What I've Learned from Two Years Collecting Data on Police Killings

nside the Twisted Police Department That Kills Unarmed Citizens at the Highest Rate in the Country

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Inside-the-Twisted-Police-by-Max-Blumenthal-Albuquerque_Citizens-Arrest_Kill-Team_Police-Abuse-Of-Power-141208-545.html

Hyper-militarized cops here have killed residents with shocking impunity.


Image of police in riot gear
(image by via Shutterstock.com)


When an Albuquerque police officer shot his 22-year-old son to death, Mike Gomez was determined to crusade for justice. Three years later, he is simply despondent.
"It's so frustrating," Gomez told me. "There's no accountability here. There's no justice. There's no respect. There's no humanity here. There's nothing. It's so disgusting that they get away with it."

A single father, Mike Gomez struggled for years to help his son, Alan, cope with a substance abuse problem. When Mike Gomez left town on May 10, 2011, Alan Gomez fell back into his addiction and was overcome with paranoid delusions. He began pacing back and forth on the front lawn of his brother's house, holding a conversation with an imaginary person about gang members assembling to kill him. Alarmed family members eventually phoned a dispatcher from the Albuquerque police, who summoned police to what she mistakenly believed was a hostage situation.

From across town, an off-duty cop named Sean Wallace heard the alert blare through his scanner, then barreled over to the scene before a crisis intervention officer could arrive. Without provocation, Wallace opened fire, killing Alan Gomez with a high-powered rifle as he entered the house through a screen door. The troubled young man was holding nothing in his hand but a plastic spoon.

FULL story at link.

BUT THERE IS HOPE!

WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!





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Angela Davis: ‘There is an unbroken line of police violence in the US that takes us all the way back
to the days of slavery’

<snip>
The activist, feminist and revolutionary explains how the ‘prison industrial complex’ profits from black people, that Barack Obama can’t be blamed for the lack of progress on race, and why Beyoncé is not a terrorist

“There is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan,” says Angela Davis. “There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice.”

I had asked the professor, activist, feminist and revolutionary, the woman whom Richard Nixon called a terrorist and whom Ronald Reagan tried to fire as a professor, if she was angered by the failure of a grand jury to indict a white police officer for shooting dead an unarmed black man, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri earlier this year. “The problem with always pursuing the individual perpetrator in all of the many cases that involve police violence,” the 70-year-old replies, “is that one reinvents the wheel each time and it cannot possibly begin to reduce racist police violence. Which is not to say that individual perpetrators should not be held accountable – they should.”

Not that Davis is insensitive to the outrage over specific cases of police violence against black men, be it the riots in Ferguson, the worldwide protests over the death of Eric Garner in police custody, or Trayvon Martin. Davis focuses on the latter to make an incendiary point about the racism endemic in Obama’s America. In 2012, she reminds me, Martin, a black high school student, was fatally shot at a gated estate in Florida by George Zimmerman, a white neighbourhood watch coordinator. Zimmerman, who was later acquitted of Martin’s killing, reminds her of “those who were part of the slave patrols during the slave era”.