WHEN POLICE DIE!

Once again, the nation is compelled to mourn the death .of police officers. Rightly so, if such mourning changes the dynamics of the relationship between a para-militarized police and the communities in which they patrol. By no sense of the imagination should anyone be cavalier about the killing of a police officer, no more than they should be when a police officer wrongly kills a civilian, especially an unarmed civilian. But that is the point. When the valorization of the life of a police officer is raised to the level of hero-worshipping, what does that do to the psyche of the general population in respect to their own lives? Thus, thePBA’s demagoguery (presumably to enhance future contract negotiations) and self-righteous condemnation must be viewed in light of how it ultimately serves to improve police-community relationships(?).

In my previous blog, “Hands Up–Don’t Shoot,” I ended by stating, “…it is time to ensure Black lives matter as much as white lives, and that all people’s lives are as sacred as police lives.” So, that leads to the question, how is that possible when police lives are considered far more valuable than anyone else’s; they are more valued than a sanitation worker’s, a postal worker’s, the bus and taxi driver’s, all of whom serve the community.(?)

Granted, police officers, like firemen, at times put their lives on the line to safeguard the lives of others. It is terrible that in our highly developed technological society, our humanity has yet to reach a point in which the police have not become obsolete. However, I am of the opinion that all of our humanity is challenged by the historical dynamic of racism and. capitalism (exploitation and profiteering). As was learned from OWS, 1% of the popu1ation controls and owns 99% of the country’s wealth. Unfortunately, more often than not, the police are used as tools of the capitalist class to protect financia1 interests over human interests. This is especially disconcerting as it pertains to the racialized disenfranchised and poor, such as racial profiling, In this regard, police violence represents the interests of the State. As I was once told, the police are the first line of defense for the maintenance of state power. If this is true, then it is extremely important the community-at-large recognizes how their lives are only as important as the state permits, for as long as they are exploitable/profitable.

Obviously, the dichotomy between the institution of police and society needs to be investigated and reevaluated, especially, when one is armed (militarized) and the other, for the most part, unarmed and vulnerable. The public perception and discourse imposed by corporate media shapes our collective thinking on the legitimacy of violence; state violence is legitimate, and any violence not sanctioned by the state is illegitimate. We then consciously accept the inevitability of the state, and thus the virtue of its violence.

Hence, community violence in inner cities is not sanctioned by the state, and therefore, it must be policed. Generally, we agree with this policing, when it saves lives and establishes social order. However, there is a causation for inner-city violence that is not readily considered for problem-solving, only managed by policing. Forty years ago, the Black Panther Party sought to challenge the causation of inner-city violence. The BPP attempted to rid the community of drug dealing, gang violence, and police brutality and murder, creating free breakfast programs, free community health clinics, supporting tenants’ rights, etc. In response, the BPP was confronted with the full force of state violence, essentially destroying a movement with the potential of de-criminalizing the community, forging a revolutionary future. Lest we forget, permit me to remind us all, the death of a movement for liberation serves to keep in place the status quo of state violence in all of its forms.

Again, we must loathe all those who fail to recognize the sanctity of life. Therefore, it is extremely necessary to reject corporate media efforts to confuse the valorization of police above and beyond deaths of unarmed civilians killed by police. The noble protest against police violence must not be undermined or in any way disputed; the communities’ grievances are real and must be resolved with justice. We cannot afford to continue to preserve the dichotomy that lends to inferior to superior social paradigm in class and race relationships, and we certainly should not seek to maintain socio-economic disparity that lends to inequitable distribution of wealth.

The De-Militarization and De-Centralization of police is the primary objective that will serve to ensure the safety of the community. The demand for community control of the police strengthens the capacity of the community to police themselves, ridding the community of outside armed and potentially racist forces occupying the community.

In this regard, Martin L. King, Jr. raised the following:

“The question is not whether we will be extremists but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?”

The First Line of Defense IS Power to the People!

Fist Up Fight Back!

Remember: We Are Our own Liberators!

Jalil A. Muntaqim

Attica 12/22/14

Anthony J. Bottom #77A4283
Attica C.F.
P.O. Box 149
Attica, NY 14011-0149 

"HANDS UP - DON'T SHOOT"

Hands Up – Don’t Shoot

Contrary to the refrain from the tragic Ferguson, Mo., shooting of Michael Brown, we know that keeping your hands up does not mean you will not be shot. Assata Shakur had her hands up when she was shot on the New Jersey turnpike by a State Trooper, Oscar Grant was laying face down on a subway platform when he was shot in the back by a Bay Area Transit cop, Sean Bell was executed in a hail of bullets by a half dozen N.Y. city cops while sitting in a car, and Trayvon Martin fought to defend himself when he was murdered by a wanna-be cop just yards from his home. Obviously, I find this plea for mercy sorely insufficient, in fact, indefensible when a trained killer has a weapon pointed at you under the guise of Blue authority. Needless to say, this passive posture generally supports the inferior and superior paradigm, creating a social environment in which Black lives do not matter. Brooke Reynolds, in an essay titled “Policing Race,” informed:

“This “order” was created and protected by US law. From slavery to today’s militarized ghettos, it is clear that racial violence has almost always occurred explicitly or implicitly in cooperation with the law. William and Murphy trace the relationship between the law and social order: “The fact that the legal order not only countenanced but sustained slavery, segregation, and discrimination for most of our nation’s history and the fact that the police were bound to uphold that order sets patterns for police behavior and attitudes toward minority communities that has persisted until the present day.” (Parenti). In terms of the relationship to the police themselves, “Government-sponsored racial discrimination and segregation have deeply affected the organizing ethos and practices of US policing.” (Parenti)—thus, it becomes clear that “... relationship between police violence and social institution of policing is structural, rather than incidental or contigent.” (Martinot, Sexton). Wielding an arsenal of moralist rhetoric and trained over hundreds of years of historical practice, the police work in conjunction with white society and its government to keep white lawlessness understood as nothing other than “public order,” enforcing “the law of white supremacist attack” with determination and fervor.”

In response this reality, Robert Williams wrote the book “Negroes With Guns,” reflecting on the institutionalization of State violence and the inherent human rights of Black people to defend themselves, that was also practiced by the Deacons for Defense opposing Klu Klux Klan violence.

Reynolds continues:

“By confronting the perpetration of police racial violence with the maintenance of social order, it is rendered unidentifiable, ignorable, and inarticulable. Having been so deeply written into our very conception of social organization and policing, police brutality and racism becomes invisible to white society (who also has an investment in denying the reality of racial violence). Shocked by stories of police violence and unmoved by the dehumanization of racial profiling, white people simultaneously reveal their ignorance of and investment in the violent inherent in the protection of white supremacy.”

Furthermore, Reynolds states:

“The ignorability and inarticulability of racist police violence to white society is directly related to its historical and current impunity. Authorized by the government end white society as a whole, the police are given the freedoms necessary in order to guarantee the stability of white supremacy and to continue constructing racialized identities. Within this system, injustices done to people of color are not classified as injustices, if they are recognized at all. Police murders, abuses, and terrorization of people of color, no matter how gratuitous, are more often than not met with legal indifference, public support, and are virtually bereft of consequences. Martinot notes the relationship between modern-day police impunity, slave patrols, and white supremacist law:

“Both the police and the impunity of slave masters belong to the same paradigm of dual systems of law, sanctioned by the law, in producing the subjection of people of color. What contemporary juridical procedure has done, by valorizing police impunity, is regenerated the doubled system of law of the slave system… Thus, both manifest the component elements of white racialized identity paranoia…, violence…, and white solidarity…” (Martinot).

“The racist police violence which pervades the landscape of US society today is not incidental, nor [is it] the work of ‘rogue cops,’ [It is] an essential part of the larger campaign of social re-racialization” (Martinot). Historically rooted in a very real desire to subjugate and control people of color in America, and operating in a way which inscribes and deepens whiteness as an identity and a value, today’s police forces operate along the same paradigm as their predecessors.” (Reynolds)

These lengthy quotes from Reynolds “Policing Race” establish the lens in which we are to view the recent rash of police killings of unarmed Black people. It is extremely important that conversations and national debate about the relationship between the police and the Black community is not the same as the relationship between the police and the white community. The historical ramifications of this dynamic relationship today are subject to the reality of the racist culture in law enforcement. Law enforcement modus operandi, for all intents and purposes, are based on outside armed forces, albeit white people, patrolling communities of color, with all of its inherent racial implications.

Over forty years ago, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense raised the e very same issues, establishing their patrols to ensure police officers conducted their business in accord with the law. For their actions and concerns for the welfare of the Black community, the BPP became the number one target for extermination by law enforcement across the country. The primary reason is because the BPP did not believe or practice passive resistance, they were not in the streets chanting “Hands Up Don’t Shoot.” Such passive pleas would be considered a misguided belief protesters would be safe challenging a system of armed forces with innate disdain for the well being of Black people’s lives. Rather, such modus operandi parallels the racial attitudes of the slave patrols out of which the police system evolved. (See, Hadden, Sally E., Slave Patrols, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) (Reynolds, pg. 3-8).

The task of young people today is to increase pressure and define the national debate on the relationship between the Black community and police. De-Militarization and De-Centralization must become the primary demand. The call for community control of the police was what the BPP fought to achieve, and that objective is what needs to be demanded now. The police need to live in the community, not come from outside the community. There must be more diversity in the command and structure of the police, reflecting the composition of the community they patrol.

It is time to reverse the chant ‘No Justice No Peace’ to “No Peace Without Justice,” it is time to ensure Black lives matter as much as white lives, and that all people’s lives are as sacred as police lives.

The First Line of Defense IS power to the People!

Remember: We Are Our Own Liberators f

Jalil A. Muntaqim #77A4283 (aka Anthony Bottom)

Attica Correctional Facility, P.O. Box 149, Attica NY 14011-0149

Attica - 12/5/14

JERICHO MOVEMENT POSITION STATEMENT ON POLICE BRUTALITY IN AMERICA IN CONTEXT WITH THE ONGOING STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE

JERICHO MOVEMENT POSITION STATEMENT ON

POLICE BRUTALITY IN AMERICA IN

CONTEXT WITH THE ONGOING STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE

By: Jihad Abdulmumit

National Jericho Movement

December 2014

(Michael Brown, Eric Garner, the United Nations Convention Against Torture

 and the Call to Free All Political Prisoners from the Movements of the 60s and 70s) 

In the wake of the decision not to indict white police officers, Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo, the people are once again left with egg on their faces in their hopes for justice; while at the same time lacking comprehensive black leadership, and suffering from continued disrespect and assaults at the hands of state/police violence. Jericho shares in the disappointment, but not the surprise. Such actions, or non-actions, on the part of the state are historic and systemic. Black people all too frequently still do not have any rights that the white man is bound to respect (Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857)).

There is a direct link between the murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, et al., ¹ the recent UN Convention Against Torture international treaty review in Geneva, Switzerland, ² and the call for the freedom of all political prisoners from the movements of the 60s and 70s.³   Ferguson and Staten Island epitomize the political, economic and social plight of Black people in the United States. It showcases white racism, poverty in communities of color, police violence, disempowerment, marginalization and lack of representation in all relevant spheres of community life.

During the week of November 11, 2014, non-government organizations and people from the United States travelled to Geneva, Switzerland to participate in the 53^rd UN Session of the Committee against Torture. Here the U.S. government heard from its citizens and from the UN Commission to address whether the U.S. has been in compliance with its signed international treaty agreement against torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Needless to say, it has not. The U.S. has always been guilty of varying extremes of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of its citizens and people from other countries abound. The U.S. denied most; and either overlooked or gave minimum lip service to the rest of the cited violations. 

In spite of the U.S. government’s non-compliance, presenting the condition of Black people in the international arena follows the legacies of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, and hundreds of revolutionary organizations of the past.  White racism and the practice thereof is a human rights violation; and the human rights of Black people are constantly being violated with every instance of police brutality, murder, profiling, denial of equal representation and resources, and disproportionate prison sentences. Although the journey is long and arduous, African Americans must be present and represented on the international stage.

Historically, from the slave plantation till now, there has always been struggle waged by Black people for freedom, self-determination and empowerment. This struggle for freedom, justice, dignity, human rights, and a better quality of life has always been met with resistance, violence, persecution, and death at the hands of the powers that be. The peoples’ sojourn has witnessed brutal responses from the state and federal government, and from those marking their progress and success in society off of the blood, sweat, and tears of the common people.

Slaves on the slave plantation in their flight/fight to be free were constantly victimized, oppressed and exploited under the violence of the salve-master’s whip, noose, hound dogs, patty-rollers, black codes, court rulings, 3/5ths of a person, Dred Scott, racial religious doctrines, segregation, racism, discrimination, water hoses, electric cattle prods, cross burnings, city-burnings, hooded creatures, shirt and tie creatures, gerrymandering, grandfather clauses, local government, congressmen and senators, presidents, federal and state laws, anti-unions, anti-workers, corporations, no-knock, stop ‘n frisk, the prison industrial complex, the FBI, Counter Intelligence Programs (COINTELPRO), communication management units, control units, special housing units, war on drugs, war on terrorism, Patriots Acts, Homeland Security, Rendition, entrapment, frame-ups and set-ups, mass media, propaganda, political incarcerations, Republican hearings on mosques and Muslims across the country, police brutality, and extra-judicial laws, policies and practices denying the human right to be free, safe and productive. The history is consistent.

Oppression breeds Resistance! Slaves risked their lives fighting back and running away. Abolitionists sacrificed their lives on the underground railroads. Men and women determined to be free led revolts. People taught, preached, marched, boycotted, picketed, and rioted.

In contemporary times these struggles comprised more than just the civil rights struggles. Just as relevant were the nationalists, socialists and Islamic movements of the 60s and 70s. Organizations like the Black Panther Party, Black Liberation Army, Nation of Islam, Republic of New Africa, Dar-ul-Islam, Weather Underground, Young Lords, American Indian Movement, and more strove gallantly to combat racial violence, police brutality and carve out and build a new self-determined life for Black, Brown and Red people, which in turn would uproot the oppression and decay of racism in America from the lives of all people.

People who fought against these conditions were targeted by police forces, and, in particular, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). Freedom fighters were sought, killed, and imprisoned. A number of these political prisoners remain till today; now serving over 40 years in prison, and oftentimes in solitary confinement for extraordinary long periods of time and denied adequate medical care and attention.

It is imperative that people and organizations fighting against police brutality, racism and corruption, and who are involved with advocating human rights, community development, and educating and organizing around social/political issues, and addressing various aspects of the prison industrial complex (viz. mass incarcerations, special housing units, solitary confinement, etc.) learn who these freedom fighters are, and understand their legacy and how things were done; what lessons should be learned; and above all, to render them full support. If those remaining captives who stood up and sacrificed, organized, and fought against racism, exploitation, and repression of people of color and poor communities across the U.S. are not supported, the door remains wide open for present and future soldiers/activists/revolutionaries/educators to be politically persecuted and incarcerated with impunity and with the expectation of no support from anyone. The State and status quo have the green light to continue repressing, exploiting and committing injustices unabated.

A movement – past or present – that does not support those who sacrificed their lives, families and physical freedom for the freedom of us all, is not a movement at all.

From Michael Brown and Eric Garner to the international arena, to supporting our incarcerated freedom fighters, to right back to the streets of Ferguson and Staten Island, it’s all interconnected. Connecting the historical dots, grasping tight to the legacy of the freedom struggle, and embracing our strength of a nation of people are prerequisites to building a new and free society. 

Join the Wave!

Stand up and be free!

Free all Political Prisoners!

www.thejerichomovement.com

jihadabdulmumit@gmail.com

https://twitter.com/Jericho4PPs