No safe age

Mumia Abu-Jamal

Go to www.prisonradio.org to hear Mumia’s audio commentaries including the following one dated Dec. 2.

It’s boys’ night out, and a group of brothas are having a bachelors’ party at a strip club. One of them is particularly thrilled because his marriage to the woman he loves is just hours away. But he will never marry, because a pack of wild undercover cops will execute him, and unleash a deadly rain of 50 bullets on him and his friends.

The crime? Cruising while Black. Sean Bell, unarmed, is 23.

And the corporate media merely explain it may have been a case of “contagious shooting.” One cop fires, two cops fire, three cops—get the picture? It’s a kind of social illness, like alcoholism.

But neither Sean Bell, Trent Benefield, nor Joseph Guzman was armed. According to some reports, one of the men saidhe was armed.

Like the madmen who launched a pre-emptive war on the unsubstantiated suspicion of weapons of mass destruction, undercover cops launched an urban war on unarmed Black men, reportedly based on unsubstantiated suspicions. Fifty shots, death, and serious injury. No cell phones, no wallets, no candy bars, for such trifles are no longer deemed necessary. In America, Blackness is sufficient.

Even maleness isn’t required, as shown by the recent shooting of an elderly woman who allegedly allowed a drug dealer to use her home. The woman, having lived almost nine decades, was shot to death while trying to defend her home after it was attacked by undercover cops. According to a neighborhood snitch, he never claimed her house was a drug site, despite police pressure to do so. No significant quantity of drugs was found at the home.

What was her crime? Trying to survive to 90 while Black? {Kathryn Johnston was reportedly 92 years old when she died—WW} What’s more dangerous—drugs, or undercover cops kicking in doors allegedly on a drug raid? How many of these armed maniacs will ever see the inside of a cell? How many will reach the confines of death row?

We know the answer, because we’ve seen this movie before. Paid leave, which amounts to paid vacation; a whitewash of an investigation; and a “they were just doing their jobs” is all that ever happens.