Every City, Every Town, Has Its Own Michael Brown

by Debra Sweet     I think most of you reading this were very heartened last fall by the protests that swept across the country in response to the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and others, killed by police. Those actions involved very large numbers of young people, most of whom had never gotten involved in protest before, and they were striking for how multi-national they were, with large numbers of white people uniting with black and brown.

Many of you wrote to me that those protests gave you hope.

Then, it was a long, cold winter. The protests were suppressed with a lot of arrests; with Department of Justice investigations which justified the killings; and with talk of dead-end reforms like “citizen review boards” and more cameras on police.

The other part of the long cold winter has to be reckoned with: a killing spree by law enforcement. Think Progress published a piece April 1, which was NO joke:

Police Killed More Than 100 People In March

Shaun King, DailyKos columnist, wrote in response:

Yeah. Those numbers are real.

A total of 111 people were killed by police in the United States in March of 2015. Since 1900, in the entire United Kingdom, 52 people have been killed by police.

Don't bother adjusting for population differences, or poverty, or mental illness, or anything else. The sheer fact that American police kill TWICE as many people per month as police have killed in the modern history of the United Kingdom is sick, preposterous, and alarming.

In March 2015:

Police beat Phillip White to death in New Jersey. He was unarmed.
Police shot and killed Meagan Hockaday, a 26-year-old mother of three.
Police shot and killed Nicholas Thomas, an unarmed man on his job at Goodyear in metro Atlanta.
Police shot and killed Anthony Hill, an unarmed war veteran fighting through mental illness, in metro Atlanta.

This has to end...

* * *

I'm asking you, very personally, to find ways to support the national “shutdown” day to stop police murder on Tuesday April 14, called by the Stop Mass Incarceration Network. Find out how you can participate on April 14. 

You can join protests already organized 

You can reach out now to your activist friends, church, neighbors, and manifest protest that day at City Hall, your local jail or courts.

You can donate for materials being spread to schools over the next ten days in a crowd-funded campaign.

You can watch/share this message from family members of “stolen lives”: A call to stop murder by police.

Learn more by watching my friend Juanita Young talk about what it has meant that the NYPD killed her unarmed son:

Juanita Young, mother of Malcolm Ferguson, murdered by police in 2000.

You can follow/participate on social media - #ShutDownA14

DC high school students on a visit to Columbia University