(ThyBlackMan.com) According to an article that was recently published on activistpost.com, police in America kill people at an extremely high rate of 450x more than four decades of school shootings combined.
Over the past few years more than 3,500 people have been killed by police than the 300+ school shootings that have happened in this country in the past five years and it’s no secret that most of the 3,500+ people that have been killed by police are from poor impoverished urban areas across this country.
As colonized people especially as colonized Africans who forced to live under a system built on colonialism, slavery, and genocide, this is the harsh, nasty treatment that we get from the police on a daily basis.
When they gun us down in the streets and or push us into a pond to drown in the heat of the night, they will immediately praise their fellow officer’s cowardly actions and deliberately slander and criminalize us, our families, and our entire community at large.
One example of this is the February 25, 2016 colonial state-sanctioned lynching of a 58 year old African man named Greg Gunn here in Montgomery, Alabama was brutally murdered in cold blood
in the heat of the night by a white police officer named A.C. Smith and immediately after this murder, the second murder happened when the Montgomery Police Department along with the local colonial media, as well as white nationalists online and in public immediately went on a vicious and nasty slandering campaign against this brother, his family, and the entire community at large. He was even slandered by the cop’s attorney calling Gunn a “career criminal that deserved his own death”.
Another example of this is just recently on the afternoon of February 21, 2018 here in Montgomery, Alabama just a few days away from the two year anniversary of the police murder of 58-year old African man named Greg Gunn, another African man has been murdered at the hands of the police and he’s was a 21 year old African man named Lonnie Smith Jr. After this premeditated murder, the police along with the colonial media wasted absolutely no time murdering this brother yet again by slandering him by claiming he was an “armed suspect in a shootout with police”. This is an deliberate lie created and used by the police and the colonial media to “justify” the murders of African people at the hands of the police and to claim he was in a “shootout” with them is a bunch of bullshit because in reality, they’re always the ones that are shooting at us and gunning us down in the street in most cases when we’re unarmed. After they killed this brother, they had cordoned off the entire community for several hours that day like a full-scale military lockdown of our community which is part of the policy of police containment imposed on our community by the corrupted city government of Montgomery, Alabama.
The corrupted big money mayor here in Montgomery in Todd Strange also joined the slandering campaign against this brother the day after his henchmen murdered this brother by blaming him for his own death by claiming it was an “unfortunate” event that was the consequence of the deceased victim. The mayor’s disgusting and slanderous statement shows without a shadow of a doubt that these vicious police murders in this city against black people are not only carried out with the sheer complicity of the mayor, the corrupt city politicians, and the colonial media, but also with the sheer complicity of white nationalists online and in public. It also shows that the mayor and hood villian police chief Ernest Henley will spare absolutely no expense to suppress the black community in Montgomery.
Even hood villian pastor Ed Nettles like a lot of other hood villain pastors in our community who have sold out to these corrupt big money politicians like Mayor Todd Strange actually defended this police murder against Lonnie Smith Jr. by saying, “The police murder against this brother was “justified” and had the nerve to tell us to “pray” for these murderous pigs that killed this young brother, FOH you sellout bastard!!!
Lonnie Smith Jr., like all other young African men had an entire life ahead of him, but it was ripped from right under him by these murderous pigs. This city government’s understanding of public safety through the vicious and brutal policy of police containment of the black community has resulted in the police murders of Bernard Winehurst, Greg Gunn, and now Lonnie Smith Jr. w/ the police and colonial media’s vilification of our community as a community filled with “gangsters, thugs, and criminals”
This is also part of the narrative historically and today that victimizes the criminals and criminalizes the victims.
The U.S. Colonial State is an instrument of coercion which is made of its vicious and brutal henchmen in the form of the police, the courts, the schools, the media, the military, and the prison system and The U.S. Colonial State’s function is to maintain the colonial status quo which is the continuing to inflict the worst forms of oppression and violence against colonized people especially colonized Africans on a daily basis.
The police function as an occupying military force in our community that’s formed to not only maintain this poisonous and toxic colonial parasitic capitalist social system, but to also protect the white community from the poor and oppressed black community.
A black person is killed once every 28 hours by police in America and most of us are just one altercation or traffic stop away from being killed at the hands of the police. This is not just some exaggeration, this is pure truth.
Unknown to many Africans, police agencies in this country are deeply rooted in modern day slavery as they first started off as slave catchers in the early 1600s where young white men between the ages of 5-60 were asked to become a slave catcher that would catch and punish enslaved Africans who tried to either start a rebellion or tried to escape the slave plantations.
The white nationalist lynch mobs of the mid-1800s through the early-1900s have now been replaced by a much more vicious and destructive force known as the police who carry out modern day lynchings in the form of police violence against colonized people especially colonized Africans on a daily basis.
Also, as colonized African people in America, our communities are under such vicious and brutal containment by police on a daily basis and police containment is also part of gentrification that’s also designed to forcibly remove African people from their own neighborhoods.
One example of police containment was recently during The MLK Day in St. Petersburg, Florida where the police there had the entire African community under a 12+ hour full scale military lockdown where African people couldn’t get into their community nor get out of their own community and this aggressive police containment also facilitated gentrification in the sense of crushing any ability for African people there to develop some semblance of genuine economic activity for their own community.
Young urban kids certainly do not feel safe under the public policy of police containment when they are the most likely to rise up and challenge the colonial social system which is why they’re the biggest victims of police violence and we’ve seen this with Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Aiyana Jones, Dominque Battle, Laniyah Miller, Ashaunti Butler, and the list goes on and on. Young urban kids are also harassed, intimidated, tazed, pepper sprayed, criminalized, and assaulted on a daily basis by police inside these schools.
The Conclusion – The only genuine solution to stop the wave of police violence in our community is Black Community Control Of The Police where we have the ability to hire, fire, train, and discipline those who will function as servants of our community that will provide true genuine public safety for our community.
Staff Writer; Kwame Shakir (aka Joe D.)
