Video after video, more times than anyone can count a Black or Latino person, just walking down the streets, going to school or driving to work, could have their life snuffed out by murdering police for no reason.
Photo after photo, story after story, we see children in Pakistan, Yemen afraid to go to school or play outside because they hear the buzz of a drone overhead, a drone that has murdered their uncle or their relative, or simply because it’s a clear day with blue skies.
In two different parts of the world, whole generations are being terrorized in the name of “keeping us safe.”
In the news this week, 14 year old Ahmed Mohamed in Texas was terrorized by the police after the teacher called the authorities on him for making his own clock, assuming that it was a bomb.
“They told me ‘No, you can’t call your parents,'” Ahmed said. “‘You’re in the middle of an interrogation at the moment.’ They asked me a couple of times, ‘Is it a bomb?’ and I answered a couple of times, ‘It’s a clock… I felt like I was a criminal,” the teenager said. “I felt like I was a terrorist. I felt like all the names I was called.”
Sharon Irwin, grandmother of Tony Robinson, killed by Madison, Wisconsin police March 6, 2015 said:
This is my grandson. He was 19. He’s young. He is Black and he is beautiful. And I am here to tell you that they took his life with seven bullets. [The cop] shot him three times, dropped his flashlight, picked it up, shot him three more times, looked at him and shot him again. Tony was unarmed and nothing he did deserved that. I’m looking at all these people, the human side of this. I cry every day. I have to go through hundreds of pages of evidence because they didn’t indict him—they said, no, he didn’t do anything wrong. And I say to you, if you lie to justify your actions, are they justifiable? No. And he lied, and the Madison police lied, and the DA lied. And they disgraced my family, they made us the criminals, they made my grandson a criminal that he was not.
What kind of a people are we to tolerate a society that treats an entire group of people or religion as suspects, as criminals, as people having no rights that the police or the U.S. government are bound to respect? This must stop now.
The protests that happened against police terror beginning in Ferguson and spreading around the country showed that the US is not the “land of freedom and democracy” it claims to be to the world, and they lifted the spirits of all who are longing for massive outpourings against the crimes of our government. And those protests shook the system back on its heels. They were beautiful for all who care about justice.
While police killing of civilians continues (view the database of stories collected by The Guardian US), so-called conservative media figures and somepolice officials call the Black Lives Matter movement “terrorist” and a “hate group.” Cops are portrayed as victims and criminal charges are thrown at protesters, not the murdering cops. A fascistic movement is being mobilized – and election season is providing a wide stage – to actually support murdering unarmed people in the streets.
The movement to stop murdering police will either be suppressed, with the horrors not only staying in place but escalating, here and all over the world, or people will come forth in much greater numbers and determination than has happened in this country in decades. Lines are being drawn. Which side are you on?
There is a way to fight this right now, to take this all to a higher level. Rise Up October! October 24 in NYC, thousands and thousands must pour in into the streets to insist to the country and the world that this must stop NOW! Nobody with a heart or a conscience can stand aside.
LaToya Howell, mother of 17-year-old Justus Howell, murdered by Zion, Illinois police April 4, 2015:
So I ask you all today, which side are you on? Would you stand by the way and watch another kid get gunned down, beaten? Another woman get raped? Would you stand by and act like it ain’t happening? I ask you today to stand up and choose your side. Power to the people. There is power in numbers. Put your fists in the air. Power to the people y’all!
Don’t stand aside, there is a place for you in this! World Can’t Wait is raising $10,000 to bring 100 families of police murder to New York City so the world can see what the United States is doing to people and that we are not taking it anymore.
Donate today. Mobilize, be in the streets of New York City on October 24!