PHOTO/MARCUS COLEMAN
ATLANTA, GA — In the dead of night in the Appalachian hills in Habersham County, Georgia, a SWAT team executed a no-knock warrant on a home where drugs were suspected. They smashed in the door and tossed in a flash-bang grenade. The grenade landed in the crib of a 19-month old baby and exploded. The baby almost died, and is maimed for life. No drugs were found. After a lengthy investigation a grand jury found the cops involved not guilty of any crime.
Also in Georgia the family of Jack Lamar Roberson called 911 for medical help because the 43-year-old man was having an adverse reaction to medication he took for his diabetes. Instead of medical assistance, the police arrived and shot the man dead in front of his mother and his 8 year-old son.
In South Carolina a man standing by his truck at a convenience store was ordered by police to produce a drivers license, and when he reached into his truck to retrieve his license, he was shot. A woman walking away from a scene in Florida is tasered in the back. A couple with two children in the car is pulled over by police in Hammond, Indiana for not wearing their seat belts, and when out of fear the man, Jamal Jones, refuses to get out of the car, the cops smash in the window and taser the man in front of the mother and children.
These are only a few of a long line of incidents of police violence and terror that stretches all the way to Ferguson, and from there, across this country. Most of these cases are targeted against African Americans or other minorities, but not all. Some are white. In just about every case, what they all have in common is that they come from the have-nots of society, those on the bottom who find themselves excluded, disposable.
In virtually every case, the police are found to be not guilty of any crime. They are routinely found to be following standard procedure or accepted protocols. And that is precisely the problem. Police force is exercised as a means of control over those who have no choice but to fight for their very survival. Police violence perpetrated against this impoverished and dispossessed section is the new normal.
Ferguson is a testament that the people, however, will not cower before tanks and armored personnel carriers, before tear gas and a militarized police force. If police violence and terror is the cutting edge of the destruction of our democracy, the people will rise to the challenge.
It is more than ironic that less than four miles from the place where Michael Brown was gunned down is the burial place of Dred Scott. Dred Scott was a slave who sued for his freedom in Missouri in 1857, and the Supreme Court denied him on the grounds that as a slave he had no rights that a white man was bound to respect. That decision made the Civil War inevitable.
Today Dred Scott is being revisited, but this time rewritten to state that the dispossessed impoverished and excluded class has no rights that the police are bound to respect. As before, this cannot be allowed to stand.
