas in my car… My 6-month-old can’t even breathe.” — The harrowing reality of a police state that treats innocent families as collateral damage.
Minneapolis, MN — If you want to know what the “War on Terror” looks like when it comes home to roost, look no further than the streets of North Minneapolis this week. In a scene that should horrify every parent in America—regardless of political affiliation—an innocent family attempting to drive home was besieged by agents of the state, leaving their 6-month-old baby unconscious and fighting for breath.
This was not a battlefield in a foreign land. This was an American street, where a family van was turned into a gas chamber by those who claim to “protect and serve.”
Shawn and Destiny Jackson were not protesting. They were not rioting. They were simply trying to get their six children, aged 6 months to 11 years, to the safety of their home. But in the eyes of the police state, there is no such thing as an innocent bystander—only collateral damage.
The chaos erupted Wednesday night following a protest over an ICE agent shooting a Venezuelan man. As the demonstration grew, law enforcement decided that the appropriate response to civil unrest was to indiscriminately unleash chemical weapons and military-grade explosives into the area.
As the Jackson family drove through the area, officers deployed flashbang grenades and tear gas canisters. According to the horrified father, the munitions didn’t just land near them—they hit their vehicle.
“Officers threw flash bangs and tear gas in my car. I got six kids in the car,” Shawn Jackson told FOX 9, holding up a car seat that had been flipped over in the chaos. The blast was so powerful it detonated the vehicle’s airbags, trapping the chemical gas inside the cabin with the terrified children. “My 6-month-old can’t even breathe.”
The scene described by Destiny Jackson is the stuff of nightmares. She recounted the terrifying moment her infant stopped breathing and lost consciousness, forcing her to perform CPR on her own baby on the side of the road while strangers poured milk on her other children’s burning eyes.
“My kids were innocent, I was innocent, my husband was innocent, this shouldn’t have happened,” Destiny said. “We were just trying to go home.”
Three of the children, including the infant, were rushed to the hospital.
For those who blindly “Back the Blue” and insist that if you just obey the law, you have nothing to fear—the Jackson family was obeying the law. They were doing everything right. And yet, the state’s enforcers nearly killed their baby.
This incident is not an anomaly; it is a systemic feature of a militarized police force that views the citizenry as enemy combatants. It brings to mind the horrific case of Baby Bou Bou (Bounkham Phonesavanh), a tragedy we covered extensively at The Free Thought Project.
In 2014, a SWAT team in Georgia executed a no-knock raid on a home based on faulty intelligence from a confidential informant. During the raid, officers blind-tossed a flashbang grenade into a room where the family was sleeping. It landed in the crib of 19-month-old Bou Bou, exploding on his pillow.
The explosion blew a hole in the baby’s chest, exposing his ribs, and tore his face down to the bone. Like the Jacksons, Bou Bou’s family was innocent. The suspect they were looking for didn’t even live there. Yet, the state fought the family every step of the way, initially refusing to pay for the millions in medical bills caused by their own negligence.
The parallels are sickening. In both cases, the state prioritized “shock and awe” tactics over human life. In both cases, “officer safety” was deemed more important than the safety of infants. And in both cases, the victims were guilty of nothing more than existing in a space that the government decided to turn into a war zone.
When we allow the state to hold a monopoly on violence, and when we grant them Qualified Immunity to escape the consequences of that violence, we guarantee that these tragedies will continue. The officers who gassed the Jackson family likely went home to their own beds that night, while Shawn and Destiny sat in a hospital room praying their baby would survive.
Destiny Jackson noted that she had never been a protester before, but this act of state aggression has changed her. “This incident has given her the drive to do so,” she said.
This is the cycle of the police state. Violence begets resistance, which the state meets with more violence. But for the Jackson family, the cost of this cycle is paid in the trauma and blood of innocent children.
As long as we continue to fund and make excuses for a system that treats our neighborhoods like battlefields, no one—not even a baby in a car seat—is safe.
