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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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http://thenat.in/1FNZoiV
DC dispatches. E-mail tips to zoe@thenation.com.
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‘This Is Not a Protest—It Is an Uprising’
Zoë Carpenter on December 3, 2014 - 5:34 PM ET
A crowd of protesters yell from the steps the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, Tuesday, November 25, 2014. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
Shortly before 2 in the afternoon on Sunday, more than a dozen people walked onto an interstate near the Capitol in Washington and formed a human chain. Eight lanes of traffic came to halt. During rush hour the next morning, protesters closed down the Fourteenth Street bridge. And then the Twelfth Street tunnel. “Shut it down for Mike Brown,” they chanted.
In the week since a grand jury declined to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Michael Brown in August, demonstrations have occurred in more than 150 cities across the United States. In Missouri, protesters are marching 127 miles from Ferguson to Jefferson City, the state capital. Shopping malls and public-transit stations and major roadways have been shut down in several cities. On Monday at 12:01 pm—the time Brown was shot—workers and students across the country walked out of their offices and schools.
Cold rain in Washington on Tuesday night didn’t keep people away from a town-hall meeting at Busboys and Poets, where the room reserved for the event was so full that latecomers watched on a projection screen hung in the main dining room. Over more than two hours, a panel and the audience talked about harnessing the energy and anger unleashed by the non-indictment.
“This is not a protest—it is an uprising,” said Kymone Freeman, an artist and activist who’d recently visited Ferguson, by which he meant: people thousands of miles from Ferguson aren’t shutting down streets only because Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown with impunity, because cops turned a town into a battlefield, and because local officials were either incompetent or malicious; but also because similar expressions of racism surface everywhere. “Ferguson is Anyhood, USA,” said Eugene Puryear, another activist on the panel, who ran for a seat on the DC City Council in November.
In DC, the Metropolitan Police Department has long been criticized for racial discrimination; at an October city council hearing, residents told a number of illustrative stories, including one about police asking a teenager if his bike was stolen because it looked expensive, and another about officers storming a barbeque and shooting a dog after a report of marijuana use. “From day one, we’ve made it about local issues here, and the ability to take the energy of a mass movement and bring it home to make somebody here in Southeast DC want to be a part of it,” DC Ferguson organizer Salim Adofo said at the meeting. One of the reforms that the group is calling for in DC is an end to “jump-outs,” where officers in unmarked cars suddenly stop and detain people in the street.
An agenda put forward by the activist group Black Youth Project 100 includes a number of other reforms that could be implemented at the local level, such as establishing or strengthening community police-review boards and elected bodies with independent authority to investigate police misconduct; ending police presence and zero-tolerance policies in schools; and decriminalizing marijuana. Adam Inyang, who works with BYP100’s DC chapter, told me at a demonstration last week that the group would be pressuring city officials to move on those changes in the coming months, particularly for the creation of a review board. “A lot of people are concerned that this whole thing is gonna taper off, is gonna end, is gonna die out like many of the other situations. But we’re stepping up to continue to organize and to continue to drive these points forward,” Inyang said. “That’s what we can strive to now.”
DeRay McKesson, an activist who’s been in Ferguson and spoke at the meeting via webstream, explained that shutting down roads and other disruptive actions were an end in themselves. “There’s this thing about disruption, right: our lives have been fundamentally disrupted by the killing of our brothers and sisters and our kids and our mothers and fathers. We work hard to put that disruption back in the life of the city,” he said.
Still, the town-hall meeting raised unanswered questions about the specific goals of demonstrations, and about “reform vs. revolution,” as moderator Nefta Freeman put it. Puryear noted that the gap between protest and large-term organizing still has to be bridged. “Right now, just to be honest, we have tactics—we do not have strategy. We are doing a lot of interesting things and a lot of important things…but ultimately, where is it going? What are we doing? What are we really asking for?” he asked. “We’re ready to get arrested, and I love that. I’m ready. But are we ready to build institutions?”
Small-scale reforms—requiring police to wear body cameras, for example—have attracted most of the attention from politicians and the media, but Puryear was talking about mobilizing for more fundamental change. “If we recognize the system doesn’t work for us, we need a new system,” he said. “If you want to get rid of that system, then you’re talking about getting rid of capitalism. I know people are afraid to say that, but it’s true.”
What was clear from the meeting at Busboys was that activists in DC are ready to escalate, not to back down. “We’re going to shut stuff down, I promise you that,” said Erika Totten, who described herself as a soccer mom from Alexandria, Virginia, and said she was trying to protect her children.
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Several speakers expressed frustration with President Obama’s tepid response, particularly the claim he made after the grand jury announcement that he’s “never seen a civil-rights law or a healthcare bill or an immigration bill result because a car got burned.” Maryland Democrat and Congressional Black Caucus member Elijah Cummings attended the meeting, and he and other members of his caucus came under fire for not supporting an effort in the House to end the transfer of military equipment to local police forces through the Pentagon’s 1033 program.
“Guess what, President Obama? It was over 100 days of peaceful protest, but we didn’t get a meeting with you then. But now, when Ferguson burns, when protests are happening all over the country, now all of a sudden we can get your attention,” said activist and hip-hop artist Jasiri X. “Now when it burns down you want to have a conversation about putting cameras on police. Well, guess what—it was a video camera that showed Eric Garner being choked by NYPD.” (On Wednesday, a grand jury in Staten Island declined to indict the officer in the case, despite video evidence showing unarmed Garner saying he couldn’t breathe.)
Ronald Hampton, former executive director of National Black Police Association, noted that “the civil rights struggle wasn’t a quiet struggle, it wasn’t, ‘Can you give this to me?’ ” He went on, “I’m not condoning violence, but I’m telling you I’m tired of doing this. I’m tired of doing this. So it’s time for us to be serious about what it’s going to take. And it’s going to take us being up in the street.” |
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Thu Dec 04, 2014 8:08 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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http://www.thenation.com/blog/191929/system-failed-eric-garner-and-michael-brown-cannot-be-reformed
Denzel Smith » The System That Failed Eric Garner and Michael Brown Cannot Be Reformed
The System That Failed Eric Garner and Michael Brown Cannot Be Reformed
Mychal Denzel Smith on December 3, 2014 - 5:50 PM ET
Protesters rallied against police violence in New York on November 24, 2014. (Reuters/Eduardo Munoz)
That a grand jury decided not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo for killing 43-year-old Eric Garner the same week that President Obama proposed spending $75 million in federal money to outfit 50,000 police officers across the country with body cameras would seem to be hack Hollywood writing with neatly applied plot points. Garner’s death was caught on video—video that the police were aware was being taken—and it still was not enough to indict anyone, least of all the man responsible for choking Garner to death, for any type of wrongdoing. It’s as if this decision was handed to us at this time in order to get us to say, “Now what?”
So… now what? We can move forward with this notion that police officers wearing body cameras will make them more judicious in their use of force, but it seems pretty clear that they just don’t give a vulgar language, and the court system is content to allow them to keep on not giving a vulgar language. And we’ll be right back here when they don’t indict the officer who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland.
So… now what? Not much, so long as the reverence paid to police officers lends itself to deference. They are not regarded as citizens also beholden to the law. They are an armed force charged with maintenance of a status quo steeped in white supremacy and anti-blackness. Key to the reign is the suspension of a belief in the rule of law. Whatever tools they require for to carry out their actual purpose, the public and the courts are eagerly ready to provide.
So… now what? Body cameras seem like a good idea when we think the issue is there isn’t enough evidence with which to hold police accountable. They’re a good idea if we think the issue is accountability. Other things get tossed around, like diversifying police forces (the NYPD is among the most diverse in the country). That sounds like a good idea if we think the problem is sensitivity or cultural miscommunication. We are thinking wrong.
We keep applying the language and framework of accountability, diversity and sensitivity to an issue of oppression. We are attempting to fly an airplane with the keys to a motorcycle. Our tools are woefully inadequate, and until we are ready to admit to ourselves that the police are an inherently oppressive force, and then use the language of anti-oppression and anti-racism in our analysis and solutions, it will not end today, as Eric Garner had hoped. The dead bodies of black folks will continue to line our streets and sidewalks, and they will be treated no better than the roadkill with whom they occupy those spaces.
Last night, at an event addressing racial profiling on the campus of Vassar College, a student told their administration that putting body cameras on security guards was like “Band-Aids to a bullet hole.” I was in attendance and was struck by just how literal that phrasing was. We are being choked and shot with impunity, and yet all that is being offered to us in response is a means to relive the experience over and over again. But we already do. |
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Thu Dec 04, 2014 8:13 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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On CNN this morning it appeared to me that Cuomo was arguing that failure to comply immediately with an officer's demands meant it was okay to use excessive force. What kind of state is it that one must comply with what could be irrational and possibly illegal demands by an officer. Cuomo continued this line of questioning even when it was refuted by attorneys.
Gardner was not under arrest when he was placed in the choke hold, illegal for officers in New York. And even when Gardner was on the ground, the officer continued the choke hold while Gardner pleaded he could not breathe. The officer's excuse that he was ensuring Gardner would not injure by the plate glass window hardly makes sense when Gardner was on the ground and nowhere near the window.
A previously unseen 7 minute video purports to show police nudging Gardner with their feet and joking while Gardner lie on the ground not breathing.
The big question is why New York's "broken window" policy, it was so important to have 5 officers (and later more) enforce a misdemeanor selling single cigarettes.
Mo Ivory, a new York attorney and radio personality angrily answered CNN that if Gardner had merely acquiesced he would not have been killed. No, Ivory insisted, there is a difference between resistance and expressing frustration when the officer jumped on his back with the choke hold.
A former secret Service Officer stated that while initially it appeared to be a choke hold that was employed by the officer, it may have been a "carotid" hold on he ground. Both are lethal and illegal for new York Police. |
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Thu Dec 04, 2014 8:32 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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| When you look at the protestors nationwide it becomes apparent that this is a "justice" thing and not just a "black" thing or a "thug" thing. There is large racially diverse groups participating in all of these protests. Their theme is "black lives matter" and the need for justice. |
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Thu Dec 04, 2014 8:36 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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CNN Kate Boldun was unwilling to give up the premise that Gardner was resisting arrest. Jeffrey Toobin, CNN analyst, replied that Gardner was not resisting arrest and even if he had been there is no death sentence for resisting arrest. Toobin also reminded the CNN host that Staten Island was the smallest New York borough, the whitest borough and the most conservative borough.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta spoke about the contributing factors of Asthma and obesity in Gardner's death. These two issues were not going to immediately kill Gardner. And while Gardner was able to say he could not breathe, that did not mean his breathing was increasingly being compromised. |
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Thu Dec 04, 2014 9:01 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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The Anti-Media
WATCH LIVE: Protests erupting all over the country over #EricGarner ruling: http://theantimedia.org/?p=3774
#ShutItDown
· December 3 · Edited |
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Sat Dec 06, 2014 9:38 am |
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