Two Los Angeles men allege David Dempsey had used the same tactics to assault them during protests five months earlier When David Dempsey was arrested in California on Thursday and charged with attacking police officers defending the US Capitol on 6 January, local activists in Los Angeles were not surprised. Federal prosecutors have accused 34-year-old Dempsey of striking police at the Capitol with improvised weapons, including a crutch and a pole, and spraying them with a chemical agent, according to the criminal complaint against him. Five months earlier, two Los Angeles men said, Dempsey had used the exact same tactics to assault them during tense summer political demonstrations in the Tujunga neighborhood and in Beverly Hills.
One of these alleged assaults had happened directly in front of police officers in Beverly Hills, and the other was reported in detail to the Los Angeles police department, according to the two men. Both said that local police failed to follow up or to arrest Dempsey, even though he had previously been charged with using bear mace on anti-Trump protesters in Santa Monica, California, in 2019. Erik Boyd, a local antifascist activist, alleged that Dempsey punched him and then hit him over the head with a skateboard on 14 August 2020. The skateboard attack left him “bleeding profusely”, and resulted in a deep cut in his head that required at least a dozen stitches, Boyd said. Boyd said he made a police report about the attack to the Los Angeles police department on 16 August, and provided the Guardian with copies of the emails he sent to an LAPD detective two days later with additional documentation – which included a video of the attack, multiple photographs and videos of Dempsey – and a video of Dempsey allegedly attacking someone else with a skateboard in a similar way that Boyd said he was attacked. Eight days after Boyd said he was attacked, Sean Beckner-Carmitchel, an independent journalist, said Dempsey and his brother Daniel both attacked him at a protest he was covering in Beverly Hills. Beckner-Carmitchel said he was bear-sprayed in the face, and then grabbed and hit by multiple rightwing protesters as he rolled on the ground. He described it as the most violent attack he has ever experienced.
via guardian: California man charged with attacking Capitol police had history of assaulting activists