LOS ANGELES
Protests grow as cops kill again
By John
Parker
Los Angeles
Outraged Los Angeles residents marched twice at the end of
May in an effort to fight an epidemic of police killings
against African Americans.
On May 25 the Service Employees union, the Nation of Islam,
the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality and others organized
a militant demonstration blasting a recent ruling by Riverside
District Attorney Grover Trask clearing four killer cops.
Tyisha Miller, a 19-year-old African American woman, was
asleep in a car last December when the cops shot her, witnesses
say. Riverside officials and cops dispute that claim, but admit
Miller was shot 26 times and that police were seen "slapping
five" and using racial slurs immediately after they killed
her.
Yet again, on May 21, another person lay dead from police
bullets.
Margaret Mitchell, a former bank employee who became
homeless, was approached by two cops on bicycles. They
questioned her about her shopping cart. Police said she tried
to stab them with a screwdriver. Mitchell weighed about 105
pounds and stood a little over five feet. Although the police
are equipped with pepper spray and supposedly trained to use
nonlethal force, one cop instead chose to shoot her to
death.
That was the police account of the incident.
Two witnesses have come forward saying Mitchell was trying
to get away from the cops, who pursued and shot her. These
discrepancies are taken seriously by many in the community,
since police accounts of shootings have been proved to be
untrue.
On May 27, at the Parker Center in front of Los Angeles
police headquarters, community activists, including many
homeless people, came out to protest the fatal police
shooting.
In the Tyisha Miller case, all four cops first claimed that
she fired at them. They took a whole day to recant their
statement after it was found that a gun she had in her
possession had not been fired. Likewise, many are skeptical
about the facts presented by the media in this most recent
shooting.
"One way to stop someone from giving another side to the
story is by killing them. When the police shot Mitchell, no
other version of what happened could come out," said Melvin
Former, an organizer of the May 27 protest.
"We have to first ask why these cops were asking her about
the shopping cart in the first place. Were they going to take
it back to the store if it wasn't hers? Is that their job?"
When asked why he thought police shootings were increasing,
Former said: "Basically because police don't have any
deterrence to stop. Anything someone has that can be called a
weapon gives them license to kill."
Former mentioned an incident the same week when a bear
escaped from captivity. "It's ironic that in the same week of
this shooting, the police--after being called like they were in
the Tyisha Miller case--came with tranquilizer guns. So they
save the bear and slay this woman."
Former leads the California Coalition in Opposition to Three
Strikes, an organization fighting the three-strikes law--which
mainly targets oppressed communities. He said many actions are
ahead.
Not an aberration
The conservative Human Rights Watch organization recently
did a study about police brutality and misconduct. It found in
all the cities it researched that police brutality was not an
aberration but accepted and allowed to continue by police and
city officials.
But not according to Bernard Parks, head of the police here,
who replaced the discredited Daryl Gates. Even before all the
facts were out, Parks said he'd support the officers and that
race was not an issue. He also criticized anyone linking the
latest police shooting to that in Riverside.
When Parks replaced Gates, who led one of the most brutal
and racist police forces in the country, some people here
believed this would reduce police brutality. But, in view of
Parks' statement, many are now reconsidering if the LAPD has
really changed at all.
Some activists believe there is a concerted effort to
terrorize the most oppressed communities since these are the
people most likely to revolt against the huge cutbacks in
services that have intensified during the Clinton regime.
Money for welfare and basic services has gone to pay for
foreign wars, like the tens of billions being spent on the war
in Yugo slavia. And since Los Angeles has some of the poorest
people in the country, is it possible that these killings are
part of a deliberate terror campaign to keep people here "in
line"?
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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