Category Archives: WTFIRGO

Written by Jason Rosencrantz

The congenital racism of the United States, the heritage of an economic order based on slave labor and the absurd culture of white supremacy, endures all too obviously.

Not only can one perceive this systemic racism in the broad brushstrokes of the demographics of poverty and incarceration, but also in the relentless cascade of tragic stories about black and brown lives disrupted or cut short with impunity by state (and state condoned) violence.

The case of Travon Martin has triggered an increase of media attention on such narratives, all of which expose the contradictions of a political order which pays lip service to an ideology of equal rights for all but which in practice adheres to a racial hierarchy of justice.  Here are just a few stories from recent months:

September 21, 2011 The State of Georgia executes Troy Anthony Davis for the murder of off-duty Savannah police officer, despite that “seven of the nine nonpolice witnesses later recanted or changed their testimony, some alleging police intimidation for their original false statements.”

November 19, 2011 Police in White Plains, NY, responding to an accidental medical alert, begin to break into the home of 68-year-old former Marine Kenneth Chamberlain Sr.  When Chamberlain protests that they are not needed, a police officer is recorded as screaming “I don’t give a f*** n*****, open the door.” Then the police break in and taser the elderly Chamberlain to death.

March 7, 2012 Plain clothes police enter a home in New Orleans on the authority of a search warrant for a marijuana offense and shot and killed unarmed high school basketball player Wendell Allen. Hear his mother speak in this video.

March 21, 2012. Responding to a “disturbance” in a Chicago neighborhood, an off-duty plain clothes police officer identifies himself as a cop and then starts shooting at Antonio Cross, probably because cell phones in black hands look like guns to the police.  Innocent bystander 22-year-old Reika Boyd is fatally shot in the head. Chicago police call the killing “justified“. Survivors and family members speak out here.

April 4, 2012 Police in Newport, CA force baseball star Tori Hunter to present his ID at gunpoint in his own home. Luckily, he was not murdered by the police.

50% of the proceeds of this T will go to the Occupy The Hood L.A. Action Assembly, which is both an Occupy L.A. affinity group as well as a local chapter of the national Occupy the Hood network. The Occupy the Hood L.A. Action Assembly has been organizing around issues of housing rights and police harassment, as well as other issues. A media wing called Occupy Shadow Media has been producing video reports which show What The Fuck is Really Going On.

T-shirt available exclusively at Reserve Online.

Written by Jason Rosencrantz

Like D.W. Griffith’s epic 1915 film, the United States was born racist.

Though the framers of the U.S. Constitution were intellectually inspired by Enlightenment principles of universal human rights, their culture of white supremacy and economic interests blinded them to the humanity of dark skinned people.

This racism was written into the founding legal document of the United States. In Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the U.S. Constitution, a distinction is made between “free Persons” and “other Persons”:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

The “other persons” were of course the population of black slaves, who counted as 3/5ths of a “free Person” for the sake of determining appropriate levels of taxation and representation in the House.

After the Civil War, this “3/5th Compromise” was rendered moot by the 13th Amendment’s abolition of chattel slavery, while the 14th Amendment superseded Acricle 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution and guaranteed “due process” and “equal protection” to every “person”.

But today, even after the election of a mixed-race President, these Constitutional guarantees remain elusive in practice, where institutional and cultural racism are reflected in disproportionate poverty and incarceration rates for dark-skinned people.

And then there are those all too common and ugly episodes, like the recent killing of the unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, which throw this endemic racism into high relief.

50% of the proceeds of this T will be going to the Occupy The Hood L.A. Action Assembly. T-shirt available exclusively at Reserve Online.

Written by Jason Rosencrantz

In the United States, brutality against people of color, particularly African Americans, has been only one of the historical functions of the police — another has been political suppression of poor and working classes.

In his history of policing in the United States, Kristian Williams points out that these two functions have often overlapped, particularly in the formative period of the antebellum South, where “slavery… was a system of production as well as a system of race control.”   The control of slave populations, in other words, was required by both “the demands of White supremacy and by the economic needs of the plantations system.”

But after the Civil War, as modern capitalism took shape, the emerging industrial working classes began to be targeted as objects of police control.

Originally, these police forces were privately funded by industrial enterprises and used to break up labor strikes. However, in an early instance of corporate welfare, these expenses were gradually transferred to the State.

The Pennsylvania State Police, for example, was created in the aftermath of the 1902 Great Anthracite Strike, on the recommendation of a commission which concluded that “peace and order… should be maintained at any cost, but should be maintained by regularly appointed and responsible officers… at the expense of the public.”

In this way strikers who “had previously had their heads cracked by guards in private employ (or police leased to the company, which comes to the same thing), they increasingly had the honor of having their heads cracked by impartial public servants, authorized by the government and funded by the tax.”

Today’s police forces are heirs to this history, and though the economic order of the United States has transformed dramatically since the industrial age, people who organize against its injustices should not be surprised when the state’s coercive forces line up against them.

Crack! Crack! is da Sound of da Police!

T-shirt available exclusively at Reserve Online.

Written by Jason Rosencrantz
 

Whether it be from pistol fire, truncheon strikes or slamming prison gates — Crack! Crack! is da Sound of da Police!

With roots in the slave patrols of the antebellum south, modern police forces in the United States have earned a reputation for both political suppression and racist brutality.

The following are some low-lights from this dismal history, though hidden behind this brief list are untold numbers of people who have been unjustly beaten or killed by these state sponsored gangs:

Fred Hampton, December 4, 1969

Nothing exemplifies the confluence of racist violence and political suppression so much as the murder 21 year old Fred Hampton by FBI agents and Chicago police officerswhile he slept in his bed next to his pregnant girlfriend on December 4, 1969.  See the 1971 documentary that explores the story of the murder and captures many of Hampton’s speeches here.

Rodney King, March 3, 1991

Not all police violence is used for the purposes of political suppression, however — sometimes it’s just good sport. The tasing and brutal beating of Rodney King on March 3, 1991, which happened to be captured o video by bystander George Holliday, exemplifies the run-of-the-mill racism and brutality of U.S. police forces. Though the video showed an out of control gang of cops mercilessly beating the helpless King, a mostly white jury in Simi Valley failed to convict any of the officers involved. This miscarriage of justice led to widespread looting and civil unrest in the spring of 1992.

The night of the beating, an LAPD watch commander summarized the incident: “…tased, then beat… basic stuff, really.”

Amadou Diallo, February 4, 1999

In an early Bronx morning, a gang of four plainclothes NYPD officers fired 41 shots at 23-year-old Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo because he reached for his wallet.  Dially was completely unarmed. All four officers were acquitted by an Albany jury.

Sean Bell, November 25, 2006

In another early morning shooting frenzy, 23-year-old Sean Bell was killed killed “in a hail of 50 bullets” fired by a group of 5 undercover NYPD officers. The unarmed father was on his way home from his own bachelor party.

Oscar Grant,  January 1, 2009

While on his way home from New Years Eve festivities, 22-year-old father Oscar Grant was publicly executed on an Bay Area transit platnorm– shot in the back as he lay on the ground – by BART cop Johannes Mehserle.

All the victims on this incomplete list were young an black, but no one is safe from the brutality of police culture — especially those who chose to confront the injustices of the system.  Just ask Iraq vet Scott Olsen or elderly pensioner Dori Rainey.

T-shirt available exclusively at Reserve Online.

Written by Jason Rosencrantz

Not only does Los Angeles have the largest homeless population in the U.S., it also ranks as the “meanest” city in terms of its systematic mistreatment of homeless people.

According to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, L.A. beats other U.S. cities in systematically mistreating the homeless, by passing anti-homeless laws and zealously enforcing them.

Since 2006, for example, Skid Row has been a target of a “Safer Cities Initiative” which, in the words of UCLA professors Gary Blasi and Forrest Stuart, resulted in “one of the most intense concentrations of police resources anywhere, anytime.”

In their introduction to Freedom Now: Struggles for the Human Right to Housing in L.A. and Beyond, Christina Heatherton and CUNY Geography Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore point out that the Safer Cities Initiative “authorized $6.5 million for additional police resources mostly concentrated in a 15 to 20 block Skid Row enforcement zone,” and that this sum “exceeded the $5.7 million budgeted for all homeless services citywide.”

This has led to disastrous consequences for the struggling Skid Row population:

Since 2006, the LAPD has routinely cited and ticketed poor people for minor offenses such as jaywalking, loitering, and littering. Within the first three years of SCI, the LAPD issued citations at a rate of 69 times the rate of the rest of the city, and made over 28,000 arrests in a community with less than 15,000 people.

Such criminalization of the poor is motivated in part by the gentrification of downtown L.A., as well as a failure to recognize the city’s most dispossessed as fellow human beings.

T-shirt available exclusively at Reserve Online.