Police brutality | Hip-Hop and Politics

Mumia Abu Jamal Speaks on the Oscar Grant/ Johannes Mehserle Verdict..He Goes in on Lebron James

July 18, 2010 By mrDaveyd

Mumia Abu Jamal weighs in on the Oscar Grant/Johannes Mehserle verdict just as cops and supporters are gearing up to hold a rally for Mehserle in Walnut Creek which is about 25 miles east of San Francisco.

Click the link below reflect and weigh in

http://www.prisonradio.org/The Mehserle Trial long.mp3

Click the link below where Mumia Weighs in on Lebron James..reflect and weigh in

From Hero-Zero

http://www.prisonradio.org/From Hero to Zero long.mp3

Mumia Abu Jamal weighs in on the Oscar Grant/Johannes Mehserle verdict-Click to HERE to hear his words...

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

What can I Do… (Remember this is Bigger than Oscar Grant) by Chela Simone

July 5, 2010 By mrDaveyd

What can I do?
By Chela Simone

original article:
http://www.facebook.com/mrdaveyd#!/note.php?note_id=446666950852&id=547107938&ref=mf
As I watched and re-watched the footage of Oscar Grant being shot in the back on the BART platform By Officer Johannes Mehserle on Jan 1 2009. It shook me to my core, knowing that my 14-year-old cousin exits that same station everyday. Knowing that In my beautiful city of Oakland, another cop murdered yet another unarmed man. Knowing that they still “hunt” us.

Oakland California my birthplace, I spent most of my life in and out of the corridors of the Bay Area. Here in Oakland being young and black is like a golden ticket for the police harassment “rite of passage”, and depending on how you respond to this initiation will determine when you catch your first case. I felt betrayed by a system that allows this to happen and continue to happen. I felt sad for both families realizing that Mehserles’ first son was born within days of executing Oscar, I felt sorry for Oscars’ child that will never have the luxury of a fathers guidance; for the families that were, are, and will continue to be affected by Americas’ constant disregard for life. All color aside we are a species of being on a planet that is bleeding into our oceans. With that said.

What can I do?
The horrors of police terrorism are no “over active paranoia’ for the young and black in Oakland. It is real life. The Oakland Riders, were a local police gang, this is not some myth on the Internet or a story I overheard drinking expensive cocktails at some fancy bar… no, I met one of the Riders personally. A day that would change my ideas of the “Officers of these Laws’ forever.

My 16th summer, my best friends and I sat on the stoop talking about “teenage stuff”. Officer Vasquez

Officer Vasquez’s mugshot.

pulled up in front of the building in his patrol car and demanded we ” go the fuck inside”. We were both shocked and confused, the area was infamous for drug activity, but it was the middle of the afternoon and we lived in the house we sat in front of. We ignored his warning, laughing at him defiantly. He scowled at us and before he drove away he said, “I’ll get you bitches”.

At 16 I had no idea the lengths this officer would go to make us pay for not following his command. One week later my best friend walked into the corner store. Officer Vasquez followed her in and with out provocation he grabbed her arm, slammed her into the display case, cleared a counter with her face, slammed her on to the ground and arrested her for possession of crack cocaine. She to this day has never touched a crack rock, let alone sold one. The young man accompanying her to the store tried to intervene and was also arrested for possession of crack cocaine and resisting arrest. Since they were 18 they where sent to adult processing. Both of them were college students and relatively mild mannered kids with no priors or otherwise. Lucky for them, they were released and all charges were dropped. But not after spending the weekend in jail. Welcome to Oakland.

I was the one with the big mouth, I thought I knew it all, I could quote laws and championed myself savvy when it came to knowing my rights. That would be until the day Vasquez pulled up next to me while I walked home from school alone. I panicked when he told me to “get in the fucking car”. Should I run? from a cop that had just beat and arrested two of my friends for sitting on the porch?

After Vasquez explained to me that he could, “fuck me, kill me and leave me in a dumpster, and no one would ever know”. His message became very clear to me. He was the boss. I never called the police, I never told my mother, I told a few friends in passing but it was only swallowed by the hum of all the other stories. Besides who would believe us anyway? We were just young black kids from Oakland.

Fast forward to 2004. Watching the evening news and I see his face, on my TV. My hands began to sweat I feel the same panic that I had felt years before. I rush to the phone to call my best friend. She cannot remember his face but she can remember his name. The once tyrannical Rider, Officer Vasquez was now a fugitive. “Breaking News” to those that do not frequent the inner city boundaries. But to me and at least 119 of the individual victims of The Riders, who were falsely arrested, had drugs planted on them, were subjected to excessive force, or went to jail/prison for as many as 5 years, knew this was real, Oscar knew this too. No surprise that The Rider Trial ended with jurors acquitting the officers of eight charges and deadlocked on the remaining 27. Even less surprising the officers wanted their jobs back, “the same shift and everything,”

I watched the execution again, you can hear the 22-year-old father, Oscar Grant scream, “you shot me and I didn’t do anything”. I watch it again. Oscar reaches up from the platform for an officer to help him and they cuff him. He is shot and they cuff him. I want Mehserle to be some evil monster that hated black people, but I can’t be sure of that… I am sure he is a 28-year-old man who made a horrible mistake; being caught on film behaving abusively and recklessly. I can only guess that in his mind, he was doing his job. The organization he works for, has no problem executing the weak, the poor and the under represented, whatever color you happen to be at the time. To Mehserle cuffing a man that had been shot in the back was nothing more than procedure, however inhumane it may seem to a civilian.

What can I do?
I watched again, I felt helpless. Felt like I needed to do something, or break something, instead I called fellow musician Azeem and asked him to record a song with me. We made “Shut em Down” a spin off of Lupe Fiasco’s “Dumb it Down’. I hosted a few benefits, one for political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal’s birthday and book release party were Angela Davis and Lynne Stewart spoke on the injustice system.

(left to right) Kulwa, Adimu, Jack Bryson, Angela Davis, Minister of Information JR, Chela Simone, Ambassador Franco, Nakiya and Mistah F.A.B

That is where I met Jack Bryson the father of Jackie Bryson, the young man on the platform with Oscar the night he was killed. He wanted Oakland’s support to get Mehserle charged. His sincere concern with bringing the shooter to trial reminded me that I could easily be Jack and I wanted to help.

Later that night a group of us lamented over memories of more cop stories. The time when they beat up Chris so bad they had to call his mom, “cause he might not make it”. When they shot unarmed Jody Mack Woodfox, a 27-year-old African American man, after a traffic stop in 2008. Not only was Woodfox unarmed, but a preliminary autopsy revealed that he was shot “numerous times” in his back from approximately 25 feet away, The “shooter” Officer Hector Jimenez, killed Jody Woodfox in July after having killed Andrew Moppin by shooting him in the back eight times on New Year’s Eve. Casper Banjo shot by OPD with a high-powered rifle through the heart in the parking lot of the police station in 2008. In 2006 a twenty-six year old African American man standing on a street corner in his neighborhood talking with friends. Two Oakland police officers approached the group of men and began to harass them and search them without probable cause. He was knocked over a fence by one of the officers and is now permanently paralyzed.

Gary King Jr. by shot in the back by OPD in 2007

Twenty year-old Gary King Jr. by shot in the back in 2007. Seventeen year-old Ameir Rollins paralyzed in 2006. Nineteen year-old Joshua Russell, murdered in 2002 all by Sergeant Pat Gonzalez who happens to be, the fifth officer shot and wounded in the events of March 21st, 2009 which left

Lovelle Mixon

Lovelle Mixon and four Oakland police officers dead. I found no peace in these discoveries, I only found myself angry, sad and uncomfortable with the situation I was witnessing.

I need to do something, what can I do?
I followed the Grant/Mehserle case in the news, in blogs, on youtube, by word of mouth. It took 12 days to call for charges on Officer Mehserle, who fled the state and was found in Nevada. Ron Dellums waited 7 days to make a statement to the City of Oakland. I was disappointed that someone that takes the stance that he is “for the people”, did nothing for the people, until he was faced with angry citizens. We needed someone to at the very least say that there would not be another young person murdered by the same organization created to “protect and serve”. Instead we were faced with BART saying that there was no “official” tape, Dellums silence and all this anger. The Oakland riots were a valid reaction. I hate to see my city destroyed, but I understand the sentiment, a legitimate response to an extreme situation. The people are not “just crazy’, Police “hunt’ us. That is a reason to demonstrate, to defy these oppressions. Everyone deals with anger and grief differently, opportunists take advantage of the moment to do what they do best.. I called my sister in New York, she had never heard of Oscar Grant. I was disappointed again.

After hearing they where moving the trial to Los Angles just like everyone else, I thought “that is where the cops that beat up Rodney King got off”. I hoped that it wouldn’t happen again. I let Oscar, fade from my memory, I found other “ills of men” to occupy my disgust like the Eleven Oakland Police Department officers, including two sergeants that were terminated for their involvement in the falsification of search warrant affidavits, drug tests and numerous criminal cases that were called into question due to the improper search warrants and untruthful statements. All of which happen to be going on at the exact time we watched the outcry in the streets of Oakland in honor of Oscar Grant, in honor of every one that knows the subtle trickle of oppression in our everyday lives. The illness of racism that hasn’t been erased from the human consciousness, call it “Muscle Memory”, if you will, all too apparent in the mixed reaction of the community to Lovell Mixion. Then BP drilled a hole in the earth. (To be continued)

What Can I Do?
Three weeks ago I got a call from a journalist from Oakland that alerted me to available seats in the court, and with no prompting and no money I found my self driving down the 5 with very mixed emotions about what I would find when I got there. I had just written my first piece for sfbayview and I was looking for a story with teeth. This story would prove to be a huge bite, one that would take a chunk out of my heart.

I needed to see it first hand. I wanted to know that they really tried this case. It wasn’t about Oscar alone. It was the one of the biggest cases in the last decade. A cop was on trial for murder. After all of the men wronged they were finally going to try one for murder. I wasn’t sure I was even angry about Oscar any more. I wasn’t sure Meserle shot him on purpose despite my need to find a place to lay blame. What a heavy load for the “lone gunman”. At that point I was not thinking about facts or video, it was about justice for all of them. I was no longer “objective”.

I made it into the courtroom after a day of being denied access during 4 separate breaks, the day Dominice lied so poorly on the stand that one of the jurors shook his head in disbelief, I watched Perone arrogantly throw Mehserle “under a bus.” I saw Jackie testify to being handcuffed for over 5 hours, in a holding cell where Pirone came to kick up his feet and smirk at him. I heard the court read transcripts with an antagonistically ignorant ebonic overtone, in an attempt to eclipse the relevancy of Bryson’s testimony. I watched Mehserle cry, I watched Oscars’ mother cry, I heard Mehserle say he didn’t mean to shoot him. I watched Mehserle get caught in a few lies. I watch the court remove 5 young black males from the public seats for various “reasons” some substantiated some not. I watch the seats refill with defense attorneys externs.

They played the tape in the court room so many times, I didn’t hear the “pop”.
I began to notice so many things I never saw before.
Like Oscar was on the phone and he took a picture.
Pirone knee Oscar in the face, 250 pounds on his neck.
Mehserle never called for an ambulance. Why not? There is a human dying.
Mehserles’ reaction after he shot him. He looks shocked.

I look to the jury, no black faces.

Can they even fathom how important this is to so many people that are so misinformed about the details of this case, but these same people know it happens all the time…

How common the abuse? How uncommon it is for it to be an officer as a defendant in a murder trial?

My observation is Mehserle’s act alone was not motivated by racism, Pirone is a bully, Domenici isn’t very good at lying and the orchestration of the “powers that be” is fine tuned and vicious.

I believe that some police are desensitized to the strategic warfare going on in specific communities. And those that aren’t desensitized and can see what it is, just go along with it because that’s the job a paycheck and that is what they are “supposed” to do.

I believe that, officers are subconsciously trained to be aggressive toward a “suspected criminal”. Just so happens, the suspects are mostly brown/black people. The All Point Bulletins (APB) that go out to all officers, everyday describe just about every Black or Hispanic Male that lives here between the ages of 16 -35, 5-7feet, 100-250 lbs walking or driving. I don’t think it is some grand conspiracy amongst the police force alone, it’s an age old doctrine that has never changed. It is just subtler and better protected by its founders. I don’t even think some of these cops recognize the scale of this experiment. They just follow orders, which protects them when they don’t follow laws.

Mehserle contended in the preliminary trial that Mehserle pulled his gun and shot Oscar because Oscar was resisting and “thought he was going for a gun”.

From what witnesses observed, Oscar was not resisting. Pirone was being an over zealous cop, and was using excessive force. Mehserle wasn’t thinking, just reacting, pulled a gun and shot him.

I do believe it was “muscle memory”, the four steps he went thru to remove his gun from his holster were all involuntary. He was drilled to remove that gun over and over. If he hesitates for one moment he could be dead. He may have even meant to reach for his taser but his training was to pull his gun and fire. And he did.

Lets say for a moment Mehserle actually did pull out that taser and tase him, after he was subdued. It was still excessive force, and during this entire act the idea never crossed his mind. He knew that he could tase Oscar and even if it was wrong and on tape and he wasn’t in fear of going to jail for it, or even being harshly punished for that matter. In his mind, at that moment, it was not wrong to watch Pirone unjustly beat him, he could then tase him, and take him to jail, all based on a description of a suspect in a fight. Which is still of course not confirmed to be Oscar Grant.

It is demonstrated over and over again, once you are a suspect, police can intimidate you, terrorize you, be aggressive and violent if they want to, they can beat you, tase you and then arrest you for resisting this terror. The only problem with this arrest is, he didn’t kill him with his hands, a nightstick or his taser, he shot him with his gun and you have to explain that.

Now before the, “I was just going to tase him. I didn’t know it was a gun”, defense. Mehserle said in preliminary trials that Grant was resisting. Now after reviewing tapes, even Mehserle said Oscar “appears to be complying”. Mehserle also said he” thought Grant was going for a gun”, so Mehserle was going to “tase” Grant?

Why would you tase a man with his finger on a “trigger”? Couldn’t his hands constrict and discharge a bullet?

If a cop sees a suspect going for a gun…. Wouldn’t the officer pull his weapon? Aren’t officers trained to match a weapon with deadly force?

Terry Foreman, the officer Mehserle asked for the morning of the shooting when he was taken to BART police headquarters at Lake Merritt testified, Mehserle “would say, out of nowhere, ‘I thought he had a gun,’ and start crying.”

So which is it?
I am confused.
Either:
He was resisting and you were going to tase him and accidently shot him
– or –
He was reaching for a gun and you pulled your weapon and shot him.
These two scenarios are vastly different.
Can’t be both.

And I am mad about that. I am angry about all the smoke and mirrors, the deception, the maze of words, and expert opinions that amount to nothing more than another lie.

Mehserle shot him on tape and it took days, a riot and three investigations to bring him up on changes.
He switched his story up and got a whole team of cops and experts to lie for him. And they aren’t even good lies.

Is that racist? NO, the acts themselves are not. Race played an obvious part when he was detained by Pirone.
It is not a “black persons” myth. Police harass black and brown people. Just take a look at the jails.
But no his actions where not motivated by race, instead by conditioning, which is even more deadly, from every angle. Until people of all color acknowledge that even with a Black President the race relations in this country are deplorable, then we are far from abandoning this ignorance . Just watch that cop punch that young woman in the face in Seattle to see how civil these servants are.

Is this justice? NOT even close. We know he shot him. It’s on TAPE, a lot of tapes. a lot of angles. Why?? Because people saw something unjust going on BEFORE he got shot. Excessive Force.

These young men were celebrating one more year of life, and found themselves being initiated into black manhood in Oakland. Sitting against the wall with their hands up watching a ritual that has been carried out for so many generations. It was the same old same, ruff up a couple a cats cite em” out and send em’ home. Write a few up and send em’ off to jail. All in a good nights work, but that night some thing went wrong.

The Expert witness Greg Meyers said Johannes Mehserle did not show excessive use of force, it could be considered coincidental that he said the same thing when he testified for the officers that beat Rodney King, or it could be the estimated 30k he commands for his performance.

On June 30th The Judge took Murder 1 off the table. The jury in People, Vs. Mehserle will chose from 2nd Degree Murder, Voluntary Manslaughter or Involuntary Manslaughter.
It’s not the worst thing that could happen. We all dread the worst.
Closing statements on Friday July 2, 2010, and then we wait.

What can we do?
In the dawn of a verdict every one is operating on the presumption that Oakland is going to “burn down”. That people will lose there lives and go to jail. Well, as illustrated above that is already happening. Some will, some will choose different methods, others like Oscar will have no choice.

The Oakland police have demonstrated their intimidation tactics in court on the street and now LIVE on the evening news. A plan is in place to call for “Mutual Aid”, which will bring hundreds of officers from Northern California to Oakland. Twenty-one thousand National Guard will be on standby, all backed by Mr. “for the people” Ron Dellums, himself. Dellums said “we will not tolerate destruction or violence”, if he would have added “unless it is towards civilians” to that statement, it would be a more honest assessment of what they are foreshadowing. Just more of the same.

Yes we need to stand together, and be objective in our approach. Burn it down –or- meet them on their playground, cry, hide, all are honest reactions. We are all wired differently, a painter can paint it, a writer can write it, a singer can sing it, Just DO something.
Not every one is readied for the battleground. Just Do something
To assume we just want to act a fool is another form of “profiling” , but we can talk about that later.

I say, do whatever you feel is right.

This story changed me in ways I cannot put into words, I have gone from a voyeur to a woman who speaks and acts. I wrote, I drove, I sang, I showed up, I came back to tell the story. Not just for Oscar, but for something I never thought would move me so deeply, Us. Its bigger than one man in one city. I just caution you to think before you move and walk into a war zone thinking it’s a good time to break a window and grab some free sneakers. You are aware they have shot many unarmed men, some handcuffed, some innocent, some face down, some in the back. They will not hesitate to shoot some one they can “prove” a potential threat, and they are giving “fair” warning.

There have been many different organizations asking for peace. I will be the first to clap when we reach that place.

In between 2004-2008 there were 45 officer involved shootings in Oakland, as of May 2009, 62 in review, of which, 80% of the victims were African American 40% had no weapons. Over 2,000 people were murdered by police in the U.S. since 1990 and this is the FIRST one brought up on charges. When exactly is a good time to be angry about that?

Do something.

written by Chela Simone

Return to Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner

Filed Under: 2009-Daily Hip Hop News, Political articles Tagged With: BART, Holly sauce, Mehserle Trial, Oscar Grant, Oscar Grant Trial, Police brutality, police terrorism, Ron dellums, What can I Do... (Remember this is Bigger than Oscar Grant) by Chela Simone

No Independence Day! In Unity & Struggle, Till We Are All Free-(This is For Oscar Grant)

July 3, 2010 By mrDaveyd

No Independence Day! In Unity & Struggle, Till We Are All Free

by DJ Kuttin’ Kandi

This is for….

Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, Ousmane Zongo, Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima,
Rodney King, the San Jose Custodio family, Fong Lee, Kuanchung Kao,
Anthony Baez, Joe Joshua….

The people who I mentioned above are only just a few of the thousands who have been beaten, tortured, harassed, murdered or all of the above by police officers in this country. There are countless many others of whom I have failed to mention, for sadly, I do not know them. They are graffiti artists who run the tracks and jump yards from the cops who beat them till their blue, women who are groped and raped by cops when they are pulled over, women behind prisoner walls who sleep unsafely in fear that they will be sexually abused by a guard, LGBTQ people who are constantly targeted, harassed and wrongfully arrested daily by hundreds of homophobic Officer Richard Fiorito’s in this country. They are our youth, and they are our people of color who are racially profiled every day. They all have names and they all have faces. They are family, they have homes, and they are part of our communities. And they have been stripped of their lives, their freedom, their liberty and their rights.

Sadly, all this mistreatment and killings have exposed not only the injustices and oppression in which we live in, but they have exposed the racist White Supremacy that embodies this country. They are in our everyday lives, embedded in the very systems that are supposed to protect and serve us, the people. They exist amongst our streets, in our schools, near our homes, infiltrating our parties, roaming in their cars, checking out our street corners, just waiting to look for any person of color to mess up or provoking us to retaliate.

As we wait for today’s closing arguments, deliberations and a verdict on the trial of what many of us are calling the Execution of Oscar Grant, I am remembering Sean Bell. I am remembering May 2008, sitting down reading a news article of hundreds of people in New York City protesting after all three officers were acquitted on all counts of charges of manslaughter, reckless endangerment and assault on the shooting and killing of Sean Bell. I remembered how the tears rolled down my face. I remembered feeling hopeless and helpless, and wishing I was back home in New York City. There I was, still a newbie San Diegan, still learning about the west coast life, 3000 miles away from New York City working at UC San Diego in a white, upper-class town called La Jolla, Ca. My lips couldn’t move but inside my head was screaming “Doesn’t anyone know what had just happened?” They had just let three police officers walk away free from murdering a young man with a 51 bullets-shooting!! Does not anyone care?

Of course there were many people that did care, many of whom were out there rallying, protesting, crying and hoping for change. But then there were also some that didn’t care. Then there were some that didn’t even know. Just as they didn’t know about Amadou Diallo who was shot and killed, with a total of 41 rounds by 4 police officers or they never heard about how Abner Louima was assaulted, brutalized and forcibly sodomized by New York police officers with a the handle of a bathroom plunger in 1997. Or they never learned about Fred Hampton, of the Black Panther Party, who was killed as he was asleep in bed by the Chicago Police department. Or they forgot about little 13-year old Timothy L. Wilson from Kansas City who was shot dead after a brief chase for driving his friend’s pick-up truck. LaTanya Haggerty in Chicago, Mario Paz in California, Aquan Salmon in Connecticut, Stanton Crew in New Jersey, Donta Dawson in Philadelphia, Pedro Oregon from Texas – all wrongfully shot and/or killed by police officers, some and/or maybe all of whose stories may not be known to most of us.

The mainstream media is also an institutionalized racist system much like the police system and the prison industry complex, and is often in cahoots with other fascists like the government; is not going to cover all of these police brutality stories in the truest details and form. The mass media play an important role in politics and policymaking, while journalists are key players in ongoing struggles of numerous socials groups to specify problems and form how we define those problems.

In the book The Politics of Force: Media and the Construction of Police Brutality, author Regina G. Lawrence reveals how the media, does not offer additional perspectives of particularly three cases of those who had been killed by police officers. She reports, “The news offered socially constructed public definitions of these vents, which drew upon official and, sometimes, nonofficial voices. With different degrees of success, police attempted to control those definitions by providing reporters with narratives that defended their use of physical force.” (Lawrence 3). She also brings to light how there be different realities for different people and “how the news simultaneously confers and denies power to different groups’ perspectives on reality.” This also raises the question which she asked, “What kind of ‘realities’ are represented in news coverage of policy issues? And whose realities are they?” (Lawrence 5).

In the preface of her book, Lawrence also makes known that the general public is not aware of the institutionalized racism that exists with the police department. She states, “It is tough to get the general public thinking about police brutality as a serious public problem. It is tougher still to persuade the public that the roots of that alleged problem lie not in the occasional bad behavior or poor judgment of individual police officers but in entire institutionalized systems of police training, management, and culture; in a criminal-justice system that discourages prosecutors from pursuing police misconduct vigorously; in a political system that responds more readily to police than to the residents of inner-city and minority communities; or in a racist political culture that fears crime and values tough policing more than it values due process for all its citizens. “ (Lawrence XII).

My question is, if the media plays a major role in being the “official dominance” and if “journalists rely heavily on institutionally position officials for the raw materials of news” as Lawrence exposes; then what do we do to change what the general public thinks is “reality”, especially if the “reality” and problems of those who are marginalized are ignored by those institutionally position officials?

As I am looking to find ways to answer that question, I am also struck with sadness because the news are depicting activists as if we are wanting to cause riots in the streets. Speaking from my own perspective as an activist and community organizer, I choose not to engage in violent measures when justice is not served for the people. However, I believe self-defense is a right, and I will exercise that right, as I am sure others will too.

Hip-Hop Activist and journalist Davey D, recently been taking us back to footages at previous Oscar Grant rallies, showing us Mandingo Hayes who was accused of being a police informant and a former pimp and in the clips. Hayes was one of the key people who were influencing folks to leave the rally and head to the BART Headquarters, and shut down the station, while it was far from CAPE (Coalition Against Police Executions) organizers agenda. Also, more recently Quebec police admitted going undercover at the Montebello protests disguising themselves as demonstrators. And just now, within the hour, Davey D exposes a new LRAD weapon and questions if the Oakland police could possibly be itching to use it for expected riots.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooWr-RhovPg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbLU9tdDwxo

So, if media are making activists appear to be intolerable, vicious people then how can we as activists gain the trust of the general public to be able to educate the “reality” that needs to be told?

Also, what the news fails to show and highlight to the general public are the many different faces that are at the Oscar Grant protests. Various faces, people of color are supporting, rallying, voicing, sharing and being allies to one another. This is happening because there is an understanding of the solidarity needed. That this is bigger than just the indictment of Officer Mehserle… that this is about fighting institutionalized racism and White Supremacy. All of us, people of color including white people are affected by White Supremacy.

The killings of people of color by police officers are a symbolic representation of what is happening across this country and around the world. They are connected to what’s happening in Arizona and Texas. They are connected to what happened in New Orleans, to the BP Oil Spill and to what are happening in Haiti now (Check Davey D’s site for Immortal Technique’s latest piece on his trip to Haiti) .

Last week, a friend posted on Facebook an article on how 4 Filipino nurses are claiming the Bon Secours Health System fired them for speaking Tagalog at work. They had recently filed a discrimination complaint before the US Equal Empoyment Opportunity Commission. The hospital policy states; that since English is the primary language of their customers it must be the exclusive language spoken and written by all employees while on duty in the emergency department. But none of the nurses recall speaking in Tagalog in front or while providing patient care in the Emergency Department and that they only spoke their native language during breaks at their Nurses Station.

Upon reading this article, I was immediately upset. I was upset for the obvious reasons, at least to me, that people could get fired for speaking their own language. Quite honestly, in my opinion, I’m saddened that such a hospital policy should even exist. Have we forgotten that we live in a country that according to the last 2008 census, 55.8 million of the US population speaks a variety of foreign languages? Perhaps, instead of making English a primary language, we should be learning to speak various languages? Aside from knowing that the English language has become the primary language pretty much all over the world due to imperialism and colonialism, this policy is another way to “whiten-out” people of color, forcing people to assimilate into this country and it’s elitist standards. While I value learning and educating ourselves to speak the white man’s language, while I understand that there can be a majority of people that speak English in an office or work setting, I still find it insulting that a policy preventing people to speak their own native language in their workplace highly racist.

Not only was I able to link these arrests as a connection to racism, I immediately linked this to what’s going on in Arizona and the SB1070 Bill, along with Texas’s Board of Education’s conservative winning vote of 9-5 back in early May to change Texas’s history curriculum to amend the teaching of the civil rights movement, slavery and America’s relationship with United Nations. I find it abominable that such a thing can even happen, and I am boggled as to how come more people aren’t enraged about how this came to pass. And if people are enraged, the news aren’t covering it, nor are they covering the thousands that caravanned to Arizona from San Diego to LA and all over to protest the SB1070-legalizing-racial-profiling Bill. But bringing it back to the subject at hand, the arrests of the 4 Filipino nurses for speaking their native language are strongly connected to how Arizona is wiping out Ethnic Studies and firing teachers who have “accents”.

There is a trickle down effect happening in this country, our world is globally dying, the earth is speaking to us to not just clean-up oil spills… there’s earthquakes, levee’s breaking, floods happening and storms coming. There is a calling… and it’s telling us that they are coming for all of us. While we continue to embrace and value our differences, and while we must continue to recognize the need for each community to express their individual needs, issues and concerns. We also need to understand that we are all struggling. And that these aren’t specifically just Black issues, or just Brown issues, these are all of our issues. And we must resist them together. More than ever, there is a need for us to recognize how these issues are all connected. And how we need to continue to be there for one another, we need to continue to stand up together, rise up together… And again, I say continue, because I know there are so many of you already doing so.

As an organizer myself, I have an understanding that we all have different political ideologies. I understand that we are all not going to agree. I know, everyone has different ways of organizing. For me, personally, I consider myself a Hip-Hop Activist, so I always find ways to utilize Hip-Hop to be that vehicle to bring voice for our people. But even 2009’s Green Party Vice-Presidential Candidate Rosa Clemente has voiced expressed having to call for a Hip-Hop radical front to separate it from other claimed Hip-Hop political agendas. This means, we may have to do some calling out on folks if we need to… and rightfully so, we should. We don’t need anyone in the movement with hidden agendas. But overall, we’re going to need to continue to be allies. And if we don’t know how to we’re going to need to learn how to be allies to each other. At the Social Justice Summer Institute at UCSD, I was given this great read on how to be an ally Aspiring Social Justice Ally Identity Development: a Conceptual Model (Edwards, K.E.) (2006) NASPA Journal Vol. 43. No. 4 Women’s Center (look it up in google scholar).

Either way, we’re going to need to continue to – in the words of Godfather of Hip-Hop Afrika Bambaataa’s words – “Organize, Organize, Organize!”

We have a lot of work ahead of us.

Many activists around the world have been working tirelessly fighting all of these injustices for years on. So many people who never wanted to be activists, who never thought they would even be one finding themselves turning into activists. Realizing they have no choice but to resist and fight back against a system that wants to keep them silent, they become activists without even putting the label on themselves. This is the reality in which many are living in…. And the reality is, at the rate of the way this world is going; this will be the reality for all of us.

And it might come down to things we haven’t even begun to imagine. It might have to come down to putting everything we have at risk in order to truly live free. We may have to rethink the ways in which we are living and the ways in which we are even trying to educate ourselves. Many of us have families, and need to come home to them. But some of us have certain privileges, in where we’re able to put ourselves out on the front lines. And although, I too, have family, a partner who loves me and would like to see me come home; I am one of those people who can, and more than likely at the end of the day, if it means to… I will be right on the front lines. And if the revolution goes down like that where I need to defend myself, then yes, by any means necessary, I will exercise my right of the 2nd amendment.

But for years many have been trying prevent this from happening… trying to prevent it having to come down to that…

But the truth is many of us are distracted. I admit, I too, get distracted. Not necessarily with the “dumbening effect” (a popular word my husband coined for television’s reality tv shows) of reality tv, but with the fact that it’s just way too stressful to even just live. We got bills to pay, we have to work, we have to go to school and we got health. There’s so much to take care of that it almost seems like we can’t ever make it to a meeting to organize or to educate. This economy is taking a toll on all of us, and it’s wearing us down to the point where sometimes we don’t have energy, or we’re too sick to show up to a planning meeting. I know I was almost about 8 months off of organizing from going through deep depression. I had to take care of me before I went back in and I’m still not doing nearly as much as I can be doing. And if it’s not that, some of us are getting PTSD from the stress to organize, the arguments, the divides… It’s just too much to bear. While many of us are dealing with all of the above, there are also many of us that rather be distracted with fake entertainment.

But the truth is, we can’t spend all day long, being tuned into questions if Chris Brown was genuinely crying or not… At some point, we have to turn off BET, MTV, Glenn Beck, Fox News, stop going on our tourist vacations and we are going to have to turn our heads, wake up, and realize the realities of the world. At some point, we are all going to have to contribute, organize… At some point, something has got to give. At some point, we’re going to have to start listening, stop the divides and come together….

During this 4th of July weekend are we thinking of fireworks and BBQ or making sure killer cop Johannes Mehersele goes to jail for murdering Oscar Grant?

It’s ironic, that as we wait for the verdict of Johannes Mehserle, the officer who executed Oscar Grant, we are a few days shy of it being Independence Day.

I can count how many facebook status’s I read of people getting ready for the weekend barbecues, beachfests and picnics. How nice! I can’t judge, (sighs) I wish I could do the same – I could if I wanted to – San Diego has the beautiful weather to be able to do so.

But in the midst of all that beach campfire I can’t help but ask –

Independence Day for who? We still have troops out in war.
Independence Day for who? There was no justice for Amadou, Sean Bell…
And Mumia is still behind bars for a crime he did not commit, and Assata still deemed as a “terrorist”, and they still haven’t shut off that oil. And on and on and on and on…..

We can’t go back to “business as usual”….

Because when is… enough is enough? How many more killings? How many more deaths? How many more wars till we realize…. We are not truly free till we are all free.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4sYnogXxFY

Below is an excerpt of my poem “I Write” in which I wrote in 1999 about the police brutality of Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima…. I am sharing it with all of you in dedication to Oscar Grant and all those who have suffered from police brutality.

smear it spray it
write it
starting at the Supreme Court
41 times
“I will find his justice”
“I will find his justice”
because his justice was not served
yet he served every man
that wrote the constitution
they write
all men shall be created equal
yet he is still serving his master
morning, noon and night
serving his master’s meals
picking his cotton
picking his apple trees
working the field
serving his children
while his master
is raping his wife
right in front of his eyes

only difference today
is his master WRITES him a check
WRITES out his life contract
WRITE his story on the
front cover of a magazine
for the music HE writes
for the video he shoots
with the ice
that his brother in
Africa and India died for
with a little girl glued to the screen
learning how to be a whore
writing him out
bleeding him out
no where to run
no way out
showing you the money
making you believe
your master cares
by selling you out
enslaving him till he goes platinum
till he wins the grammy
till he gets drugged up
till he gets locked up
till she gets knocked up
this is how tupac and biggie
got shot up
im sorry
this is how it goes
but this is how
the system is all fucked up

41 times
41 times
it happened more than just 41 times

and all he ever asked
for was his freedom?
but when New York’s finest
did not protect and serve
he still served his master
following the system
believing in the system
believe in the system

how can I believe in the system
when the system does not believe in me?

oh but as they thrust their way
into his bottom
into the crevices of his buttocks
they were plunging
plunging
plunging their way
into his mind
into his mind
for he will not forget
he will not forget
so he doesn’t stop there
no he doesn’t stop there
he cant stop
he wont stop
because it don’t stop
till we get the popo off the block

then they make their laws
one, two, three
strikes your out
and expect us to follow
and try to win our votes
because it is then that we count?
we count
as victims of
global bureaucratic depravation
clintons libidinous prevarication
guiliani’s fucked up regimentation
bush and his administration
all over this nation
all over this nation
we’re countless
we’re countless
with their broken window theories
with their quality of life initiative
with their preemptive laws
with their proposition 21’s
and this is how they won
and this is how they won
this is how they won

Return to Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner

Filed Under: 2009-Daily Hip Hop News, Political articles Tagged With: Bon Secours Health System, DJ kuttin kandi, freedom, independence day, Johannes Mehserle, LRAD, Mandingo Hayes, No Independence Day! In Unity & Struggle, Oscar Grant, Police brutality, police informant, Police provacutuers, SB 1070, Texas’s Board of Education, Till We Are All Free

Coundown to the Oscar Grant Vedict/ Why Are Police beating Our Kids?

June 30, 2010 By mrDaveyd

Click HERE to listen to Breakdown FM podcast

Click HERE: http://bit.ly/9IlXCm

Breaking News Update Wed June 30 2010:

Judge has taken 1st degree murder off the table. Jury will choose from 2nd degree murder, voluntary manslaughter or involuntary manslaughter… Closing arguments will start tomorrow…Mehserle’s lawyer wanted jury to choose either murder 1 or acquital. Many speculated getting murder1 would be difficult.

As the historic Oscar Grant trial comes to a close in Los Angeles we wanted to share a crucial update as to what is going on in the trial. For those who are unaware, for the first time in the history of the state of California, a police officer (Johannes Mehserle) was brought to trail and charged with murder after shooting and killing someone while on duty.

An unarmed, completely subdued Grant was shot in the back as he lay face down on New Year’s morning ’09 in front of hundreds of people on a BART subway station in Oakland. Mehserle claims he thought he reached for his taser instead of his gun. It’s a story the community wasn’t and has never brought especially when it was revealed that Mehserle was heard shouting “I thought he had a gun’.

If he had a gun, then why reach for your taser?

The community became even more enraged when it was discovered that moments before Grant was killed, Mehserle’s partner Tony Pirone who was recently fired had called Grant a ‘bitch ass nigger’ before he was shot.

The community was even more enraged when it was discovered that Mehserle just six weeks earlier in an unprovoked attacked had severely beaten a 41-year-old Black man named Kenneth Carrethers after he was overheard complaining about how inefficient the police were at stopping crime…

We caught up with Minister of Information-JR who is the associate editor of the SF Bayview and heads up the Block Report Radio. He’s been down in LA covering the trial even after he and several other Black men under 40 were kicked out of court for a variety of un-related reasons. In our podcast JR explains why this has been going on in what many are saying is a highly biased court.

Expert witness Greg Meyers said there was no excessive use of force during the Rodney King trail. Of course he is defending Johannes Mehserle

In this interview JR talks about some of the ‘expert’ witness that have come forward in defense of Mehserle including a former LA police captain Greg Meyer who claimed that Grant when shot was resisting arrest. It’s an outlandish conclusion considering Grant was shown completely restrained with the larger Mehserle sitting on his back. however one should not be surprised, considering it was Meyer who sat on the witness stand during the Rodney King trail and claimed there was no excessive use of force. I guess the estimated 30 thousand dollars paid to Meyer didn’t hurt when giving his testimony.

We also spoke to JR about the media blackout on the case especially in the LA area and offer up some reasons why this is happening.

In the latest update another expert witness is claiming that Mehserle was so stressed out that he became temporarily blind which is why he shot Grant. What’s taking place at this trial is unbelievable.

Today June 30th the judge will be meeting with lawyers to discuss what the options are for jurors. Mehserle’s high-priced lawyer Michael Rain is pushing for an all or nothing ruling. In short either convict him of murder or acquit him. The prosecutor wants the jury to have options so Mehserle doesn’t walk.

Sadly the judge on the trial Robert Perry has history of siding with the police as was evidence during the infamous Rampart Scandal in LA when he let the cops off the hook.

Also as we speak Oakland police have been planting seeds of fear in the community by warning people of impending riots. Last night KRON 4 reported that as much as 21 thousand national guards are on alert and ready to move in on Oakland. All off vacationing officers have been called back into the city with police as far away as Oregon ready to join in.

Why Are Police Beating Our Kids-What Should We be Doing?

In pt 2 of our podcast we sat down with community activist and former Seattle mayoral candidate Wyking Allah and Paradise Gray of X-Clan and One Hood out in Pittsburgh to talk about the recent rash of police brutality incidents where children as young as 7 have been the victims.

Wyking does an excellent job putting things in historical context and offering solid solution for communities to follow. He noted that much of what he suggested were key tenets on his platform for mayor.

Paradise Gray updates us on two key cases in Pittsburgh. One involves the beatings that took place last fall when officers stormed the University of Pittsburgh campaus looking for anarchists. Unsuspecting students were tear-gased, beaten and arrested. There was major investigation with the police being found in the wrong.. The other incident involves honor student Jordan Miles who was beaten and had his dread locks ripped out his head by a rogue group of martial art expert police dubbed the ‘Jump Out Boys‘.

Gray also speaks about the incident of Pamela Lawton who had a police officer stick his gun in the face of her crying 7 year old after she was pulled over for a traffic violation.

Like Wyking, Paradise lays out a number of solutions for us and our communities to follow.

Click HERE to listen to Breakdown FM Podcast

Click Here: http://bit.ly/d27VNG

Return to Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner

Filed Under: 2009-Daily Hip Hop News, Political articles Tagged With: Block Report Radio, Coundown to the Oscar Grant Vedict/ Why Are Police beating Our Kids?, Greg Meyer, Johannes Mehserle, Jordan Miles, LAPD captain Greg Meyer, Michael Rain, Minister of information JR, Oscar Grant Trial, Pamela Lawton, Paradise gray, Police brutality, police terrorism, Robert Perry, Tony Pirone, Wyking Allah

An Open letter to President Obama about Oscar Grant

June 29, 2010 By mrDaveyd

I sent this to the White house. Although it may never reach him, I sent it anyway.

“The price of having hope is sometimes disappointment, but the price of having no hope is always failure…” ~ Immortal Technique

Dear Mr. President,

I am writing to ask that you bring national attention to the Oscar Grant trial in Los Angeles, CA. While I know you have other priorities, this too should grab your attention, if at least not your compassion.

Injustice is once again being administered through the justice system. A life was unjustly lost & publicly recorded. Please take notice.

Many have lost hope in big government because it proves over & over that it fails to protect those who are not the wealthy and privileged with resource and access. The common man helped you win your presidency, so please don’t forget about the common man now.

Sincerely,

Sara Hill

——————————————————

I think this was an important letter to write..Thanks for doing this Sara… We just did a radio show today where Wyking an activist and freedom fighter out of Seattle reminded us that we should be hitting at all angles-inside, outside and everyway in between.. Sure we can rally the troops out on the streets and we should, but the President can make stuff happen with the stroke of a pen.. one that was paid for by our tax dollars..

-Davey D-

Return to Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner

Filed Under: 2009-Daily Hip Hop News, Political articles Tagged With: An Open letter to President Obama about Oscar Grant, Oscar Grant, Oscar Grant Trial, Police brutality, President Obama, Sara Hill

The Rise of Facism: More & More Journalists are Being Attacked by Police

June 29, 2010 By mrDaveyd

Seems like with each passing day we are hearing and seeing more and more police getting drunk with power. Even though most are one of two paychecks away from being in deep financial trouble, many ignorantly like to go overboard and smash on people who they know are legitimately protesting policies that in the long run will hurt them too.

In recent months we see more and more cops acting brazenly even when they know cameras are trained up on them. many are crossing the line and going after journalist. many feel that the police unions they belong to have partnered up with corporate interest enough so that they are likely not to be convicted or even punished for crossing the line.

Below we see a disturbing videos of police attacking reporters. What’s the excuse for such behavior? Agitation? Them being provoked? Hardly.. Our men and women in blue along with their apologists have sadly gone down the wrong path. They are now holding it down for corporate based interests that will one day turn on them…

I’m willing to bet some of those corporate interests will be backing the police unions attempts to make it a felony to video tape officers which is what many departments are pushing for as we speak..Here’s a story that speaks to that issue: http://gizmodo.com/5553765/are-cameras-the-new-guns

Here’s a video of a reporter Jesse Freeston for Canada based Real News Network being attacked by cops in Toronto during the G20 Summit who were no where on the scene when ‘Black Block Anarchists‘ showed up, but were all up in people’s grill when people protested them beating on a man who is deaf..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7OA920pbv8

Here’s angry police officers ganging up on a ABC cameraman who was dispatched to a public hospital to cover the shooting of several officers. The camerman had been working the beat for 30 years. He was forced to retire because Oakland police made him feel unsafe when he would show up at events to cover them. He is now suing the department

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufHI4YRm6OU&feature=player_embedded

Here’s an out of control cop going after two reporters who were covering an accident. Remember the police work for us and ideally the media is supposed to be extended eyes and ears for the public, I guess that’s not the case in El Paso, Tx

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq8OTLt7quQ

Below is an angry Newark, NJ Police officer going after a CBS cameraman. Lucky for him there was a City Council woman nearby and he has the lawyers of CBS fighting for him.. Such may not be the fate of indy journalists.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5ixF_xHqYM

Return to Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner

Filed Under: 2009-Daily Hip Hop News, Political articles, Southern Shift Tagged With: Black Block Anarchists, Jesse Freeston, Police brutality, Real News Network, The Rise of Facism: More & More Journalists are Being Attacked by Police

USSF 2010: Why and How Do Corporations Get to Hire Cops to do their Bidding?

June 24, 2010 By mrDaveyd

Here at the US Social Forum in Detroit we caught up with longtime Austin based activist Debbie Russell and spoke to her about the growing trend of corporations using cops as a private army or law enforcement wing. Our good friends at Alternet just published a Mother Jones article called Louisiana Off-Duty Cops Working for BP? Corporate Police State Watch

Here this article highlights this disturbing practice with BP Oil being a recent partaker. In the article they detail how BP Oil is using Lousiana cops to enforce BP rules on public property and p[reventing reporters from filming dead oil stained animals.

Last week, Drew Wheelan, the conservation coordinator for the American Birding Association, was filming himself across the street from the BP building/Deepwater Horizon response command in Houma, Louisiana. As he explained to me, he was standing in a field that did not belong to the oil company when a police officer approached him and asked him for ID and “strongly suggest[ed]” that he get lost since “BP doesn’t want people filming”:

Here’s the key exchange:

Wheelan: ”Am I violating any laws or anything like that?”

Officer: ”Um…not particularly. BP doesn’t want people filming.”

Wheelan: ”Well, I’m not on their property so BP doesn’t have anything to say about what I do right now.”

Officer: ”Let me explain: BP doesn’t want any filming. So all I can really do is strongly suggest that you not film anything right now. If that makes any sense.”

Not really! Shortly thereafter, Wheelan got in his car and drove away but was soon was pulled over.

It was the same cop, but this time he had company: Kenneth Thomas, whose badge, Wheelan told me, read “Chief BP Security.” The cop stood by as Thomas interrogated Wheelan for 20 minutes, asking him who he worked with, who he answered to, what he was doing, why he was down here in Louisiana. He phoned Wheelan’s information in to someone. Wheelan says Thomas confiscated his Audubon volunteer badge (he’d recently attended an official Audubon/BP bird-helper volunteer training) and then wouldn’t give it back, which sounds like something only a bully in a bad movie would do. Eventually, Thomas let Wheelan go.

This footage and story should be frightening to everyone who loves their freedom watching it…We should all be asking ourselves, ‘How did things dissolve to this point where corporations own the police who enforce rules put forth by the company?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=344em_5hwcQ&feature=player_embedded

Debbie Russell

Russell who rolls with the ACLU explained this is totally illegal and went into lots of detail explaining why. During our convo, it was pointed out that in recent times we saw police and corporations merge when the employees of the RIAA (Record Industry of America Association) were photographed wearing windbreakers similar to law enforment and physically joining them on raids to arrest deejays selling home made mixtapes.

Unfortunately the practice was ignored by many because it was music industry / Hip Hop thing..However, when word leaked out that Steve Jobs of Apple chaired a board that oversaw a special task force of local Bay Area police officers which were seen kicking in the door at the wee hours of the morning confiscating the computer of a reporter who took pictures of Jobs ‘lost iphone.

I asked Debbie with companies yeileding this much power, how does the average person counter? Do we get to hire our own cops?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO06FJXVGyk&feature=channel

Return to Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner

Filed Under: 2009-Daily Hip Hop News, Political articles, Southern Shift Tagged With: ACLU, BP Oil, Debbie Russell, Police brutality, RIAA, US Social Forum, USSF 2010, USSF 2010: Why and How Do Corporations Get to Hire Cops to do their Bidding?

Police drama in Seattle: 17 year old girl punched in face by cop during jay walking stop

June 15, 2010 By mrDaveyd

What is going on in the Emerald City? It wasn’t too long ago we saw security officers stand around and watch a girl get jumped. Now we see a police officer punching a sista in the face? This is beyond disturbing..Keep in mind we have police officers around the country trying to make it illegal to film them..Go figure.. Below is the police account of the incident

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9w9AfptGGQ&feature=player_embedded

http://www.komonews.com/news/local/96353934.html

SEATTLE — Seattle police are investigating what they call an assault of an officer in South Seattle.

However, a police officer is seen punching a 17-year-old girl in the face during the incident captured by a video camera on Monday.

According to Seattle police, the incident began when an officer spotted a man jaywalking in the 3100 block of Martin Luther King, Jr. Way S. at approximately 3:10 p.m. The man was some 15 feet away from a pedestrian overpass, police said.

The officer was talking to the man when he saw four young women jaywalk across the same street at the same spot. The officer asked the women to step over to his patrol car, but the women were being “verbally antagonistic toward the officer,” according to officials.

One of the women, later identified as a 19 year old, began to walk away from the scene despite the officer’s instructions, prompting the officer to walk over to her and escort her back to his patrol car.

The girl then “began to tense up her arm, and pull away from the officer while yelling at him,” investigators said. The officer told the girl to place her hands on his patrol car, but she refused. When the officer tried to grab hold of her, “she pulled away and twisted, breaking free of the officer’s grip several times,” the blotter report said.

When the officer tried to handcuff the girl, another girl, this one 17 years old, intervened and placed her hands on the officer’s arm, “causing the officer to believe she was attempting to physically affect the first subject’s escape,” police said.

The officer pushed back the second girl, but the girl came back at him. The officer then punched her, police said.

The officer then handcuffed the 19-year-old woman. Other officers arrived and helped handcuff the second girl.

Both teens were cited for jaywalking. The older suspect was booked into the King County Jail for investigation of obstructing an officer. The 17-year-old girl was booked into the Youth Service Center for investigation of assault of an officer.

Nobody was injured during the incident, police said.

Seattle police have not reviewed the video of the incident. Sgt. Sean Whitcomb said investigators may review the video on Tuesday.

Whitcomb said the officer involved in the incident sent out a call for help, prompting other officers to rush to his aid.

All use of force on the job is reviewed, Whitcomb said, as use of force is under the officer’s discretion. He added that punching is a trained tactic.

“There will be a thorough investigation into this incident,” he said.

Filed Under: 2009-Daily Hip Hop News, Political articles Tagged With: Police brutality, Police drama in Seattle: 17 year old girl punched in face by cop during jay walking stop, Seattle Police

Reality TV, Cops Mistreating Little Kids & the Tragic Death of Aiyana Stanley Jones-Who Protects Us From You?

May 18, 2010 By mrDaveyd

By now many of you have heard of the tragic shooting around 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley Jones. It’s beyond heartbreaking. It’s beyond shocking.. and sadly it underscores the disrespect and disregard far too many have for Black life. When word of this first came out, there were far too many who asked, ‘What did they do wrong?”, meaning that the family or even the little girl must’ve done something as opposed the police being dead wrong in their procedures. many were quick to point out that the police were looking for a suspect in the killing of a 17-year-old earlier that week and the family was supposedly harboring him.. Again, folks conditioned to immediately side with the boys in blue..

Of course we now know that the police entered the wrong resident, tussled with the girls grandma after they tossed flash grenades in the house and shot Aiyana ‘by accident’. Here’s something many don’t know. Most police departments are media savvy and deeply embedded in the corporate media machine. They allow camera crews to follow them and we are bombarded with numerous ‘reality Cop spin-off shows that result in us forever having a ‘soft spot’ for the police who take us on highly edited and somewhat scripted adventures through the sordid world of crime and vice.

The city of Detroit is one such department being profiled for reality TV -in this case 48 Hours and it was on that fatal night that Aiyana was killed that these dip shit cops with a camera crew in tow came busting into the wrong house, storm trooper style, tossing flash grenades and ‘shooting’ the girl-oops lemme rephrase.. the gun ‘accidently’ went off. What we all need to be asking is; ‘How much of their outlandish actions were attributed to them showing off and hamming it up for TV cameras?’ How much was their over the top approach attributed to them wanting to show LAPD, NYPD and every other city profiled on reality shows that Detroit PD was ’bout it bout it’?

I ain’t no expert in police work, but I covered enough of these stories and had enough police officers on my shows to understand a few things. First, officer safety is paramount. The goal is to come home at night, hence if you are not chasing down a suspect and you know he’s holed up in a unit that has children and other folks, you wait it out. You catch dude when he leaves the building. There’s all sorts of ways to flush someone out a resident that you have surrounded. However, the gung-ho shoot em up bang bang, Tea Party crowd that watches these types of reality cop shows would find thoughtful, methodic police work boring. So with TV crew on hand, and anxious producers needing some ‘action’ to satisfy the thirst of viewers, the police as was the case here in Detroit are gonna ham it up and perhaps break a few rules-end result a dead 7-year-old girl name Aiyana Stanley Jones.

Folks need to ponder on that for minute-serious ponder that…Was police work compromised by TV cameras. I been on TV sets before and I know the type of pressure producers can exert when looking for an angle or a result.I also know cops are human and while some are shy about the cameras, others play to it..Why a flash grenade in a house with innocent people? Let’s all pause and ask ourselves that for a second.

Second thing, folks need to understand that this isn’t the first time police have gone overboard when it comes to dealing with 7 year old girls. A couple of years ago in Pittsburgh, PA a mother Pamela Lawton was pulled over for what appeared to be a routine traffic stop. She was on her way to a Pee Wee league game with her two girls in the car age 7 and 8.

Pamela Lawton and One Hood member Reverend Cornel Jones

When the officer Eric Tatusko approached the car he had already drawn his gun on the mother and ordered her to put her hands up. As he approached the car, the mom, not knowing what was going on and why she was ordered to put her hands up was shaken and scared. She became more frightened when the officer went over to the passenger side where the girls where with the gun drawn. The whole ordeal caused Ms Lawton’s kids to cry frantically. The officer became annoyed when the girls would not stop. Bear in mind the mom still has her hands in the air.. Next Officer Tatusko pointed his 9mm gun at the 7 year old Joshalyn Lawton and threatened to shoot her if she didn’t stop crying.

When other officers arrived on the scene, they ordered Tatusko to withdraw his weapons. Then in an attempt to justify this egregious behavior, officers searched Pamela’s car ‘looking for weapons’. Of course they found nothing. Ms Lawton was cited her for having expired insurance and then hit with disorderly conduct charges for yelling at the officer. She spent an year in trial as the police did everything they could to spin the story.. Lawton thanks to the outrage and help of community members like X-Clan member Paradise Gray and rapper Jasiri X and their fellow members of the group One Hood who helped bring national attention to this story, was eventually found not guilty.

The Aiyana Jones tragedy, the Pamela Lawton case are coupled with a slew of cases including 3 officers entering a kindergarden class to put handcuffs on and arrest a 5 year old girl who was having a tantrum in Florida..Or the 94 pound, 10 year old in Martinville, Ind who was tasered by police .. There’s a long list and sadly what’s been missing is not only some sort of change in policy on how to deal with small children, but a lack of good cops stepping up and telling folks that these types of incidents are wrong. From what I been told; many are afraid to cross the blue line for fear of retaliation.. is this what are tax dollars are paying for?

-Davey D-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_Ig34hQQXo

Below is the link to the interview we did with organizer and author Adrienne Maree who attended the vigil for Aiyana and wrote the moving piece below

http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/61117

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there is no justice for aiyana

by Adrienne Maree

http://adriennemareebrown.net/blog/?p=1423

there is no justice. not for aiyana stanley jones.

there is punishment, and perhaps accountability. someone to point towards, many people, a trail of blame, stories, mistakes and tears.

but there is no justice.

i’m just home from a vigil for aiyana. i don’t like to go to these things because they make me feel too raw and hopeless. my partner, however, knew that we had to go and make sure aiyana’s story was told. so here it is: she was alive yesterday, 7 years old. she went to bed on a couch in a first floor room with her grandmother last night. in the wee hours of the morning, cops raided her house. a man outside the house shouted that there were kids inside. a man on the second floor of the house was a suspect in the murder of a 17-year-old last Friday.

the police threw a “flash bang” through the front window. it blinded everyone inside; it lit aiyana on fire.

the news reported a tussle with the grandmother, during which the firearm discharged. everyone in the family says there was no tussle, that the grandmother was throwing herself over the baby when aiyana was shot in the head.

what do you call the blinded, terrified groping of a grandmother who knows her grandchildren are in the room, blasted from safety and sleep into chaos and danger, whose granddaughter is on fire? how do you comfort a man like aiyana’s father, which was forced to lie face down in his daughter’s blood by the same police officers who killed her?

the police shot and killed aiyana. they shot her in the forehead. her family saw her brain on the couch. by accident, perhaps. which doesn’t even matter to a 7-year-old. you don’t get let off any hooks for your intentions in this case, officer.

apparently a crew from the television show 48 Hours were with the police during the raid. i can’t help but wonder what their footage shows, and if filming for the show had anything to do with the drastic tactics and fatal timing – flash bombing a home in the middle of the night when the women and children are most likely to be home and sleeping.

standing on the sidewalk with over 100 black people, some shell-shocked, some sharing bits and pieces of the tragic gossip, some railing against the mayor, some staring at each other or holding each other in quiet sadness…i only saw the children. they were running, kicking, punching each other. playing. they were all 7 to me, however big or small. they were all potentially aiyana. yesterday she was with them, today she is martyred for no cause.

several members of imam luqman’s family were present, in prayer as we approached the house, present in solidarity with the particular grief of losing a loved one to violence at the hands of authority figures.

as we left the crowd, a man walked past us – more literally was dragged past us, barely able to walk, wailing in grief. his voice ripped through the southern twilight on the street, the realest voice there. i had spent the whole day around beautiful, vibrant children – little boys who ran circles around me and kicked everything because they were ninjas, and then grabbed my hands gently and easily to cross the sidewalk. and then i held a 2-day-old baby, totally fresh, just barely opening his eyes to say hello. what is more valuable than our children? this man, stumbling down the sidewalk weeping – this is how it feels when society offers up our babies as human sacrifices in pursuit of an unattainable justice.

i wanted to hold him. i wanted to say it would be ok, that there would be justice for aiyana. but i don’t believe, right now, there is any real justice for the violent deaths of our youth.

every thread i pick up in the story leads to more impossible questions.

why are police officers legally able to use military tactics on a house with children in it on a sunday morning…or any morning, on any house, with anyone in it?
why do the grieving faces of people on this street look so unsurprised?
and when 17-year-old Jerean Blake was killed Friday, wasn’t that equally devastating? did we do enough as a community at that moment?
do we know how to keep our children safe?
can we admit that we don’t know anything about how to be the kind of society where this could never happen?

to step back from the immediate events is to see what happens in communities who internalize the corporate military worldview that some people are expendable. the way we function as an economy that places profit first is that it’s normal for people in uniform to throw bombs into the home of civilians and shoot children.

an economy that valued people first could never justify those tactics.

i think of the children in my life – those blessed and loved and safe, and those who will never really be safe because of how the world sees them. the way aiyana died, the last minutes of her life – that is terrorism. to know that that kind of terror and pain can happen to a child in this time – IS happening to children, funded by our tax dollars, right now, in iraq, afghanistan, palestine, arizona, and here in detroit – is to understand that as things stand, there is no justice. nothing will make it right, nothing will take away the pain, nothing will heal us – and anyway, there is no time to heal. not for aiyana.

detroit police, at the behest of the detroit city government, are on the offensive in this war against our community. this is national in scope – international really. we cannot keep half-healing from the wounds inflicted on us – we have to fundamentally shift the way we participate in our lives and in the creation of our local economies and societies. we have to demand that police fundamentally shift how they are allowed to function in our communities – they must be disarmed, we must demand they focus their training on the humanity of communities, unlearning these tactics of creating devastation from a safe distance.

we have to make today’s events impossible – that is the only way to regain our humanity. then, maybe, we can use the word justice.

Return to Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner

Filed Under: 2009-Daily Hip Hop News, Political articles Tagged With: 48 Hours, Aiyana Stanley Jones, cops arrest little kids, Detroit police abuse, imam luqman, jerean blake, justice., Pamela Lawton, Police brutality

As the Poor Get Poorer Look for Brutalizing Police to become the New ‘Buffer’ Middle Class Set to Protect the Rich

April 19, 2010 By mrDaveyd

I been saying this for a minute and will most likely do a show on this later this week. But as the economy worsens and the gap between the Have and Have Nots widens we are going to have some serious problems. One disturbing note is that an estimated 75% of the people do not trust the government. That’s playing out with the rise of militias, increasing threats by Tim McVeigh like domestic terrorists and just an overall overt disrespect for anyone in office. A lot of anger has been directed at President Obama, but increasingly more and more ire is being turned toward anyone in office.

Part of what has driven this is the nagging perception is that the those in office work for the rich and powerful and not for the people. There’s a lot of media middleman efforts seemingly designed to keep people’s anger directed at politicians and not the rich and powerful figures behind the scenes who are driving policy. It’s only a matter of time before folks come to realize that no real changes are gonna take place until the proverbial Wall Street fat cats are put in place. Sadly they seem to realize this as well.

Now once upon a time the Aristocratic class and Land Barons who ran this country realized it was just a matter of time before their African slaves and white (European) indentured servants would come to realize as they were working side by side on the fields they were being smashed on by the same person. They feared these lower class folks would rise up and turn on the rich and so these Aristocrats did a couple of things. First they elevated the status of the indentured servant. They were granted more privileges than their African counterparts and were literally told they were better. Many were given overseer status. Their job was to keep everyone especially the African slaves in check and basically protect the rich land owners.The overseers became the first police officers.

The original concern from our founding fathers was to protect the rich and powerful from the poor they were exploiting

Next they put laws in place that would protect them from the ‘Tyranny of the majority’. This is one of the basis for the Federalist Papers put forth by early president James Madison. As Professor and fellow radio host Dr Jared Ball once explained to me…The ‘tyranny of the majority’ the Aristocratic class was afraid of was the poor and desperate who were being oppressed yet vastly outnumbered the ruling class. If they should ever get into power the fear was they would start redistributing the wealth and might start returning the harsh oppressive favors they levied on everyone else. Because of that fear, in a nutshell the game plan was to find ways to protect the interests and property of the rich and powerful and with each passing year and generation different scenarios, tactics and schemes have been thought up. It might’ve been saying slaves were only 3/5th human and not allowing them to vote. It might’ve been making women property and denying them the right to vote. It might have been concocting the ‘American dream’ narrative and leaving a whole lot of poor whites under the illusion that with a bit of hard work, elbow grease and determination they to could one day become rich and powerful.

For decades the rich and powerful were able to keep things moving because they had a buffer class that kept the misery of the poor from smashing on the oppressive nature of the rich. They were the Middle class. For the overwhelming majority of people in this country getting a nice house and a white picket fence was the goal. Forget being a land baron, just give me a small piece of the pie and I’m straight is how most people thought. Become Middle Class and issues of inequality, injustice and the existence of an underclass would be swept under the rug. We saw this with poor whites who became working class and would show a disdain for Blacks and Browns shooting for the same goals. It was the outspoken voices of the so-called working and Middle class who shitted on things like affirmative action and welfare. We even saw this amongst Middle class Blacks and Browns who would buy into what has often been described as the illusion of inclusion. The need to continue to struggle for total freedom and equality was abandoned by many ‘who got theirs’ who would then turn around and arrogantly chastise those who didn’t make it..

But as we can see that illusion has all but crumbled and those who were happy being middle class the reality has sunk in that they to are not only poor, but they may now be a part of this expanded permanent underclass. This realization is setting on for many as they’ve seen their 401ks tank, their credit completely ruined, overwhelming mounting debt that they can’t get rid of thanks to new and more stringent bankruptcy laws designed to protect the rich, sky-high school tuitions and jobs permanently gone while more and more workers are being told they are too old or too irrelevant for today’s youthful and politically dumbed down job market. Today in 2010 we’ve seen a collapse of the Middle Class. It’s either your rich or poor. Very very few are in between. Those who are holding on desperately and willing to do whatever it takes to avoid the plight of those around them. Enter the new Middle class.

Private 'security' outfits like Blackwater are increasingly being used to be a buffer between the rich and poor.

To protect themselves from the ‘Tyranny of the majority‘ we are now seeing the formation of a new buffer class made up of law enforcement. Police, prison guards, Border patrol, ICE, private security firms like Blackwater or whatever name they now go by, IRS agents etc…Those who are willing to smash on ‘their own’ are finding they can escape being apart of this permanent underclass by joining up. We’re hearing about the formation of more and more gated communities and private police forces being used to patrol them. We’re seeing this phenomenon in areas where gentrification is taking place and there is concern that newcomers may have to endure the anger of displaced residents.

We’re also hearing about how private police forces are being used to ‘supplement’ supposedly beleaguered police departments. Journalist Jeremy Scahill noted this a while back with Blackwater mercenaries who has been investigating. What took place in New Orleans during Katrina with them being them holding down empty hotels while poor people around them desperate for food and shelter were forced away seems to have just been a test run for what will soon be commonplace.

Adding to all this is the increasing number of egregious incidents of police brutality. First, many of these incidents seem to be more brazen. It doesn’t seem to matter that incidents are caught on film as is shown in the video below. Here we a police officer from a Chicago suburb ruthlessly clobber a driver over a dozen times. The passenger was already tasered.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8WCEAIcaT0

Such incidents also seem to be taking place beyond the confines of the hood where police suppression has been an everyday thing. What took place with innocent students many of them white during the G20 Summit at the University of Pittsburgh is one of the more glaring examples. Having experienced being tear gassed and seeing out of control police running into dorms whupping on students while pursuing ‘fictional’ anarchists was eye-opening. It suggested that it did not matter that students from this prestigious university who are generally heralded and cuddled by the city were gonna be shielded. Police came after them like there was no tomorrow and left many of us this is just the tip of the iceberg.. Look at what happened to students in California protesting fee hikes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etv8YEqaWgA

In this video notice the officers of color seem to be going off the most.. Also note how many people seem to cheer the cops on in the comment boxes. They praised the cops for samashing on students protesting 40% fee hikes at a time when everyone is losing jobs.. What sort of backward thinking is that? The type to prevent the ‘tyranny of the majority’.. Something to ponder..

-Davey D-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOI5l2_RghQ

Return to Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner

Filed Under: 2009-Daily Hip Hop News, Political articles, Southern Shift Tagged With: As the Poor Get Poorer Look for Brutalizing Police to become the New 'Buffer' Middle Class Set to Pro, Blackwater, Dr Jared Ball, Have and Have nots, Middle class, Police brutality, t James Madison, Tyranny of the majority

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