[Pnews] In America the ‘Terrorists’ All Too Often Are the Police

[Prisoner News]

September 16, 2014
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/16/in-america-the-terrorists-all-too-often-are-the-police/


*Lawless Law Enforcers*


  In America the ‘Terrorists’ All Too Often Are the Police

by LINN WASHINGTON JR.

Two acts of ugly terrorism occurred in Birmingham, Alabama on September 
15, 1963.

One act was widely abhorred. The other act ignored.

Many across America know about the 9/15/63 Birmingham murders of four 
little girls slain in the bombing of a black Baptist church 18-days 
after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his stirring “I Have A Dream” 
speech.

However, few know about the Birmingham murder of Johnny Robinson, a 
16-year-old shot in the back by a policeman hours after that church bombing.

If the deaths of those four children inside that Birmingham church 
catalyzed the 1960s-era Civil Rights Movement contributing to the racial 
progress America now praises itself for achieving, the death of Johnny 
Robinson represents yet another instance of the regression across 
America on the issue of effectively addressing lawlessness by law 
enforcers – lawlessness that most often evades legal accountability.

Historically, America has a history of downplaying brutal behavior by 
police.

Police abuses – from fatal shootings through false arrests to the 
gratuitous use of foul or threatening language – are dismissed as 
isolated acts of a ‘few bad apples’ instead of as an endemic scourge 
historically impacting minorities and increasing impacting 
non-minorities. Top policy-makers and even much of the public embrace 
this dismissal dynamic.

The policeman who fatally shot Johnny Robinson during disturbances that 
erupted in the wake of that murderous church bombing never faced 
criminal prosecution because all-white grand juries (state and federal) 
excused his shotgun slaying of the boy.

That Birmingham policeman who blasted Robinson with a shotgun, like the 
men who bombed that city’s Sixteen Street Baptist Church, staunchly 
opposed eradicating America’s system of legally sanctioned racial 
segregation. Officer Jack Parker, then the head of Birmingham’s police 
union, publicly opposed integrating that city’s police department.

“We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is victim of the 
unspeakable horrors of police brutality.” Dr. King declared during his 
iconic 1963 speech, during which he twice decried police abuses.

Today most Americans extoll the vision King articulated during that 
speech while continually ignoring the nightmares he detailed as 
injustices that drove the need for his ‘Dream.’ Police abuses remain 
core elements of the nightmare that too many people across America 
encounter daily.

A dozen years before King’s ‘Dream’ speech a black union leader 
criticized police brutality during his keynote address at labor 
convention in Cincinnati. “We are horrified to hear of the many police 
killings of Negroes from New York City to Birmingham, Alabama,” William 
R. Hood said in October 1951.

The same year as Hood linked discrimination in the workplace with racist 
deprivations across American society, an interracial group of Americans 
delivered a petition to the United Nations charging the American 
government with committing genocide against African-Americans.

“Once the classic method of lynching was the rope. Now it is the 
policeman’s bullet,” that seminal yet forgotten petition asserted. “We 
submit that the evidence suggests that the killing of Negroes has become 
police policy in the United States and that police policy is the most 
practical expression of government policy.”

Typical of America’s history of denial on police brutality, federal 
government leaders viciously attacked those behind the petition instead 
of the police abuse and other problems highlighted in their petition. 
Top federal authorities, for example, pulled the passports of petition 
signers who were scheduled to travel to Europe to meet with U.N. 
representatives and even enlisted the widow of President Franklin 
Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, to convince U.N. officials that charges in 
that petition were exaggerated.

They were not, and they still hold true.

Indeed, many of those who continue to protest the early August 2014 
fatal shooting of the unarmed and surrendering Michael Brown by a 
policeman in Ferguson, Missouri believe that the killing of blacks and 
other non-whites is accepted police policy across America.

Bracketing the slaying of Michael Brown was the police chokehold death 
of Eric Garner in New York City and the fatal shooting of John Crawford 
inside a Wal-Mart store in a town north of Cincinnati.

One month before the death of Brown in Ferguson, the District Attorney 
of bucolic Sonoma County California announced that the policeman who 
fatally shot a 13-year-old Mexican-American boy months earlier would not 
face prosecution for that controversial slaying.

D.A. Jill Ravitch based her decision not to prosecute Deputy Erick 
Glehaus for the death of Andy Lopez on a report that absolved Glehaus 
prepared by an expert Ravitch had hired allegedly for his 
“independence.” In truth, that expert has a history of consistently 
siding with police accused of wrongful deaths. Ravitch withheld release 
of the expert’s report until after her reelection.

In 2000, a report prepared for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 
harshly criticized the then D.A. and police officials in Sonoma County 
for excusing each of eight fatal police shootings from April 1995 to 
September 1997.

The investigative committee that prepared that 2000 report was “appalled 
at the number of deadly incidents.” The committee’s report urged 
Sonoma’s District Attorneys office to conduct reviews of fatal police 
shootings that were “fair and impartial.” It’s a suggestion that current 
DA Ravitch did not follow in the Lopez shooting, critics charge.

That 2000 report recommended the creation of a citizen review board to 
monitor police. Sonoma authorities never implemented that recommendation 
for the county located sixty miles north San Francisco known for its 
wines (and ‘weed’).

That report also assailed authorities for the practice of seeking “…to 
criminalize their victims and marginalize their critics…”

Sonoma authorities, defending Deputy Glehaus, faulted Lopez for having 
marijuana in his system. (Authorities in Ferguson, Missouri quickly 
portrayed Brown as a robber who had pilfered a few cigars shortly before 
his fatal shooting, only to discover later that the video allegedly 
showing him stealing from a retail store was actually depicting an 
entirely different person.)

As the 2000 report from the California Advisory Committee to the U.S. 
Commission on Civil Rights noted, when police commanders and officers 
“separate from the greater community to protect individual officers who 
have transgressed they also become part of the problem.”

Today, politicians, press pundits and preachers across America, portray 
terrorism as having a foreign face. Yet, for far too many Americans, the 
terrorists that they encounter daily are the police.

*/Linn Washington, Jr./*/ is a founder of This Can’t Be Happening and a 
contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1849351104/counterpunchmaga>, 
(AK Press). He lives in Philadelphia./

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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