Oscar Grant was shot in the back of the head by a police officer on New Year’s Day 2009. He was lying face down on the ground at an Oakland train station. The shooting was captured on multiple mobile phones and is all over youtube, you can see some of the footage here, though I warn you, it’s graphic.
The officer claimed he thought he was pulling his taser and not his gun. And last week the courts convicted him of involuntary manslaughter, with a sentence of two to four years, which is less than the five-year mandatory sentence for crack possession. Arnold Schwarzenegger begged for calm, and while some didn’t listen, it is saddening that the protests weren’t bigger, riots certainly seems far too strong a word.
Perhaps people just don’t believe change is possible. The names of 2000 people killed by law enforcement in the 1990’s alone are shown below as part of the Stolen Lives project.
Extreme cases like those of Rodney King and Amadou Diallo are well known, but there are thousands of others. Amnesty International has cited the United States for multiple violations, as has Human Rights Watch. And police brutality against people of colour is intertwined with the shocking statistics on incarceration in the United States, where 2.2 million people, over one in every hundred Americans, is behind bars. One out of every 9 African American men between 20 and 34 are in prison.
From slavery to the institutional racism and lynchings of Jim Crow to the violent repression of the Civil Rights movement, there is an unbroken chain leading to today’s ugly statistics. Self protection against police brutality was one of the organizing principles of the Black Panthers, hundreds of them were incarcerated, and George Jackson and Fred Hampton among others were killed by police. Many continue as political prisoners today, Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Angola 3 among them. But they are still fighting, we can do no less.
[also posted at www.brightwide.com]