Protesters in the streets shortly after police officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. (Jamelle Bouie, Wikimedia)
“It is clear that the St Louis/Ferguson police department has been thoroughly infiltrated by white supremacists masquerading as police officers cum slave patrollers.”
There has long been a playbook for police departments across America—after police officers, predominantly white, kill unarmed citizens who are predominantly black. We can trace this to its origins in the Deep South, during the early days of human trafficking in America when it was called “slavery.” Today’s iteration of African human trafficking in America goes by various MOs, all with politely toned down labeling: “racial profiling,” “gentrification,” “the prison-industrial complex.” Yet, if we were honest with ourselves we would call this systemic lethality what is it – the renewal of the slave posse’s license to kill black people.
After Michael Brown, 18 was profiled and executed on August 9th as he walked in the street with a companion, the Ferguson police department was happy to release a video that on casual viewing appeared to show Brown just minutes before his execution manhandling the much smaller clerk in a local market where Michael appeared to be shoplifting cigars. The implicit message and subtle conclusion the Ferguson police were attempting to convey was that a very large man had stolen merchandise from a local store, had manhandled the store’s clerk and that the officer who killed Michael was responding to a crime in progress.
Not so much.
It turned out that in viewing the entire store video Michael had paid for the cigars and his exchange with the clerk was playful jostling. Further, there was no reported crime in progress prior to Officer Darren Wilson’s engaging Michael Brown. OOPS.
Days later, when police officers responded to an African-American acting erratically outside another store, the police arrived by patrol car, opened its doors with guns drawn and almost immediately played target practice with the clearly troubled victim. The initial police report claimed the victim, Kajieme Powell, had raised a knife over his head causing the officers to fear for their lives and prompting them to empty their guns into him. A civilian witness video, however shows that the man never raised the knife he was holding—he was dead before that ever occurred. OOPS.
No matter. It would appear the standard operating procedure for the police is to exercise creative writing in their official reports, with the absolute liberty of rewriting their accounts when the evidence shows their initial reports in error.
In Part 1 we detailed the sordid history that is particular to the recent incidents of police brutality in the greater St. Louis area. Their national corollaries have long been known to African Americans and by now are becoming more known to the general population not so much through the diligent coverage of state-sponsored media, but by virtue of ubiquitous cell phone recordings by average citizens and their ability to post these over social media.
“It would appear the standard operating procedure for the police is to exercise creative writing in their official reports.”
Long before YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, the history of the black “kill zone” has been documented. The beginning of modern police practices traces to the creation of the “Slave Patrol” in 1704 in the Carolina colonies. The Slave Patrols had three primary goals: (1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, escaped Africans; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter African armed revolts; and (3) to maintain a form of discipline for Africans who were subject to vigilante summary execution, outside of the law, if they violated any plantation rules or just ran afoul of any white person.
After the civil war, the Slave Patrols evolved into southern police departments. Post-civil war Slave Patrols were focused on controlling freed Africans now locked into oppressive sharecropper farming for abusive former terrorists/enslavers, enforcement of “Jim Crow” segregation laws, denial of African human rights and an institutional resistance to Africans who attempted to access the political system.
Alternatively, the genesis of policing in the European-American communities closely followed the practices of policing in England. Initially, policing among European-immigrants was “informal” with the focus on the “Watch.” Boston created a night watch in 1636, New York in 1658 and Philadelphia in 1700. The first centralized police department emerged in 1838 in Boston, followed by New York in 1845 and Chicago in 1851. By the 1880s all major U.S. cities had local police departments in place. The early modern police department focused its attention on easily identifiable targets laboring under harsh and sometimes deadly working conditions, the goal being to keep this “dangerous class” in its place as Africans and foreign immigrants were assigned the label of criminals.
Policing European-Americans, in contrast to Africans, did not focus on apprehension, capture, violent control mechanisms, organized terror and surveillance. Instead, the primary focus of policing the Euro-American community was mercantile interests and the need to control “unrest” due to social and economic inequalities. Emerging business interests were the primary focus of policing in white communities rather than crime control. These elites required a work environment that emphasized stability in order to maximize business opportunities. In addition, this early mercantile class needed to transfer the costs of protecting their businesses from the private sector to tax payers.
The Slave Patrols’ contemporaries—police forces—provide an organized group of men the legal authority to use lethal forces with impunity. This practice persists today and can be clearly heard when police speak of outcasts, such as, Travyon Martin, Jordan Davis, Michael, Brown, Vonderrit Myers and Kajieme Powell. These are individuals, according to Slave Patroller/Police Officers, who are “suspicious,” menacing, troubled and dangerous. The paradigm and practice of the 21st century slave patroller remains the same.
The Black Panther Party was correct in its analysis of the police as an occupying force in the black community. The Party advocated the need for oppressed people to struggle against the brutality and murders of its children through armed resistance and self-defense awareness.
“Post-civil war Slave Patrols were focused on controlling freed Africans.”
The conflicting narratives of whether Vonderrit was armed or unarmed continue. Before taking the police chief’s allegations at face value, consider this incident of police misconduct in New Jersey:
Were it not for a camera that was completely forgotten, Marcus Jeter, who was being charged with assaulting an officer and was also accused of “going for the gun” of the officer, would be serving a long jail sentence today. However, the police camera, which officers forgot was on, caught officers who weren’t even near Jeter yelling, “Get your hand off of my gun,” which has turned out to be a near unbeatable defense for officers and is going to apparently be used by Darren Wilson. As you will see in this video, while the officer performs for the audio of one camera and forgets he can be seen by the other, Jeter is flat on the ground after being brutally assaulted himself and wasn’t doing anything like going for a gun.
Notwithstanding the rancid history of the St. Louis Police Department and ample evidence of systemic police corruption nationwide, let’s even assume Vonderrit Myers did have a gun on him at that time of his murder. Perhaps he realized that an undeclared war, not of his making or of his generation, is underway and he sought to protect himself. It is inconceivable that he was unaware of what happened to Michael Brown just 12 miles and two months removed when Brown surrendered, unarmed, with his hands up.
Officer, Dan Page, of the St. Louis County Police Department, became something of a familiar face to many earlier this month when video showed him pushing back CNN’s Don Lemon and others in a group in Ferguson. At the time, CNN was reporting on the large-scale protests demanding the arrest of the police officer who killed Michael Brown. Page is speaking to the right wing/white supremacist Oath Keepers, a group that has been on the radar of anti-hate groups such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Page declares:
“I personally believe the Lord Jesus Christ is my savior, but I’m also a killer. I’ve killed a lot and, if I need to, I will kill a whole bunch more…If you don’t want to get killed, don’t show up in front of me.”
It is clear that the St Louis/Ferguson police department has been thoroughly infiltrated by white supremacists masquerading as police officers cum slave patrollers and Page speech before the Oath Keepers can only be seen as recruiting like-minded soldiers to engage in urban warfare against young African-American boys and men.
“The paradigm and practice of the 21st century slave patroller remains the same.”
When will the Black mis-leadership class call for the African-American community in St. Louis to come under federal protection until the community can organize its own civilian protection association? Until that time, Black folks will have to protect themselves and fight for the lives of their children “by any means necessary.”
Unfortunately, St. Louis brings its modern day Slave Patrols to the black community’s doorstep with regularity. Michael Brown, Vonderritt Myers, Kajieme Powell and countless others have now joined the thousands of black men and boys who have been lynched, burned, castrated, shot, dragged and ripped-apart under the protection of state-sponsored slave patrols. Mark Furman was the face of the racist cop in Los Angeles. Jeff Roorda has taken Furman’s baton in St. Louis, and, with a straight face declares:
“We’re done, as a police union, standing in the shadows in these cases,” Roorda said, adding he and other members of the union had seen the photographs allegedly showing Myers posing with guns and were aware of Myers’s earlier arrest.
As we reported in Part 1, Roorda has been front and center, on camera and before microphones slandering the victims posthumously in these cases. What he refers to as “activities in the shadows” must be his efforts in raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend Officer Darren Wilson and to attempt to provide blanket cover to other officers who kill civilians.
Code Black Alert: Florida
“A Mother Dies in Prison After Reporting Threats”
Latandra Ellington, a 36-year old mother of four children, died in a Florida prison last week. Ellington had just seven months left to serve of her twenty-two month sentence for grand theft when she was found dead in her cell.”