Policing Justice Requires Economic Justice, Part I | Occupy.com.
Demonstrating in Ferguson late in the summer, activist and former Green Party vice presidential nominee Rosa Clemente posted to Facebook:
“We ran to get away and were surrounded on a small path on [a] bridge, surrounded by all types of police and told to lie down and put our hands up. We complied and we were told if we did not stop moving we would be shot. We were breathing. The young brother lying on my feet as I was holding him was not able to control his breathing he said ‘I’m choking’ the cop told him to stop or he would shoot him. I told him ‘try not to move, just lay still I got you.'”
“The gun was at his chest. I looked at the cop and said ‘please, he is not doing anything’ I tried to record but the cop had his finger on the trigger . . . We laid there until one Black officer said ‘Let them go, we got who we wanted.’ In all my life I have never been so terrified . . . What is going down here in Ferguson in all my years of activism, organizing, I have never seen.”
A few months later, Ferguson exploded again as a highly problematic Missouri grand jury failed to indict Darren Wilson, the cop who killed Michael Brown. A week later, a New York grand jury failed to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo for killing Eric Garner—on video, with Garner pleading for his life, not behaving violently, the victim of an illegal police procedure.
Dayvon Love, director of the Baltimore-based Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, wrote in response: “The goal is not to make white people care about our pain, the goal is to be so effectively organized that it does not matter if they care.”
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