Black Folks Run
The murder of Mr Walter Scott, a fifty-year-oldcoast guard veteran, father and Born Again Christian, by an on duty officer of the law in Summerville, South Carolina fills us with horror and shame. It’s as if the dark side of America, the cancer that supported the enslavement of Africans, that raped American Indians and murdered them wholesale in their villages, that killed the women and children in Mai Lai, has re-emerged in an unstoppable series of police murders across the country. Here in Albuquerque, the 58th largest city in the country, forty people were shot to death by various forms of law enforcement in a very short period of time. One of these police crimes, of James Boyd, a homeless person trying to camp on what is essentially the empty side of Sandia Mountain, was committed by two officers of the Albuquerque Police Department, who because they wore video cameras, was recorded by the murderers themselves. Kari Brandenburg, a Bernalillo County DA, had the courage to charge both men with murder, demanding full transparency in the trial, something almost unprecedented in other cities. Three days ago afteran abusive campaign by APD, Brandenburg was removedfrom the case by a local judge, meaning even in Albuquerque, a city under a Justice Department order to stop this behavior, resistance to putting police on trial, is so strong as to be virtually impossible to carry out. The two officers are still under a murder charge.
Once, before I was born, public lynching and torture of mostly African Americans occurred quite often, but not exclusively, in the South. It is this deeply sick, violent racism that has returned, percolating out from the dark American hell that nurtures it, and because this violent racism is successfully repressed in “civilians” (thank God), it has emerged now from the gun barrels of law enforcement, the only Americans who can legally kill us.
There are way too many police in America. In south Albuquerque there are seven separate law enforcement agencies operating in the same neighborhood. And the police need to be disarmed. They have too much equipment, as if they were an army and America was an occupied country.
Finally, there needs to be national campaign to end this. Not a campaign led by African Americans but a campaign led by the office of the President of the United States, the Congress and influential people in all areas of the media including entertainment and the church; all churches. . And if we don’t get this done, beware. Someday the law might stop you and as you reach into your glove compartment for your auto insurance papers, or you forgot to take your meds that day, you too might get a bullet in the head.
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