http://themilitant.com/2016/8039/803903.html
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Vol. 80/No. 39 October 17, 2016
(front page)
100s protest cop killing of Alfred Olango in California
BY DEBORAH LIATOS
EL CAJON, Calif. — Over 300 people marched here Oct. 1 to protest the
police killing of 38-year-old Alfred Olango in this San Diego suburb
four days earlier. The march was one of daily protests since he was killed.
Olango, a restaurant cook who came to the U.S. from Uganda, was gunned
down by police in a taco shop parking lot. He was distraught about the
death of his best friend, Olango’s mother told Associated Press, and his
sister called 911 asking for help because he was acting erratically.
Within one minute of arriving on the scene, Officer Richard Gonsalves
shot and killed him while Officer Josh McDaniel simultaneously shocked
him with a Taser stun gun. Olango was holding an e-cigarette in front of
him and was unarmed.
The protests led police officials to release videos they had been
withholding. One shows a woman telling the cops not to shoot him and a
cop tells her to “Shut the f--- up.” Seconds later, Olango is dead.
“When the officer pulled the trigger on my son he declared war on
humanity,” Richard Olango Abuka, Alfred’s father, told the Oct. 1 rally.
“We are going to fight like one people, like brothers and sisters. The
police officer who killed my son is a criminal.”
“I’m out here because of the need to stop the killing,” Jeremiah Patton,
a 22-year-old retail worker who joined the march, told the Militant.
“The cops have to stop trying to justify it.”
Several religious figures, Black and Caucasian alike, also spoke at the
rally.
Spreading opposition to cop brutality
The killing was one of several recent police killings nationwide,
including of Keith Scott in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Terence
Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Olango was one of three Black men killed by
cops in southern California within the last week.
Reginald Thomas, a father of eight children, was killed in Pasadena
Sept. 30 when police fired a Taser at him and he stopped breathing.
Carnell Snell Jr. was shot and killed by cops the following day after he
fled from a car they were attempting to pull over. The cops chased him
as he ran toward his home in South Los Angeles. These killings were also
met by protests.
Protests by professional athletes started when Colin Kaepernick, a
quarterback with the San Francisco 49ers, started kneeling during the
playing of the Star-Spangled Banner before games. He has since been
joined by other athletes, both Black and Caucasian.
This protest is spreading widely in high schools across the country.
“You can’t continue to slap people in the face and not expect them to
stand up,” Vicqari Horton, a junior tight end at Aurora Central High
School in Aurora, Colorado, told the New York Times.
Over the past weekend three-quarters of the team’s players joined the
protest. The Oct. 3 Times reported similar demonstrations at high
schools in Camden, New Jersey; Omaha, Nebraska; Madison, Wisconsin; San
Francisco and Oakland, California; and Seattle. Some included
cheerleaders and band members.
“We know what we’re doing; we made a conscious decision,” Jalil Grimes,
17, the senior quarterback in Aurora, told the Times. “We see police do
us wrong. We see our teachers give up on us and expect us to fail. We’ve
always seen this. Once we saw somebody else stand up against it, we just
fell in line.”
And in Beaumont, Texas, 11- and 12-year-olds from a youth team called
the Beaumont Bulls took a knee.
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