“Her life has been so radically altered, it’s just devastating,” says Love’s lawyer, Lisa Bloom, who filed a lawsuit against the city and county of Sacramento, the state of California and numerous officers for damages. “It may have been a split second for them to pull the trigger. It’s a lifetime of pain for her and many others.” A Sacramento Police Department spokesperson said the department has not yet confirmed it was responsible for Love’s injury, since multiple outside agencies responded to the protests. The incident is still under review.

Many of the weapons used by police in recent protests, like rubber bullets and beanbag rounds, are deemed “less-lethal” by law enforcement, even though they can maim and kill. From January 1990 to June 2017, at least 53 people died after such weapons were used for crowd control in incidents around the world, according to a 2017 study published in the medical journal BMJ Open. Three hundred others suffered permanent disability, often from being struck in the head and neck. “Bullets by another name are still bullets,” says Dr. Rohini Haar, the study’s lead author. As an emergency doctor in Oakland, Calif., Haar says she witnessed the damage of the projectiles firsthand in 2014, when rubber bullets were used on Black Lives Matter protesters amid unrest over a St. Louis grand jury’s decision not to charge the officer involved in Michael Brown’s shooting death. When police answered protests with violence in 2020, she was not surprised.

«The level of violence that police officers have used throughout history, against people exercising their constitutional right to protest, is really quite staggering.»

Neither were historians. Recent accounts of police aggression mirror those seen multiple times in American history, according to historian and author Heather Ann Thompson, who studies 1960s and ’70s policing and protest movements. Her book, Blood in the Water, about the Attica, N.Y., prison uprising, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in History. “There’s a long, long history of this,” says Thompson, citing the 1968 protest at the Democratic National Convention and a massacre that same year in Orangeburg, S.C., in which law enforcement killed three students and wounded more than two dozen others during a civil rights protest. “The level of violence that police officers have used throughout history, against people exercising their constitutional right to protest, is really quite staggering,” she says.

What’s new, Thompson says, is that police are militarized, often with surplus U.S. Army equipment designed for use in wars of occupation. And in 2020, police actions, and those of white, far-right groups claiming to want to protect businesses and towns from protesters, have been emboldened by a sitting U.S. President, she says. “None of these other presidents would have verbally celebrated white-vigilante, racist violence the way that Donald Trump has,” Thompson says.

Trump has generalized Black Lives Matter protesters as “violent anarchists” and threatened to quell demonstrations with federal forces. “These are not ‘peaceful protesters,’” he tweeted in part on Sept. 8. “They are THUGS.”

During the decade that Martin Gugino has spent protesting, the 75-year-old retiree has been arrested at demonstrations four times and faced charges ranging from misdemeanor trespassing to demonstrating without a permit. He had never been convicted in court or injured at a protest until June 4, when a police officer in Buffalo, N.Y., pushed Gugino onto the pavement. In some of the most graphic footage to emerge from the protest movement, Gugino is seen staggering backward, then falling on his back to the sidewalk, his head slamming to the ground. Blood leaks from his ear, and more than a dozen officers in riot gear stream past the apparently unconscious man without helping him.

The last thing Gugino remembers seeing is a line of helmeted officers coming toward him with batons. “When I was in the hospital,” Gugino says, “I thought, ‘What’s all the fuss about?’ And then I saw the video and I said, ‘Oh yeah, I get it.’” He suffered a fractured skull and concussion and was hospitalized for about a month—the last three weeks of which were spent in physical therapy, relearning how to walk. When he was first hospitalized, Gugino says he could not hear anything because his ears were full of blood. Gugino, who’s hoping for a full recovery, says the experience was a small sample of what Black people endure on a daily basis. “It’s unacceptable,” he says of police violence. “They need to be corrected. The cops have just got the wrong idea. And bad ideas have bad consequences.”