State Terror Against People of Color
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/state_terror_against_people_of_color_201
50928/
Posted on Sep 28, 2015
By Chris Hedges
A neighbor walks past a memorial for police shooting victim Manuel Angel
Diaz, 25, in Anaheim, Calif., on July 25, 2012. (Damian Dovarganes / AP)
SANTA ANA, Calif.-The police murder of poor people of color-occurring at a
rate of roughly two a day across the country-is not only about the
indiscriminate use of lethal force. It is also about maintaining an ongoing
climate of terror in marginal communities. It is about making it impossible
for the poor, cast aside by corporate capitalists as surplus labor, to
organize and build meaningful lives and to resist. It is terror by design.
And it will not stop until police are disarmed-the authority to use lethal
force should be restricted to specialized, highly regulated police units-and
finally held accountable under the law. Until the rule of law becomes a
reality for those who live in marginal communities, until we obliterate the
poverty-the mechanism that keeps people trapped in squalor like penned
animals-until we stop gunning the poor down in our streets, the nightmare
will not stop. In fact, as poverty and inequality expand, this nightmare
will only grow.
Families, suffocating in grief, terrified for their children, unable to
find justice, rendered invisible by the media and crushed by poverty-the
worst of all crimes-endure a hell that is directly linked to the plague of
mass incarceration, Jim and Jane Crow laws, sunset laws, lynching and slave
patrols. This terror is the latest manifestation of white supremacy and the
expression of a corporate capitalist state that consciously creates huge
pools of unemployed and underemployed. The destitute, desperate for work and
kept in a state of constant fear, are easily exploited and unable to rise up
against their oppressors.
Several days ago I met three mothers in Santa Ana whose sons had been
murdered by police here in Orange County, Calif. Manuel Diaz, who was
unarmed, was shot to death July 21, 2012, by Anaheim police Officer Nicholas
Bennallack, also responsible for a fatal shooting in 2012. Bennallack was
cleared in both killings. During protests over the Diaz killing, Joel
Acevedo, 21, was killed July 22, 2012, by Anaheim police Officer Kelly
Phillips, who had been involved in the fatal shooting of Caesar Cruz in
2009. Phillips too was cleared twice. Paul Joseph Quintanar, 19, died when
he was struck by freeway traffic as officers of the Tustin Police Department
tried to arrest him on Sept. 8, 2011. He had been on his way to buy a bottle
of water from a 7-Eleven. Marcel Ceja, on Nov. 4, 2011, was shot to death by
a police officer in Anaheim as he was walking to a store with two friends.
In Anaheim alone, where Disneyland markets a fantasy vision of a happy
America, the police shot 37 people between 2003 and 2011, killing 21 of
them, mostly people of color. As is usual across the United States, all of
the police officers involved were cleared of criminal wrongdoing.
"It was 4 o'clock in the afternoon-in the neighborhood, there was a couple
of children's parties going on," said Genevieve Huizar, the mother of Manuel
Diaz. "They had jumpers for children to play on. My son was in the alley
talking to a couple of friends. A police car came into the alley. The police
got out. They pointed at him for some reason. When they pointed at him he
ran. He ran around our apartment building, to the right. He was blocked by a
gate. Officer Nick Bennallack came around the corner. He said he thought my
son had a gun in his hand. It turned out to be my son's cellphone. My son
was shot in the lower back. As Manuel was falling to his knees, the second
bullet got him in the right side of the head."
"How could the police do this in broad daylight in front of children?" she
asked. "My son wasn't doing anything. He wasn't on parole or probation. He
wasn't committing a crime."
The Diaz shooting triggered an uprising in Anaheim. Residents hauled
mattresses onto the streets and set them on fire. Crowds threw rocks,
bottles and other projectiles at police. Police officers fanned out in the
neighborhood to buy the cellphones of witnesses to the Diaz shooting in an
attempt to keep any video of the killing from being made public,
neighborhood residents told the media. The day after the killing, with
protests still taking place, police chased and fatally shot Joel Acevedo. In
response to the protests, members of the police force patrolled the streets
in camouflage uniforms, as if they were at war.
"First they [the police] pushed him down," Marie Sales said of her son Paul
Quintanar. "They searched him. Then they started to rough him up. He was
talking to them. He complied with everything that they wanted. Then two to
three officers were on top of him. He got scared. He was chased onto the 5
Freeway. They pulled guns on him. He was hit [by vehicles] and thrown to the
onramp on the 5 Freeway. The police were never investigated."
Barbara Padilla lost her son Marcel Ceja on Nov. 4, 2011, in Anaheim as he
was walking to the store with two friends. Anaheim police Officer David
Garcia approached the young men. Ceja ran. Garcia shot him twice in the
chest.
"My son was taken to UCI hospital," Padilla said. "Nobody called me. He died
alone at the hospital. The police then appeared at my house and searched it
without a warrant. The officer was never charged. We went to trial twice
[after filing lawsuits]. We lost both times."
These killings do not end with the funerals of the young men. They
reverberate, as they are meant to do, through poor neighborhoods, leaving in
their wake constant stress, anxiety and fear that infect households.
The message this violence sends to poor people of color is this: We can kill
you and your children with impunity. There is nothing you can do about it.
You have no rights. You will never be safe. And if you attempt rise up and
resist we will kill you and your children en masse.
"I'm constantly screaming, 'Where are my kids?' " Sales said. "I am
constantly calling them to make sure they're not outside, or that they are
at least inside the gate. Your mind is always on 'it's gonna happen again,
it's not gonna stop here.' My son's little brother was beaten by the cops
two days before my son was killed. I think, 'They are going to kill another
one of my kids.' I can't get that out of my head. I constantly ask, 'Who is
next, what are they going to do to us next?' I don't have any ease. You
can't let your kids go down the street to the store because the cops are
there. You don't know if they are going to get stopped, or if they are going
to get beat up, or worse. My son was just getting a bottle of water, no
crime, no dispatch, no call, and now he's not here. Who's to say it won't
happen again?"
The killings routinely shatter and at times destroy the lives of families
left behind.
"My daughter turned to drugs and alcohol because she misses her brother so
much," Huizar said. "She can't stand to be sober. It impacts your whole
family. It impacts her children."
Huizar asked me if she could read some of the names of those killed by
police in Anaheim and other cities in Orange County. She pulled out a paper
and recited from the long list, made up almost entirely of the names of
people of color. The women remained silent after she finished, grief etched
across their faces.
After losing a child to police violence, said Padilla, "it is like you just
barely exist." She has two other sons. One is a U.S. Marine.
Orange County is divided between the wealthy white elites, notorious as
conservative Republicans, and impoverished Hispanic and black populations,
especially in Anaheim, Santa Ana and Tustin. Police shootings take place
almost exclusively in the areas where poor people of color reside. Those who
hold power, however, even in cities such as Anaheim, where Hispanics are at
least half the population, are usually rich and white. And in cities where
people of color are integrated into the power elite, such as Santa Ana,
quislings doggedly protect the status quo.
It is common to see rows of poor black and brown men seated abjectly in a
line along a curb in poor neighborhoods as police officers check their
documents. Police routinely search backpacks as children leave schools,
uttering threats, according to mothers, such as "You could be next."
"I've lived in Anaheim my whole life, my parents were born in Anaheim,"
Padilla said. "It's been going on for forever. Anaheim has always been a
racist city. The Ku Klux Klan used to meet at Pearson Park."
"And it's gotten worse," she added. "The police are now on a killing spree."
The mothers said they discovered online posts by gang-unit police officers
boasting that they were part of a "shooting squad." The posts included
drawings of high-caliber weapons, skulls and the Grim Reaper. After the
mothers used the downloaded images in a street protest against police
violence, the images were hastily removed from the Internet.
"Revolt is simmering," said Chicanos Unidos' Gaby Hernandez, whose nephew's
father was murdered by police. "People don't even want the police to come in
anymore. They say, 'We'll handle our own issues. Stay away.' "
The killings and police intimidation in Anaheim are carried out within sight
of Disneyland, a tourist attraction the women detest. And when the one-year
anniversary of the uprising put protesters in the streets, the Anaheim
Police Department brought in military-style gear and armored vehicles to
protect Disneyland and intimidate the marchers.
"Disney is a corporation that wants to take these neighborhoods and pretty
much wipe them out," Huizar said, "even though we are the ones serving the
food and cleaning up around Disney for minimal pay without medical
benefits."
"Disney functions as a Brave New World form of oppression," Gabriel San
Roman, a journalist for the OC Weekly, said to me in an interview. "There's
this corporate image of childhood innocence. Then, when riots happen, you
have '1984.' It's the bludgeon of repression."
San Roman said participants in a July 2012 street protest against police
were startled to hear huge explosions. "There were people's cathartic
outbursts in the streets, yelling, people getting out their frustrations
against what they've experienced for years, and at that very moment at 9:30
everyone heard explosions in the sky," he said. "It was the Disneyland
fireworks. That moment tells you everything you need to know about Anaheim
and about corporations like Disneyland."
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
State Terror Against People of Color
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/state_terror_against_people_of_color_201
50928/
Posted on Sep 28, 2015
By Chris Hedges
A neighbor walks past a memorial for police shooting victim Manuel Angel
Diaz, 25, in Anaheim, Calif., on July 25, 2012. (Damian Dovarganes / AP)
SANTA ANA, Calif.-The police murder of poor people of color-occurring at a
rate of roughly two a day across the country-is not only about the
indiscriminate use of lethal force. It is also about maintaining an ongoing
climate of terror in marginal communities. It is about making it impossible
for the poor, cast aside by corporate capitalists as surplus labor, to
organize and build meaningful lives and to resist. It is terror by design.
And it will not stop until police are disarmed-the authority to use lethal
force should be restricted to specialized, highly regulated police units-and
finally held accountable under the law. Until the rule of law becomes a
reality for those who live in marginal communities, until we obliterate the
poverty-the mechanism that keeps people trapped in squalor like penned
animals-until we stop gunning the poor down in our streets, the nightmare
will not stop. In fact, as poverty and inequality expand, this nightmare
will only grow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-mkcY-w7_4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A
wQcb2yzh_k Families, suffocating in grief, terrified for their children,
unable to find justice, rendered invisible by the media and crushed by
poverty-the worst of all crimes-endure a hell that is directly linked to the
plague of mass incarceration, Jim and Jane Crow laws, sunset laws, lynching
and slave patrols. This terror is the latest manifestation of white
supremacy and the expression of a corporate capitalist state that
consciously creates huge pools of unemployed and underemployed. The
destitute, desperate for work and kept in a state of constant fear, are
easily exploited and unable to rise up against their oppressors.
Several days ago I met three mothers in Santa Ana whose sons had been
murdered by police here in Orange County, Calif. Manuel Diaz, who was
unarmed, was shot to death July 21, 2012, by Anaheim police Officer Nicholas
Bennallack, also responsible for a fatal shooting in 2012. Bennallack was
cleared in both killings. During protests over the Diaz killing, Joel
Acevedo, 21, was killed July 22, 2012, by Anaheim police Officer Kelly
Phillips, who had been involved in the fatal shooting of Caesar Cruz in
2009. Phillips too was cleared twice. Paul Joseph Quintanar, 19, died when
he was struck by freeway traffic as officers of the Tustin Police Department
tried to arrest him on Sept. 8, 2011. He had been on his way to buy a bottle
of water from a 7-Eleven. Marcel Ceja, on Nov. 4, 2011, was shot to death by
a police officer in Anaheim as he was walking to a store with two friends.
In Anaheim alone, where Disneyland markets a fantasy vision of a happy
America, the police shot 37 people between 2003 and 2011, killing 21 of
them, mostly people of color. As is usual across the United States, all of
the police officers involved were cleared of criminal wrongdoing.
"It was 4 o'clock in the afternoon-in the neighborhood, there was a couple
of children's parties going on," said Genevieve Huizar, the mother of Manuel
Diaz. "They had jumpers for children to play on. My son was in the alley
talking to a couple of friends. A police car came into the alley. The police
got out. They pointed at him for some reason. When they pointed at him he
ran. He ran around our apartment building, to the right. He was blocked by a
gate. Officer Nick Bennallack came around the corner. He said he thought my
son had a gun in his hand. It turned out to be my son's cellphone. My son
was shot in the lower back. As Manuel was falling to his knees, the second
bullet got him in the right side of the head."
"How could the police do this in broad daylight in front of children?" she
asked. "My son wasn't doing anything. He wasn't on parole or probation. He
wasn't committing a crime."
The Diaz shooting triggered an uprising in Anaheim. Residents hauled
mattresses onto the streets and set them on fire. Crowds threw rocks,
bottles and other projectiles at police. Police officers fanned out in the
neighborhood to buy the cellphones of witnesses to the Diaz shooting in an
attempt to keep any video of the killing from being made public,
neighborhood residents told the media. The day after the killing, with
protests still taking place, police chased and fatally shot Joel Acevedo. In
response to the protests, members of the police force patrolled the streets
in camouflage uniforms, as if they were at war.
"First they [the police] pushed him down," Marie Sales said of her son Paul
Quintanar. "They searched him. Then they started to rough him up. He was
talking to them. He complied with everything that they wanted. Then two to
three officers were on top of him. He got scared. He was chased onto the 5
Freeway. They pulled guns on him. He was hit [by vehicles] and thrown to the
onramp on the 5 Freeway. The police were never investigated."
Barbara Padilla lost her son Marcel Ceja on Nov. 4, 2011, in Anaheim as he
was walking to the store with two friends. Anaheim police Officer David
Garcia approached the young men. Ceja ran. Garcia shot him twice in the
chest.
"My son was taken to UCI hospital," Padilla said. "Nobody called me. He died
alone at the hospital. The police then appeared at my house and searched it
without a warrant. The officer was never charged. We went to trial twice
[after filing lawsuits]. We lost both times."
These killings do not end with the funerals of the young men. They
reverberate, as they are meant to do, through poor neighborhoods, leaving in
their wake constant stress, anxiety and fear that infect households.
The message this violence sends to poor people of color is this: We can kill
you and your children with impunity. There is nothing you can do about it.
You have no rights. You will never be safe. And if you attempt rise up and
resist we will kill you and your children en masse.
"I'm constantly screaming, 'Where are my kids?' " Sales said. "I am
constantly calling them to make sure they're not outside, or that they are
at least inside the gate. Your mind is always on 'it's gonna happen again,
it's not gonna stop here.' My son's little brother was beaten by the cops
two days before my son was killed. I think, 'They are going to kill another
one of my kids.' I can't get that out of my head. I constantly ask, 'Who is
next, what are they going to do to us next?' I don't have any ease. You
can't let your kids go down the street to the store because the cops are
there. You don't know if they are going to get stopped, or if they are going
to get beat up, or worse. My son was just getting a bottle of water, no
crime, no dispatch, no call, and now he's not here. Who's to say it won't
happen again?"
The killings routinely shatter and at times destroy the lives of families
left behind.
"My daughter turned to drugs and alcohol because she misses her brother so
much," Huizar said. "She can't stand to be sober. It impacts your whole
family. It impacts her children."
Huizar asked me if she could read some of the names of those killed by
police in Anaheim and other cities in Orange County. She pulled out a paper
and recited from the long list, made up almost entirely of the names of
people of color. The women remained silent after she finished, grief etched
across their faces.
After losing a child to police violence, said Padilla, "it is like you just
barely exist." She has two other sons. One is a U.S. Marine.
Orange County is divided between the wealthy white elites, notorious as
conservative Republicans, and impoverished Hispanic and black populations,
especially in Anaheim, Santa Ana and Tustin. Police shootings take place
almost exclusively in the areas where poor people of color reside. Those who
hold power, however, even in cities such as Anaheim, where Hispanics are at
least half the population, are usually rich and white. And in cities where
people of color are integrated into the power elite, such as Santa Ana,
quislings doggedly protect the status quo.
It is common to see rows of poor black and brown men seated abjectly in a
line along a curb in poor neighborhoods as police officers check their
documents. Police routinely search backpacks as children leave schools,
uttering threats, according to mothers, such as "You could be next."
"I've lived in Anaheim my whole life, my parents were born in Anaheim,"
Padilla said. "It's been going on for forever. Anaheim has always been a
racist city. The Ku Klux Klan used to meet at Pearson Park."
"And it's gotten worse," she added. "The police are now on a killing spree."
The mothers said they discovered online posts by gang-unit police officers
boasting that they were part of a "shooting squad." The posts included
drawings of high-caliber weapons, skulls and the Grim Reaper. After the
mothers used the downloaded images in a street protest against police
violence, the images were hastily removed from the Internet.
"Revolt is simmering," said Chicanos Unidos' Gaby Hernandez, whose nephew's
father was murdered by police. "People don't even want the police to come in
anymore. They say, 'We'll handle our own issues. Stay away.' "
The killings and police intimidation in Anaheim are carried out within sight
of Disneyland, a tourist attraction the women detest. And when the one-year
anniversary of the uprising put protesters in the streets, the Anaheim
Police Department brought in military-style gear and armored vehicles to
protect Disneyland and intimidate the marchers.
"Disney is a corporation that wants to take these neighborhoods and pretty
much wipe them out," Huizar said, "even though we are the ones serving the
food and cleaning up around Disney for minimal pay without medical
benefits."
"Disney functions as a Brave New World form of oppression," Gabriel San
Roman, a journalist for the OC Weekly, said to me in an interview. "There's
this corporate image of childhood innocence. Then, when riots happen, you
have '1984.' It's the bludgeon of repression."
San Roman said participants in a July 2012 street protest against police
were startled to hear huge explosions. "There were people's cathartic
outbursts in the streets, yelling, people getting out their frustrations
against what they've experienced for years, and at that very moment at 9:30
everyone heard explosions in the sky," he said. "It was the Disneyland
fireworks. That moment tells you everything you need to know about Anaheim
and about corporations like Disneyland."
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50928/
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