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Babykillers in Black and Blue

Published Jul 29, 2005 7:21 PM

Mumia Abu-Jamal

July 17—In recent days, the armed standoff in Los Angeles, Calif., gripped the heart, especially when it was learned that one of the two slain in the hail of police bullets was an adorable toddler, 19-month-old Suzie Peña.

Within hours of the deaths, police rushed to the mike to proclaim the murderer of the child was her dead father, Jose Raul Lemos, who traded gunfire with cops as he held his baby in his arms.

When a coroner’s report uncovered the fact that the baby was slain by police fire, the story became, “He made us do it.”

A man driven to the very precipice of madness, made cops fire over 90 shots, with semi-automatic weapons, killing himself and his child.

I thought of the recent incident in northern California, when police, acting on a erroneous tip, fired at a motorist, who, it turned out, was unarmed, and (thankfully!) only wounded and not killed by the storm of bullets.

Invariably, after incidents like these, police mouthpieces are trotted out to report that the officers involved followed departmental policy.

“Don’t worry,” they seem to be saying, “no policy was violated when we shot over 100 bullets into this ghetto neighborhood.”

I wondered, what’s “policy”?

Policy is what the department says it’s okay for them to do.

They set policy for themselves!

Remember when the little Black girl in grade school was handcuffed by cops?

Policy. Nothing personal ... just policy.

In L.A., Police Chief William Bratton bum-rushes the mike, to take a few digs at the dead. “He used drugs,” Bratton assured us. “He was a bad guy.” And one wonders, from whence comes Bratton’s expertise, other than the abysmal record left in New York City, like the deadly police strangulation of Anthony Baez; or the doorpost slaughter of Amadou Diallo, shot [at—WW] 41 times by Bratton’s minions—and then it dawns, this is indeed expertise, of a sort.

(Perhaps New York can teach L.A. a thing or two!)

Abner Louima ... Patrick Dorismund.... yeah, these guys are experts.

The late Black revolutionary, Malcolm X, didn’t bite his tongue when he said:

“If we’re going to talk about police
brutality, it’s because police brutality exists. Why does it exist? Because our people in this particular society live in a police state.” (Quoted in Jill Nelson’s “Police Brutality: An Anthology,” N.Y.: Norton, 2000, p. 206.)

We are looking at cowboys. Wild racing, gun toting, choking (remember [former LAPD Chief] Daryl Gates’ reference to how choke holds didn’t kill “normal” people?), bombing, and a hundred shots, in a residential neighborhood, at an innocent motorist, on a false stolen-car report.

Cowboys just being cowboys. Policy.

This very weekend, a man took to the roof of his estranged wife’s suburban Pittsburgh home, armed with a small-caliber pistol. He rolled around on the roof, and appeared to be under the influence of something powerful, repeatedly pointing his pistol firmly against his temple.

This went on for about four hours, and not a shot was fired before the husband calmed down, and came down.

Oh, yeah—I almost forgot—this was a white guy.

Activist-writer Kristian Williams, in the book, “Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America” (Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2003), reminds us that today’s police had their genesis in the monstrous brutality and violence of American slavery. What were once called “searchers,” then “alarm men,” then “slave patrols,” and then “paddyrollers” by Black captives, in time became “police.”

Those days have bled into these, and with it, violent hatred by the lie, “Serve & Protect.”

One thing for sure, it ain’t “serve” or “protect” us.