Ferguson, Missouri, is on fire with days of protest over the death of
Michael Brown Jr. Tens of thousands of people like Michael Brown have been
killed by law enforcement officers in the United States, and their deaths
have been covered up. What does this large number of deaths mean? Why
doesn’t the government prosecute the police for violation of civil rights
or murder? Why must we compile a body of statistics about citizens killed
by the police? Join us as we talk to the administrator of the website,
KilledByCops.org, which tracks tens of thousands of deaths of people killed
by police shootings and other forms of homicide by law enforcement officers.

This is an Internet radio show. To listen to the show live or to make your
voice heard, call 1-530-881-1400, access code 549032#.

*If you can’t listen to the show live, you can listen to our podcast. In
your search engine, type: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/black-autonomy-federation.

On Monday morning, the Memphis Black Autonomy Federation held a small but spirited picket in front of the Memphis Police headquarters. We spoke in solidarity with the protesters in Ferguson, Mo., but focused our picket on police terror in Memphis. We passed out copies of MBAF’s “The Body Count,” a report about the 23 people killed by Memphis cops from February, 2012, to October, 2013. Nowhere in America did any police department kill more people than Memphis cops killed during this time period. Most people in the black community in Memphis don’t know this because of a deliberate cover-up by the politicians and the police, aided and abetted by the corporate media, and we spent time talking about this as people passed by. Several people actually stopped and took time then and there to read “The Body Count” because they had no idea that the Memphis Police Department leads the nation in the use of deadly force.

We took our protest to the very front door of Memphis police headquarters, which the cops clearly did not like. Among other things, we chanted “Stop Police Murder! Prosecute the Cops!”, and eventually a female black deputy sheriff (the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department is located in the same building as the MPD) came out and harassed us, claiming we were blocking the sidewalk, which we clearly were not doing. In Memphis, it is clear that the police do not like any protest, even the smallest ones that they do not control through a group like the Midtown (so-called Mid-South) Peace and Justice Center. They like it even less if you bring it right to their front door , as we did, and accuse them of murder.

The city government and all their allies are intent on not raising anything about the deaths of people in Memphis by MPD officers. Recently, the local U.S. Congressman, Steve Cohen, sent a letter to Congress calling for an investigation of Ferguson, Mo., but he never mentioned one word about the police murders in Memphis, including the shooting of a 15-year-old kid, Justin Thompson, (killed in September 2012), who was believed to be molested by an MPD officer at the time, Terrance Shaw, who shot and killed this kid. It’s clear that the Memphis police want everyone to forget the murderous police reign of terror between February 2012 and October 2013, that killed another teenager, 19-year-old Christian Freeman. The police refused requests for access to their files by family members, Black Autonomy and others. This clamming up continued with a cover-up by the Shelby County Medical Examiner, who illegally covered-up their files.

But can you really cover up the deaths of 23 people? You can if nobody speaks out or if everybody is afraid. We have made it our duty to expose these crimes and continue to speak out, even though the local media and the government work to silence us through fear, intimidation, and disruption of our work. Working with the Midtown Peace and Justice Center, the Memphis police have created a bogus Citizens Law Enforcement Review Board to funnel complaints back into the local government or even into the police department itself. They have also created a number of bogus organizations which purportedly protest police brutality, but mainly just want to take over existing campaigns by Black Autonomy and help the police “keep the peace.” This police campaign is a counterinsurgency campaign to stifle Black Autonomy, and to hide the facts of those who have been murdered. This white-controlled effort is part of the Progressive Plantation by the Midtown Peace and Justice Center to be the only protest movement in Memphis, and just put up a number of black stooges to fool the masses of people.

Black People must call out the Midtown Peace and Justice Center for all their nefarious activities. They are worse than snitches or spies. They are Peace Police working as sworn unarmed MPD officers to pacify the black community through lies, subversion and treachery, along with the media and local government. We can truthfully say that most cities would have had mass street protests, or would have been in rebellion by now if the cops had killed 23 people in their cities. The fact that Memphis is so quiet, even though it leads the nation in the number of people killed by the police, is also related to the fact that Memphis is the poorest big city in the country, and that nobody in this city hardly knows this or knows what it means.

We must redouble our efforts to get the facts out in Memphis, and around the country about the police murders in this city. We must work to educate our people, and to encourage them to speak up against the police. We must encourage black activists in this city to get over their own fear and laziness, and begin to speak out about police terrorism against the black community in this city. We must let the entire world know about police murders in this city, organize our people in protest, and take the fight to the enemy.

Below is The Body Count.

Memphis Black Autonomy Federation
P.O. Box 16382
Memphis, TN. 38116
organize.the.hood@gmail.com
_________________________________________________________________

Memphis Leads Nation in Deadly Force Used by Police
The Body Count:

Victims of Police Terror in Memphis, Tennessee, In 2012 and 2013

Compiled by the Memphis Black Autonomy Federation, P.O. Box 16382, Memphis, TN 38186-0382,

(901)674-8430, email organize.the.hood@gmail.com

Police Victims in 2012

Jeremy McCraven, 20, was shot to death in the back by police on Feb. 10, 2012, while allegedly driving a stolen car.

William Howlett, 41, died on March 10, 2012, after becoming “unresponsive” after police chased and arrested him for allegedly attacking his girlfriend.

Randy Green died in March, 2012. A family friend said that Green, who was blind, was pepper-sprayed to death by Memphis police officers on the campus of the University of Memphis, where Green was trying to use the library.

4. Dewayne Bailey, 38, was shot to death on May 8, 2012, after falling asleep in his car in a store parking lot. Witnesses disputed the claim by police that when they woke Bailey up, he got out of his car and fought with them, then got back in his car and started driving it.

5. Christian Freeman, 19, was shot to death on June 12, 2012, downtown on Beale Street. Police alleged that Freeman threatened them with a knife. Family members said Freeman had mental health problems and that police knew this because they had arrested him in April for disorderly conduct.

6. Hernandez Dowdy, 36, was shot to death on June 27, 2012. Police say Dowdy, who was Black, was a carjacking suspect whom they chased and that they killed him because they mistakenly thought he had a gun. The owner of the car, a white woman, had filed a false report.

7. Lorenzo Davis, 28, died on July 3, 2012, after police chased and arrested him for allegedly selling drugs. He collapsed after he was in custody. Doctors told his mother that he had severe head injuries, internal bleeding and a broken leg.

Delois Epps, 54, died on Aug. 26, 2012, in a car crash caused by a Memphis police officer. Witnesses said the officer was speeding at the time of the crash and did not use the flashing lights and the siren on his car as required by police regulations.

Makayla Ross, 13, died in a car crash with her mother, Delois Epps, on Aug. 26, 2012. (See above.) Officer Alex Beard, who caused the crash, was later fired, and in May 2013 was charged with two counts of vehicular homicide.

Justin Thompson, 15, was shot to death on Sept. 24, 2012, by off-duty police officer Terrance Shaw, who claimed Thompson tried to rob him. Shaw, who admitted that he knew Thompson prior to killing him, resigned when questioned about his relationship with the boy.

Charles Livingston, 32, was shot to death on Dec. 27, 2012. Police claimed they killed Livingston while he was fleeing from a McDonald’s restaurant, which he allegedly robbed, and that he pointed a gun at them while he was escaping. For over 30 years the MPD has been under a U.S. Supreme Court decision forbidding them from shooting “fleeing felons” like Livingston in the back

Police Victims in 2013

12. Donald Moore, 67, was shot to death on Jan. 11, 2013. Police claim that when they came to Moore’s home to serve him with a warrant for animal cruelty, he pointed a gun at them. However, when the cops came busting into the house, they broke down the door in the middle of the night and never announced they were police officers. Then Moore was fatally shot when he went for his firearm on a night stand.

13. Steven Askew, 24, was shot to death on Jan. 17, 2013, after falling asleep in his car waiting for his girlfriend to come home from work. Two police officers, who were called to the area on another matter, claimed that when they approached Askew’s car, he pointed a gun at them and they killed him. Askew was licensed to carry a gun. A video of the incident disputes the police version of events.

Horace Whiting, 63, was shot to death on March 10, 2013. Police claim Whiting had a shotgun when they confronted him in front of his house and that he fired at them when they told him to put the gun down. A neighbor of Whiting said Whiting never pointed the gun at anyone, and that he was on his own porch.

15. George Golden, 42, died on April 5, 2013, from injuries he sustained on March 27 after he was shot, kicked and beaten by two police officers in the parking lot of a Walmart store, where police claim Golden was shoplifting. A cell phone video taken by a bystander shows that one cop beat and kicked Golden while he was lying on the ground after being shot by another cop. Police made no reference to the fatal shooting in their final incident report, covering up the cause of death.

16. Daniel Brock, 47, was shot to death on April 10, 2013. Police claim that when they stopped Brock for an alleged incident of “road rage,” they shot him because they thought he had a gun as he was approaching them. Brock’s son said his father had a mental illness and was taking medication for it.

17. Amjustine Hunter, 28, was shot to death in his car on April 23, 2013, at a gas station. At least one witness disputed the police story that after they stopped Hunter for “suspicious” activity, police shot him when he tried to run them over with his car.

18. John Walker died on May 18, 2013, when an off-duty police officer hit the motorcycle Walker was riding while working as a traffic escort for a funeral.

19. Police claim an unidentified man shot himself to death on May 24, 2013, after he allegedly shot at police officers at an apartment complex. To date, no public report has been found verifying the story of the police.

20. Byron Kelley, 32, was shot to death on June 4, 2013, in Olive Branch, Miss., by Memphis police and DEA agents.

21. Johnny Taylor, 33, was shot to death on July 1, 2013. Police said they killed Taylor after he fired at them outside his home.

Marvin Amerson allegedly committed suicide on July 23, 2013, according to the MPD, after a standoff with officers following a bank robbery.

Aaron Dumas, 32, was killed on Oct. 15, 2013, when tactical officers of the Memphis police department threw tear gas chemicals into the house where they had chased Dumas, causing the house to catch on fire and burning him alive. Several neighbors had their homes damaged by the flames.

Saturday August 9th, a racist Ferguson police officer profiled and fatally shot a black teenager, Michael Brown, as he walked to his grandmother’s residence with a friend. He was 18 years old. Multiple witnesses told KMOV that Brown was unarmed and had his hands up in the air when he was cut down. “The officer shot again and once my friend felt that shot, he turned around and put his hands in the air,” said witness Dorian Johnson. “He started to get down and the officer still approached with his weapon drawn and fired several more shots.” The family and the community are calling his death an execution.

About 200 residents from the city of Ferguson came together to protest the terror, Amongst them, Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, “I know they killed my son,” “This was wrong and it was cold-hearted”. She added that her son “doesn’t kill, steal or rob. He doesn’t do any of that.” Also present, Brown’s step father, Louis Head, “Ferguson police just executed my unarmed son!!!” .Desuirea Harris, Brown’s grandmother “He didn’t live around here” “He came to visit me and they did that to him for no reason.” St. Louis County Prosecutor’s office confirmed that Brown had no prior misdemeanors or felonies against him. He was a 2014 graduate of Normandy High School and was scheduled to begin classes at Vatterott College.

Wednesday August 13th, St. Louis and Ferguson police dressed in camouflage and equipped with armored tanks and military rifles — fired tear gas, rubber coated bullets, and flash grenades at thousands of Black residents. Many were injured in the war-like environment as police displayed a blatant disregard for civil rights, unlawfully arresting dozens of people including members of the press.

Anti-State STL has established a new bail and legal fund to support the people who have been arrested during these anti-police demonstrations. Over 50 have been arrested.
Please Donate

Walls of tear gas, thick, barricading access from one side of town to another. Police marched down streets ordering protesters to leave as they fired tear gas, hitting vehicles as people inside tried to escape. While also firing tear gas into homes and backyards. Rubber bullets and a high-pitched sirens were used in an attempt to neutralize protesters. “The guardian observed one individual with the “hands up, don’t shoot” refrain that has come to define the protesters shot several times with rubber bullets by officers, before he fell to the ground. When he did, several officers pounced on him, according to the Guardian”

It’s clear that this fascist institution is trying to suppress this resistance, while still protecting their own. Officials stayed silent until today, releasing the identity of the murderous cop that killed Michael Brown in cold-blood. Officer Darren Wilson.

To make matters more upsetting, this cop is being supported by the KKK. Yesterday, August 14th, The South Carolina-based New Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan says its Missouri chapter is raising a reward fund for the officer who shot the African-American teen. Stating that “We are setting up a reward/fund for the police officer who shot this thug,” the Klan group said in an email. “He is a hero! We need more white cops who are anti-Zog and willing to put Jewish controlled black thugs in their place”.

– – – – – – – –

How many more must die?
Once again, an unarmed black teenager has been killed at the hands of racist police. Ferguson is now facing excruciating militarization and oppression, stemming from one incident of everyday police terror.  This everyday terror defines the visible war on our communities, the fear that someone will be murdered at any moment. The same police terror took the lives of eleven people in 2012, and twelve people in 2013, Memphis Tennessee. All were unarmed, disabled, or fleeing. Additionally, we witnessed the massive string of 26 killings in Albuquerque since 2010, six unarmed murders in Denver since 2009, and countless others. Where does it end? In Ferguson and many other militarized zones all over the world, continued state violence demonstrates that we only have each other. The state only offers more violence, more oppression, more repression. Institutional racism is the law that this extreme modern policing is enforcing, and always has. Our fight against racist police terror is happening on our streets everyday, and only we can end this war waged against us.

For a World Without Police, In Solidarity With Ferguson.

“We the people need to build a long term plan for our own protection and defense against the state sponsored terrorism and fascism against us, and more importantly, we need to build a plan and the world we want to live

in. We need to be about the business of building community, love, health, prosperity and justice that we can sustain for our won welfare.

Like the Zapatistas in Chiapis, Mexico. While fighting a war they have chosen life over death, while knowing they must die to live. They are building schools, clinics and all the things they need to take care of themselves. Community-centeredness, bottom-up work.

We must save ourselves–somehow. We are resourceful; we can do it”   -Ida B. Wells Coalition KC Chapter

Furguson Scanner Updates:

VIA KSDK

ST. LOUIS COUNTY – An 18-year-old shot and killed near a Ferguson apartment complex Saturday afternoon had no criminal record, according to the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s office.

According to police, Brown pushed an officer into his car. Then, both struggled and at some point, Brown reached for the officer’s weapon before a shot inside of the car followed by a number of other shots. Brown was not armed.

St. Louis County Prosecutor’s office confirmed that Brown had no prior misdemeanors or felonies against him.

From the Huffingtonpost:

If 11-year-old Jordan Brown had yet had the opportunity in school to learn about the United Nations, it probably wouldn’t have surprised him to also learn that the U.S. is one of only two nations on the globe that have refused to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In 2010 this Pennsylvania child found himself facing the possibility of being tried in adult court, as well as a life sentence without any chance for parole, for the shooting death of his stepmother.

Had Cortez R. Davis also managed to make it to high-school social studies, he too would have been unsurprised to learn about the U.S.’s unwillingness to sign this document. When this Michigan child was barely 16 years old, and even though he hadn’t killed anyone, he had to stand trial as an adult and is today serving a juvenile life sentence without the possibility of parole (JLWOP).

And yet, in 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Miller v. Alabama that mandatory sentences such as Davis’ are utterly unconstitutional. They violate the Eighth Amendment and its protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

As the court explained it, children’s brains are not yet fully developed, and therefore they do not necessarily have the capacity to consider the consequences of their actions. What is more, it opined, children have “greater prospects for reform” than adults, and states therefore should not be allowed to automatically lock them up and throw away the key.

Although the Miller decision excited many, from the instant that jurists handed it down, and in no small part because their ruling did not say anything about mandatory JLWOP sentences that had already been rendered, state prosecutors across the nation have waged a most bitter fight against human rights groups, child-advocacy organizations, and individual appellants like Davis to ensure that the nearly 2,500 children whom they had previously locked up for life would in fact die behind bars.

Just a few weeks ago the state of Michigan succeeded in its battle to keep this state’s juvenile lifers in prison forever. Not only will prosecutors in Michigan now be allowed to keep the children they sentenced to JLWOP locked up, but so will district attorneys in other states such as Louisiana, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, thanks to their similar legal victories.

That Miller won’t be made retroactive in Michigan and Pennsylvania is particularly noteworthy since, by 2012, these two states had imprisoned even more kids to JLWOP than had any other — 358 and 475 children, respectively. The Supreme Court has declined to get involved in these state-level battles over retroactivity and re-sentencing.

Ending up here, however, with thousands of kids imprisoned for life, was by no means inevitable, or even predictable, when we look back in our nation’s history.

In fact, for much of the last two centuries, very few would have accepted the idea that the legal system should treat children exactly like adults, or that a child who breaks the law, even egregiously so, is unredeemable. The truth is that more than 150 years ago reformers across the nation had already begun pointing out that young people simply did not have the same capacity as adults for understanding the long-term consequences of their short-term actions, or for making rational, clear-headed decisions when under pressure. Children, they argued, needed to be “saved” rather than abandoned to the adult system.

And so, by the 1860s, major cities across the nation had begun setting up facilities for juveniles who had run afoul of the law that were entirely separate from adult institutions precisely because they felt that children needed a different sort of intervention. In 1899 officials in Cook County, Illinois, opened the nation’s first juveniles-only court system, which, as the next century unfolded, would, for good and ill, become a powerful model for other American cities and counties that also believed that children were different.

To be sure, the view that children should not be punished to the same degree as adults was always contested, and it was also seriously flawed in practice. Indeed, because juvenile-justice reformers had their own very deep class and race prejudices, throughout American history the mantle of inherent innocence never covered all children equally. Unlike white kids, for instance, black and brown children were too rarely given the benefit of the doubt in the juvenile system and were too regularly treated both brutally and similarly to adults despite the myriad justice reforms that had swept the nation by World War II.

And, of course, as author Nell Bernstein has shown so hauntingly, deciding that institutionalization was still the best way to address childhood wrongdoing then — even if it was separated from adults — was itself deeply problematic. Indeed, it would mean that over the next 100 years far too many kids would be removed from their families at a most vulnerable time in their development, only to suffer much pain and trauma in juvenile facilities that were also inhumane.

Still, by the middle of the 20th century, most Americans had come to accept that, as a rule of law, children were not adults and therefore deserved some sort of special consideration in the legal and justice systems. The law and the citizenry both understood that children were redeemable.

In fact, it wasn’t until the latter third of the 20th century that a legitimate desire to clarify exactly what rights juveniles in fact had in the system, and how that system should operate, led to a series of legal decisions that unwittingly made the juvenile system much more formal and, in the process, much more like the adult criminal-justice system.

However, nothing served to blur the lines between the justice systems of children and adults more than when America embraced a national and newly punitive war on crime in the wake of the civil-rights ’60s. As all of America’s criminal laws and sentences were completely overhauled and made far harsher, by the 1980s kids, even kids as young as 11 years old, found themselves facing penalties tougher than ever had been rendered before in the history of this nation. As importantly, they found themselves tried, in record numbers, as adults within the adult criminal-justice system no matter how young they were. And, in keeping with earlier history, the children who most often faced this harsh reception in the system were kids of color.

By the 1990s too many state prosecutors had decided that their job was not to help America’s children who had broken the law become better adults — particularly its black and brown kids, whom they had decided were super-predators — but to punish them most severely.

This dramatic post-1960s shift in law, policy, and ideology had vast consequences for American children. By 2012 the United States had earned the dubious distinction of having more kids serving a life sentence without any chance of parole than any other country in the world. In most of these cases, kids had received these sentences because they were mandatory; in other words, state legislatures had decided that no mitigating circumstances should prevent a child from a life sentence. Often that crime was murder, but by no means was this the only offense that could land a child in prison forever.

And then, in 2012, we got Miller v. Alabama, which suggested that draconian JLWOP sentences would be, from then on, an unfortunate relic of a most backward past.

But yet here we are today, in 2014, with our nation’s kids still at the mercy of politicians who pride themselves on being tough on crime, because, in short, nothing in the Miller decision said prosecutors couldn’t sentence kids to JLWOP. It just said they couldn’t do it automatically.

So what about everything that scholars and scientists know from their data about kids and how they develop? What about the myriad facts about children and decision making that the Supreme Court noted in the Miller decision? And what about all that we know simply from having raised our own kids, which makes it abundantly clear that they are in no way adults? Of course, this is why our nation does not allow children to stay out all night, to live on their own, to vote, to drink alcohol, to buy property, to get married, or to sign contracts.

And we actually know a lot more than all of this. We also know that children, in time, simply age out of the majority of the stupid, dangerous, and even criminal behaviors that they may engage in. Whereas we all were easily swayed by our peers to do dumb and illegal things in our youth, as grownups we are much less easily led astray.

What is more, we know that so many of our nation’s kids who land behind bars were themselves, and first, crime victims. Indeed, had we as a nation really been worried about public safety and really been concerned about protecting those who need protection, there simply wouldn’t be this many children so neglected, so abused, and so traumatized that they, almost inevitably, ended up in the juvenile- or adult-justice system.

Take, for example, Evan Miller, the Alabama boy whose case was at the heart of Miller v. Alabama. Evan was only 14 when he received his JLWOP sentence, but by that year he had already suffered so much brutality in his own life that he had “tried to kill himself six times, the first time when he was 5 years old.”

Just as the nation’s embrace of draconian tough-on-crime policies ended up blurring the lines between our nation’s juvenile-justice system and its adult-criminal-justice system in alarming ways, so has it made unnaturally rigid the line ostensibly separating victims and offenders. And yet, here again, the data is clear: The overwhelming majority of the children who are now sitting in prison with life sentences were first themselves victims of unspeakable violence.

What in fact does it say about us as a society if we decide that only some victims of crime are worthy of being heard, or that only some acts of violence are worthy of being called a crime? What does it say about us that we now think it “just” for the state to lock a child who has done something wrong — even something terribly wrong — in a 5-by-8-foot cell from the time they are 11 or 14 or even 16 until they the day they die? Of course, if we were caught punishing our own children in this way — if we locked them up in a small room of our house for years on end — we would be seen as abusive. All understand that such treatment terrifies children and scars them permanently. We would be viewed as inhumane.

So the Supreme Court must again weigh in on our nation’s justice system. The problems it should consider are myriad, ranging from specific prison practices such as holding human beings in solitary confinement for years on end to the very racial and class disproportionality of the penal system itself. However, the justices can start by following the logic of the arguments they have already made in Miller v. Alabama. If JLWOP sentences are unconstitutional because children are not yet formed and can still be redeemed, then every one of these existing sentences should be overturned. Immediately.

Black Autonomy Federation received this report from Ann Brooks, the mother of Spokesperson Ray.

START CALLING ST.CLAIR TODAY @7AM 205-467-6111 AND DEMAND MELVIN RAY TO GET MEDICAL ATT.

We are receiving reports from St. Clair prison that my son, Melvin Ray,[one of the leaders of the Free Alabama Movement prison organization] is ill. Yesterday after lunch, Melvin indicated that he wasn’t feeling well. (As you may know, when we went to March at St Clair yesterday, officers were already aware that we would be arriving).

At around 9 p.m., Melvin began having problems urinating and was experiencing pain in his lower abdomen and bladder. At around 11 p.m., Melvin began passing excessive blood through his urinary tract. Melvin has been in isolation since January, and we believe that someone introduced something through his food yesterday.

Melvin informed Off. Cosby of his condition and was told that the medical staff said that he should fill out a sick-call form and that he would be seen by the nurse at pill-call.When pill-call came around at 3 a.m. (4 hours later), the nurse (Holcombe) and officer refused to stop at his door. Melvin banged on his door until Officer Mackesy appeared at 3:10 and informed Melvin that he would have to fill out a sick-call slip (which Melvin had already done, but Nurse Holcomb and Off. Humphries refused to pick up), and that he could turn it in at 12 p.m. and wait to be called by the doctor.

By 12 p.m. Melvin will have been passing blood for over 13 hours with no medical attention. The shift commander was Sgt. Hamilton, who is the same officer that was presented when Melvin’s hand was slammed in a door by another officer. We are asking that you please contact St. Clair @ 205 467 6111, or dial 911 and report that we belive that Melvin’s food has been tampered with. [ NOTE: THIS IS HOW PEOPLE DIE IN PRISON, AND WE CANNOT ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN, PLEASE HELP US WITH AN EMERGENCY RESPONSE, Call 205-467-6111, and demand medical care for this prisoner activist!

Denver:

Donation link: http://www.gofundme.com/bm8kg8

On July 2, 2014 20 year old Ryan Ronquillo was repeatedly shot by Denver
Police in the parking lot of the Romero Family Funeral Home in Northwest
Denver during a funeral service.

While attending a friend’s funeral service, Ryan stepped out to decompress
and sit in his parked car. Police stormed the area, speeding several
unmarked cars into the parking lot. In a matter of seconds, Ryan was dead,
shot nearly a dozen times by multiple officers.

Police allege that they were in the process of serving a warrant for
“auto-theft and other felonies”, and that Ryan “started to back the car in
the direction of officers”. Statements from witnesses are at odds with the
police statements. Witnesses at the scene desribe a horrific chaotic mess.
Many in attendence did not even know who the individuals shooting at Ryan
were, let alone that they were even police officers.

Other witnesses claim that Ryan was left to die, choking on his own blood,
as police denied medical help at the scene and instead waited for
paramedics to arrive before any aid was administered.

Ryan was unarmed and suspected of participating in non-violent offenses.
Although police considered him a “flight risk”, no statements from Denver
officials or the police indicate that there was any suspicion of Ryan
being dangerous or armed.

Police claim that they had been following him all day in an effort to
serve the warrant. They claim that they chose the funeral, where dozens of
people, including many small children were in attendence, because it
proved “tactically beneficial”. In the end, instead of a peaceful arrest
anywhere else, people who were already in the process of mourning one lost
youth had to witness the murder of another.

Following Ryan’s death, his family was not even contacted by Denver police
or officials. They had to find out about the death of their son from his
friends and media reports.

As the quest for justice begins, Ryan’s family needs desperate help paying
for his funeral and burial. Any amount, no matter how large, or how small
would go a long way to beginning the process of bringing peace to his
family.

Any excess donations over the requested amount will go toward other
expenses incurred by the family, including missing work, and hiring an
attorney.

Some local media coverage:
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/anger-at-vigil-for-man-shot-and-killed-by-police

Written by JoNina Abron-Ervin and edited by Brianna Burton, members of the Ida B. Wells Coalition Against Racism & Police Brutality

It is always said that babies,regardless of race, are born innocent, and should not have any racist legal or political standards applied to them. But this is not the case with black children and those of interracial couples. They are treated as criminals by the state and its police.

Your help is urgently needed to protest the use of armed security guards who threatened Kelly Stone, a new mother, at the Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center in Chicago, Ill. The baby’s father LeMar DeBooth, is a personal friend of mine and a comrade in the Black Autonomy Federation. Below is a complaint letter that we are asking everyone to email. Please feel free to reword the letter according to your own writing style. It should be sent to:

To: rose.cosme@advocatehealth.org

robert.zadylak@advocatehealth.org

donna.king@advocatehealth.org

cc: complaint@jointcommission.org

Also, on Monday, you may call the medical center’s patient relations representative, Rose Cosme, at (773)296-8217.

*************************************

To Whom It May Concern:

It has come to my attention that on July 11, armed guards at the Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center threatened Kelly Stone, who at the time was a patient at the medical center.

According to my information, these are the events leading up to this incident:

On July 8, Ms Stone gave birth to a male infant at the medical center. The baby was delivered by Cesarean section. After his birth, Ms. Stone and the father of the baby, Bondi LeMar DeBooth, verbally told nurses that they wanted to set up a breast feeding schedule for their son. Ms. Stone and Mr. DeBooth subsequently saw a nurse feeding formula milk to their son off the schedule. When they voiced their objections to the disruption of the feeding schedule, they said a medical center employee threatened to place their son in protective custody. Thereafter, Ms. Stone and Mr. DeBooth were were no longer allowed to be alone with their son, according to Mr. DeBooth. They were “chaperoned” at all times by medical center staff and made to feel like criminals.

On July 10, Ms. Stone and Mr. DeBooth filed a complaint with Rose Cosme, the medical center’s patient relations representative. The complaint charged the medical center with economic and racial discrimination. Ms. Stone, who is white, and Mr. DeBooth, who is black, are poor people.

Ms. Stone and Mr. DeBooth were told that their baby’s blood sugar was low. The baby was then moved to an infirmary so he could be treated. Later, while holding his son, Mr. DeBooth saw a scratch on his baby that he had not previously noticed. He asked a nurse about the cause of the scratch. The nurse said that the baby could not have scratched himself. Fearing that their son had been injured by someone on the medical center’s staff, Ms. Stone and Mr. DeBooth decided to file a new complaint with the patient relations representative on July 11.

While trying to leave the room in which Ms. Stone was recuperating from the surgical wounds of her C-Section, armed security guards stopped them. Afraid that Ms. Stone might be shot and killed, Mr. DeBooth stepped between her and the guards in order to protect her. When they asked why they could not leave the room to file their complaint, Ms. Stone and Mr. DeBooth were told by the security guards that they were not allowed to give the reason.

A social worker told Ms. Stone and Mr. DeBooth that in order for their son to be released to their care, the social worker would first have to inspect their home. This inspection could not occur until July 14 at the earliest, meaning that the baby would have to stay at the medical center at least until this date.

Under federal law, women who have C-sections are entitled to remain hospitalized for 96 hours, which would have allowed Ms. Stone to remain a patient until July 12. A patient can ask for earlier release by signing a form, which states that the patient understands that she is asking to be released before the recommended time. On July 11, Ms. Stone signed a form asking to be released from the medical center. She did so after a member of the medical center told her that by signing the form, she and Mr. DeBooth would be given a room, equipped with beds, in which they could stay with their baby over the weekend while waiting for the social worker’s inspection of their home. However, the room given to them did not have any beds. Did the medical center staff member deliberately lie to Ms. Stone?

Under the federal Patient Bill of Rights, a patient’s request for early release is not valid if the patient signed the request under duress. Based on what I have learned, I believe that Ms. Stone signed the request for release under extreme duress. This is illegal and unethical, and voids any “release form” by the hospital.

I believe that the medical center has committed major violations of Ms. Stone’s patient rights and the rights of Mr. DeBooth, the father of their son. If they were both white and middle class, I do not believe they would been mistreated. This was administrative racism. I am asking the medical center to conduct a complete investigation of this matter, and am sending a copy of this letter to the regulatory body for medical institutions, The Joint Commission and the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

Sincerely,

From Tony’s Kansas City

Breaking news right now from SOME OF THE MOST AWESOME TKC TIPSTERS watching and documenting Westport changes that challenge city hall propaganda and promotional media preconceptions.

To wit . . .

FIRST ON TKC: CHECK THIS VIDEO OF KCPD SPRAYING MASE ON WESTPORT CROWDS LAST NIGHT!!!

Link:

Kansas City Police Department Pepper Spray At Westport July 6 2014

This is one of the best clips we’ve seen about what’s really happening in Westport right now and these AWESOME CITIZEN JOURNALISTS are documenting stuff in a very real and grassroots way that mainstream media simply can’t capture.

Read the statement that accompanies the clip. As always, TKC STRIVES TO PRESENT ALTERNATIVE OPINIONS AND NEWS IN KANSAS CITY and then let the OUR AWESOME BLOGGY COMMUNITY decide in an open FREE SPEECH comment forum.

Check the statement:

Westport Gassing

Did Mayor James violate Kansas Citians’ Right to Assemble by ordering a chemical attack on Westport patrons Saturday night?

We are a little slow getting our video uploaded tonight. As you will notice in the very first clip of tonight’s video a cop indiscriminately sprayed tear gas up into the air in the wind so so our cameraman had to take a shower before he could get started on the footage since we were caught in the drift of the mace that was apparently sprayed to get people to leave Westport. We initially got a first hand report from someone who had moved upwind to get away from what he claimed to be police spraying mace into the air and then when they did it again, we caught it on film.

We don’t usually get into a whole lot of social commentary because we figure people are going to think what they think and they can figure things out for themselves, but cops spraying mace into the air to… to what? … Make people go where the cops want them to go? To enforce some imaginary curfew on adults? To deny us the Right to Assemble? I just can’t see how they could even remotely justify this kind of behavior.

Why do Kansas Citians accept this kind of thing either from random cops who run around doing whatever they want or from a local government directing the cops to behave like thing? Are we thinking at least they’re not spraying people directly in the face with mace? At least they’re not shooting people? At least they’re not throwing people in prison to go to work for a for-profit corporation for $0.03 to $0.70 per hour? Is it ok because some of them were probably drunk? Is it ok because it was a multi-racial crowd?

And where is this heavy handed approach coming from? Is Sly James bypassing the police force hierarchy, talking to the underlings himself, and making them think that cops who display an overly aggressive attitude will get his attention? Are the cops in competition with prison guards who are torturing people to see who is tougher on crime? Not to mention that cop cars now seem to be equipped with scanning devices that automatically run tags as the cars cruise along and spit out data on a screen so cops have probable cause to stop car after car for not having insurance or other non-moving violations. This kind of massive technological implementation surely isn’t coming from within the KCPD. Who is footing the bill for all this equipment and who is suffering as a result of the increased surveillance?

And what chemicals exactly were we exposed to? I was half a block away and got half a breath of the gas and 4 hours later my throat still hurts.

These are draconian days in the river city.
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That’s the video evidence and statement . . . Now it’s up to KICK-ASS TKC READERS to decide . . . WHAT DO YOU THINK OF WHAT’S GOING IN IN WESTPORT???

1. Write to the U.S. Department of Justice in support of our demand that they open a civil rights investigation and prosecute the killer cops.  Make a phone call to the Civil Rights Division, and demand that they stop ignoring the reign of police terror in Memphis. (202)514-4609 (Ask for Jocelyn Samuels, Acting Asst. Atty General. You can also send email to : AskDoj@usdoj.gov, and they will transfer it to the Civil Rights Division.

2. Join our “Million E-Mail March” and send letters of complaint to A.C. Wharton, Mayor of Memphis, Tenn. (mayor@memphistn.gov). Tell him that he has blood on his hands by his repeated failures to rein in his cops, covering up the causes of police murders of civilians, and allowing police brutality a free hand.  

3. Please spread the message about police brutality and murder in Memphis, by contacting news services, human rights organizations, anti-police brutality groups, citizen journalist websites, and many others that you are in contact with. We must break through the cover-up by the cops, local media, and political power structure in Memphis, and expose the awful truth.

Peace and love,

JoNina Ervin, Acting Chair

Memphis Black Autonomy Federation

(901)674-8430

organize.the.hood@gmail.com