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damnedifIknow

(3,183 posts)
Tue Sep 2, 2014, 10:24 AM Sep 2014

On police brutality and anti-Black racism

Many people were shocked by the militarized force used by police and by scenes of violent street fighting in Ferguson that many Americans and Canadians associate with far-away war zones. This is North America, not Cairo or Gaza. Of course, such comments ignore hundreds of years of brutal state violence against Black and Indigenous people in Canada and the U.S., as well as the violence that is and always has been directed at the poor, or at any resistance posing a threat to the current social order and racial hierarchy."

Less than a week before Brown was killed, police in Ohio shot death 22-year-old John Crawford to death in a Walmart after a shopper called 911, reporting a man in the store with a gun who might “rob the place” or “shoot somebody.” Crawford was on the telephone with the mother of his children, LeeCee Johnson, at the time. He had picked up a toy rifle, the butt of which he was reportedly leaning on when police arrived. His last words were “it’s not real,” before he was shot and killed by the police. Johnson reported, “I could hear him just crying and screaming. I feel like they shot him down like he was not even human.”

Videos that document police violence and abuses of power – particularly directed at Black, mentally ill, and poor people – constantly circulate. This violence is normalized to the extent that when someone whose identities place them in multiple groups is killed – someone who is Black and poor, or Black and mentally ill – many are inclined to view their death as inevitable. An example of this tendency was the police killing on August 19 of a second Black man, 25-year-old Kajieme Powell, not far from Ferguson. Captured in full on a cellphone video, some assessed the situation as “suicide by cops.”

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2014/09/on-police-brutality-and-anti-black-racism/

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