Category: Police Repression

A Rebuttal to Cleveland PD’s Infuriating Excuses on Why They Killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice

By Shaun King
DailyKOS

March 2, 2015 – Last known photo of Tamir Rice before he was killed by Cleveland PD. Taken just a few weeks before his murder.
Do you see the picture above of Tamir Rice? Please take a good look at it. Look at his eyes, his smile, his boyish manner. It was the last-known photo taken of Tamir just weeks before he was shot and killed by police on November 22, 2014.

Hanging out and having fun in the park near his home in Cleveland, Ohio, Tamir Rice broke no laws that day. A 12-year-old sixth grader, Tamir, according to his teacher, was on the drum line of the band, loved sports, and enjoyed drawing. He was the baby boy of Samaria Rice, had never been in any trouble with the law or his school, and he loved life.

Shot and killed by an officer who was dismissed from his previous police force for lying, mishandling his gun, and weeping uncontrollably during his gun training, Tamir is now being blamed for his own death by the city of Cleveland and called a "menacing" man child by the Cleveland Police Union.

Can I keep it all the way real? Call me dumb, but I just didn’t see this coming. I know ripping apart victims of police violence is the modus operandi of the police, but seeing them do it with a child is despicably low, unethical, and unnecessary.

Speaking about Tamir last week, the man chosen by the Cleveland Police to represent them to the public, Steve Loomis, stooped to a new low:

    “Tamir Rice is in the wrong,” he said. “He’s menacing. He’s 5-feet-7, 191 pounds. He wasn’t that little kid you’re seeing in pictures. He’s a 12-year-old in an adult body. Tamir looks to his left and sees a police car. He puts his gun in his waistband. Those people—99 percent of the time those people run away from us. We don’t want him running into the rec center. That could be a whole other set of really bad events. They’re trying to flush him into the field. Frank [the driver] is expecting the kid to run. The circumstances are so fluid and unique. …

    “The guy with the gun is not running. He’s walking toward us. He’s squaring off with Cleveland police and he has a gun. Loehmann is thinking, ‘Oh my God, he’s pulling it out of his waistband.’”

While a real part of me feels dirty for even responding to Steve Loomis—it’s not as if he’s some random racist—he is the official representative for the police and what he thinks and says matters. Police voluntarily pay this man to be their mouthpiece.

First off, Tamir absolutely is the boy we see in the photos. We’re not going back in time and showing photos of Tamir as a toddler, but we’re going back to the month before he was killed. That’s a boy. He has fat cheeks. His skin is as smooth (and hairless) as a baby’s butt. His eyes have an innocence that most of us lost decades ago. They look like an episode of SpongeBob and a slam dunk from Lebron would take all of his troubles away.

We must refuse to allow Steve Loomis or anyone else to make Tamir into a man, a man-child, or a kid in a man’s body—he was none of these things. He was a sweet, fun, playful son, brother, student, and friend. In the four weeks after the above photo of him was taken, he didn’t morph into a goatee-having, tattoo-toting, musclebound man. He looked just like he did in this photo.

Secondly, Loomis called Tamir "menacing." Since when did anyone, including a man who is 5’7" become menacing? This is not even the average height for an American man, but is short. Both officers who pulled up on Tamir and Steve Loomis himself are several inches taller than this child. At quick glance, Loomis appears to be a huge man and the notion that he would find Tamir "menacing" is preposterous. Furthermore, the word "menace" has so many loaded connotations that just don’t apply to Tamir. He was a boy playing at a park. (Continued)

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The US is Heading Into a Heavily Militarized Future

By Tom Englehardt
Beaver County Peace Links via TomDispatch

Feb 17, 2015 – I never fail to be amazed — and that’s undoubtedly my failing.  I mean, if you retain a capacity for wonder you can still be awed by a sunset, but should you really be shocked that the sun is once again sinking in the west? Maybe not.

The occasion for such reflections: machine guns in my hometown. To be specific, several weeks ago, New York Police Commissioner William J. Bratton announced the formation of a new 350-officer Special Response Group (SRG). Keep in mind that New York City already has a police force of more than 34,000 — bigger, that is, than the active militaries of Austria, Bulgaria, Chad, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kenya, Laos, Switzerland, or Zimbabwe — as well as its own “navy,” including six submersible drones. 

Just another drop in an ocean of blue, the SRG will nonetheless be a squad for our times, trained in what Bratton referred to as “advanced disorder control and counterterror.”  It will also, he announced, be equipped with “extra heavy protective gear, with the long rifles and machine guns — unfortunately sometimes necessary in these instances.” And here’s where he created a little controversy in my hometown.  The squad would, Bratton added, be “designed for dealing with events like our recent protests or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in Paris.”

Now, that was an embarrassment in liberal New York.  By mixing the recent demonstrations over the police killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and others into the same sentence with the assault on Mumbai and the Charlie Hebdo affair in France, he seemed to be equating civil protest in the Big Apple with acts of terrorism.  Perhaps you won’t be surprised then that the very next day the police department started walking back the idea that the unit would be toting its machine guns not just to possible terror incidents but to local protests.  A day later, Bratton himself walked his comments back even further. (“I may have in my remarks or in your interpretation of my remarks confused you or confused the issue.”)  Now, it seems there will be two separate units, the SRG for counterterror patrols and a different, assumedly machine-gun-less crew for protests.

Here was what, like the sun going down in the west, shouldn’t have shocked me but did: no one thought there was any need to walk back the arming of the New York Police Department with machine guns for whatever reasons.  The retention of such weaponry should, of course, have been the last thing to shock any American in 2015.  After all, the up-armoring and militarization of the police has been an ongoing phenomenon since 9/11, even if it only received real media attention after the police, looking like an army of occupation, rolled onto the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, in response to protests over the killing of Michael Brown.

In fact, the Pentagon (and the Department of Homeland Security) had already shunted $5.1 billion worth of military equipment, much of it directly from the country’s distant battlefields — assault rifles, land-mine detectors, grenade launchers, and 94,000 of those machine guns — to local police departments around the country.  Take, for example, the various tank-like, heavily armored vehicles that have now become commonplace for police departments to possess.  (Ferguson, for instance, had a “Bearcat,” widely featured in coverage of protests there.)

Since 2013, the Pentagon has transferred for free more than 600 mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, or MRAPs, worth at least half a million dollars each and previously used in U.S. war zones, to various “qualified law enforcement agencies.” Police departments in rural areas like Walsh County, North Dakota (pop. 11,000) now have their own MRAPs, as does the campus police department at Ohio State University.  It hardly matters that these monster vehicles have few uses in a country where neither ambushes nor roadside bombs are a part of everyday life. (Continued)

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A Report and a Reflection on a Weekend of Anti-Racist Action: Boston, Martin Luther King Day Protest, January 2015

‘We Will Shake this System with the Truth of Our Message’

By Joe Ramsey
OpenMediaBoston.org

Jan 23, 2015 – This past Monday in Boston, at least 1,000 people braved the bitter downtown wind to gather, march and rally against a system that strangles Black lives.  Invoking the activist legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.—but also other historic figures, from Malcolm X and Fred Hampton to Assata Shakur—protesters took the streets for a “Four Mile March” through downtown, culminating in a spirited rally and speak-out on the Boston Common steps, across from the Massachusetts Statehouse. 

Twice along the way, at major intersections, marchers stopped and dropped to the ground for mass “die-ins,” collectively dramatizing the deaths of Black youth and young men shot and killed by police.  While they lay on the ground, organizers read out the names of victims of police violence, including those killed in Boston—such a Burrell Ramsey-White— as well as in Ferguson, New York City, and across the United States.

Drawing a clear—if gentle—distinction between Monday’s mass action and the controversial blockade that shut down Interstate-93 three days earlier, leading organizer and union member, Brock Satter made very clear from the start: “We’re not here to disrupt anything today.  We’re here for a peaceful march. We will shake this system with the truth of our message. And with the millions that we will mobilize to support us.” 

Throughout the day, Satter emphasized the imperative of organizing “not just thousands or even tens of thousands, but millions,” in order to create  mass movement that can fundamentally change this society.  Several speakers agreed that today was “just the beginning” and that the “real work lay ahead of us.” 

Satter further clarified the importance of insisting on the slogan “Black Lives Matter” not because all lives don’t matter,” he said, “but because, “Until Black lives matter, to say that ‘All Lives Matter’ is a lie.”

Fellow lead-organizer Brandi Artez, of Villa Victoria, kicked off the rally by targeting the resistance of “white moderates,” quoting Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”  As King there wrote:

Over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”

“Who are these white moderates,” Artez asked of the crowd, “to tell me how to go about fighting for my freedom?”

If the protest’s MLK Day timing was symbolic, so was it’s starting place.  Protestors converged by the Old Statehouse, filling sidewalks —and soon the streets— at the site of the 1770 Boston Massacre.  As the leaflet for the demo reminded passerby: “It is here that Crispus Attucks, a black man, became the first casualty of the American Revolution.” As the hand-out further explained:  (Continued)

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