We cannot and must not allow the authorities to get away with using September 11th to let cops who brutalize and kill people go free. It is more important than ever that people from different ethnicities and backgrounds take to the streets in cities and towns across the US on October 22, 2002, the 7th annual National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation.
2002.07.19
POLICE BRUTALITY DID NOT DIE ON SEPTEMBER 11th!
We cannot and must not allow the authorities to get away with using September 11th to let cops who brutalize and kill people go free. We cannot allow the authorities to legitimize heinous practices like racial profiling. We will not allow our hard fought and won victories to be snatched away from us, nor will we be told to shut up.
It is more important than ever that people from different ethnicities and backgrounds take to the streets in cities and towns across the US on October 22, 2002, the 7th annual National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation.
This is important because since September 11, 2001:
All over the US people are being killed by law enforcement officers at an escalating rate. The numbers we have been able to document so far include 21 people from LA, 20 in Chicago, 12 people in the Seattle-Tacoma area, 11 in New York/New Jersey, 6 in San Francisco/Bay Area, 6 in North Carolina, 2 in Atlanta, and many more.
Their stories join the already too long list of over 2,000 cases documented in the book, Stolen Lives (and Spanish edition, Vidas Robadas). Cops who kill and brutalize are not heroes!
In city after city, cops viciously beat people, confident that they will face no punishment. The recent beating of the Inglewood, California youth, captured on videotape, is no isolated incident. As cases in Detroit and elsewhere have shown, even the existence of videotape catching police in the act of brutalizing someone is no guarantee they will be punished for their crimes!
Detroit and other cities are now refusing to pay civil damages for killings and brutality done by members of their police forces. 3 of the cops convicted for torturing Abner Louima or helping to cover it up afterward have had their convictions thrown out by an appeals court. Now Abner Louima himself is being portrayed in court as a malicious liar who wrongfully accused an innocent cop.
In Chicago, authorities recently decided that the cops who killed LaTanya Haggerty and Robert Russ would not be charged. In Detroit, Eugene Brown, a cop who has killed 3 unarmed men and shot at least 6 others who survived, is offered a $340,000 buy-out by the city to leave the police force! Just before September 11, 2001, it was exposed that cops in Miami regularly plant guns on the bodies of people they kill to try to justify the murder, a news story which got buried in the post-September 11th atmosphere.
Racial profiling, which had been widely exposed and discredited through people’s struggles, has now come back with a vengeance. Airport searches, checkpoints, and traffic stops for individuals based solely on their religion or national origin are promoted and defended by the authorities.
Since September 11th thousands of Muslims, Arabs and South Asians have been rounded up, detained and disappeared. The Department of Justice refuses to give an accounting of who has been detained, for how long and under what charges. Hundreds still languish in correctional facilities across the country without access to family, friends or legal representation, and suffer inhumane conditions and even beatings by corrections officers. So far at least one person has died while incarcerated. Thousands have been subjected to so-called “voluntary” interrogation by the government.
Hard won civil liberties and protections have been stripped away as part of the government’s “war on terrorism.” The USA-PATRIOT Act brings in a new set of repressive laws and restrictions on people and grants even greater power to law enforcement agents of all kinds.
Everyone who is opposed to such injustice should join us in the streets and in resistance in other ways on October 22, 2002, the 7th annual National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation.
JOIN US, STOP POLICE BRUTALITY, REPRESSION, AND THE CRIMINALIZATION OF A GENERATION!
OCTOBER 22nd WEAR BLACK!
Author:
News Service: October 22 Coalition
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