Sickening Similarities In Police Assaults Evidence Resilience Of Racism by Linn Washington!
(2023-02-18 at 16:14:33 )

Sickening Similarities In Police Assaults Evidence Resilience Of Racism by Linn Washington!

That deadly gang in blue - police

Raw racism deeply embedded in law enforcement connects the fatal January 7, 2023 police beating of a Black man in Memphis, Tennessee with a vicious December 9, 1981 police assault on a Black man in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

That deadly 2023 police beating of motorist Tyre Nichols and the barbaric 1981 beating of journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal each occurred in cities with documentable histories of racist policing from false arrests to fatal shootings.

Evidence of brutal, bigoted behaviors that often animate law enforcement culture are evident in the merciless beatings of Nicholas and Abu-Jamal through such commonalities as police unleashed each assault without resistance from their targets and the lawless law enforcers in each incident reflexively denied any misconduct.

Police brutally battered both Nichols and Abu-Jamal with punches and kicks.

With Nichols, one policeman also hammered his head with a metal baton.

Policemen who assaulted Abu-Jamal, at one point, held his body battering-ram- style to smash his head into a street sign pole..multiple times. Police beat Abu-Jamal with such intensity that some who witnessed it said seeing that assault made them physically sick.

Like the Nichols beating where Memphis police callously left the badly injured Nichols suffering at the scene for nearly thirty minutes, Philadelphia police maliciously refused to quickly render medical aid to the critically injured Abu-Jamal..despite him bleeding from a policemans bullet.

Unlike the Nichols beating, when police finally took Abu-Jamal to a hospital emergency room, officers attacked him again, beating him before life-saving surgery and beating him during his post-op recovery. Nichols was not attacked inside the hospital but that police beating caused his death days later.

One salient difference does exist between the police assaults on Nichols and Abu-Jamal – incarcerated since 1981 for fatally shooting a policeman.

In the 2023 Nichols beating death, undeniable video evidence from police force installed anti-crime surveillance cameras helped defeat initial denials of wrongdoing from the policemen who attacked Nichols.

In the 1981 Abu-Jamal beating, the lack of video evidence during that pre-high-tech era enabled authorities to dismiss multiple eyewitness accounts of that beating. Typically, Philadelphia authorities accepted pleas from police who denied beating Abu-Jamal. Authorities ignored the obvious evidence of multiple broken bones and other serious internal injuries the journalist sustained from those police beatings.

Even more absurd, authorities embraced belated claims from police that Abu-Jamal confessed - claims not made until two months after Abu-Jamals arrest. During an investigation into a brutality complaint Abu-Jamal filed against his attackers, two policemen claimed they suddenly remembered hearing Abu-Jamal utter a confession.

That belated confession claim helped prosecutors convict Abu-Jamal in a murder case that lacked any credible forensic evidence that connected Abu-Jamal to the crime. One of those two belated confession claim cops filed a report hours after Abu-Jamals 12-9-81 arrest stating the journalist "made no comments."

Many proclaim racism is not an element in the fatal beating of Nichols because the five officers initially arrested for his savage death are Black.

Persons who have made this "no-racism" declaration range from Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn "C.J." Davis, a Black woman, to British broadcaster Piers Morgan, a white man.

Chief Davis postures that Black police involvement blunts criticisms that "problems in law enforcement [are] about race." Morgan pretends that Black police involvement proves Nichols death "is not a racist act of white supremacy."

In February 1981, while Abu-Jamal worked as an award-winning journalist, he questioned Philadelphias then District Attorney about racism in that citys justice system, according to Abu-Jamals original audio recordings of that encounter.

That DA rejected racism as a factor in a Philadelphia judges highly unusual dismissal of assault charges against three white policemen for their vicious beating of a Black radical in 1978. TV news captured that 1978 beating live and broadcast it around the world. That televised 1978 beating of the unarmed, surrendering radical came 13-years before the infamous videotaped beating of motorist Rodney King in Los Angeles.

Attempts to downplay racist police culture embedded in the beatings of Nichols and Abu-Jamal evidence either willful ignorance or deliberate deception about the realities of institutionalized, race-based inequities operative across American society since the inception of the United States in the late 18th Century.

For example with the Nichols beating, if anti-Blackness is not embedded in police culture, then Blacks in Memphis would not comprise 86 percent of the persons subjected to use of force from a Memphis police department that is 58 percent Black.

As a New York Times article about Nichols death and policing in Memphis noted, "..the data shows that Black residents were subjects of police use of force at a rate nearly three times that of white residents, and eight times that of Hispanic residents."

Commentators on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean rebuff attempts to downplay racism in law policing.

Wendell Griffen, a recently retired state court judge in Arkansas, noted on his blog that terrorizing people of color for social control is embedded across American society.

"People like Tyre Nichols are abused..and slain by police to satisfy White supremacist notions of what "safe" and "public safety" mean," Griffen wrote.

Richard Sudan, in a commentary posted on Londons African-Caribbean, The Voice-Online, called-out the law enforcement attitude that Black lives hold less value than white lives.

"Black officers beating and killing Tyre Nichols does not suddenly mean that race no longer becomes a factor in another Black death in custody," Sudan wrote. "It makes the officers involved, whatever their complexion, complicit in a system blighted by white supremacy."

The plight of Mumia Abu-Jamal is a prime example of institutional racism embedded throughout the United States of Americas justice system.

Racism in law enforcement stalked the life of Mumia Abu-Jamal years before his controversial 1982 conviction - a conviction that initially sent him to death row for decades before conversion of his sentence in 2011 to life in prison without parole.

In October 1968 a white Philadelphia police detective wantonly beat a teenaged Abu-Jamal and falsely charged the teen with assault. A judge dismissed that charge due to evidence Abu-Jamal did not attack the detective. That detective beat Abu-Jamal when Abu-Jamal sought protection from bigots who attacked him for his participation in a protest against a prominent white supremacist then campaigning for the presidency of the United States.

In the Abu-Jamal murder case, Philadelphia police unlawfully manufactured evidence of guilt and Philly prosecutors illegally withheld evidence of innocence, some evidence withheld for nearly four decades.

Further, courts, including the United States Supreme Court, have consistently dismissed this egregious misconduct by police and prosecutors to uphold Abu-Jamals flawed conviction. Those appeal dismissals clearly violate Abu-Jamals constitutional rights..evidence that courts consistently shirk their prime duty to ensure justice.

In one ugly example, the judge at Abu-Jamals 1982 trial declared on the eve of that trial that he would help prosecutors "fry the n-gger." That odious pronouncement of racial bigotry and pro-prosecution bias corrupted Abu-Jamals constitutional right to a fair trial.

Yet, appellate courts consistently whitewash trial judge Albert Sabos racist misconduct with contorted contentions that Abu-Jamal suffered no legal harms during his trial undermined by Sabos bias.

In 2003, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania found no fault with Judge Sabos judicial conduct code violating admission to assist prosecutors "fry the
n-gger." Years later, the Pa Supreme Court justice who authored that 2003 whitewash ruling was forced to resign from Pennsylvanias highest court when exposed as a participant in a scandal that involved sending racist-sexist-homophobic emails.

Corrupted, racist procedures in Abu-Jamals case have triggered criticisms nationally and internationally for decades.

In February 2000, Amnesty International, the respected human rights organization, released a report on its thorough review of Abu-Jamals racism-tainted case. One finding in that AI report stated: "The record of this case indicates a pattern of events that compromised Abu-Jamals right to a fair trial."

In December 2022 the United Nations Working Group of Experts of People of African Descent issued a legal document regarding the Abu-Jamal case. Criticisms in the Groups document sent to the Philadelphia judge handling Abu-Jamals current appeal cited content and context regarding "impropriety and racial discriminatory effects" embedded in the Abu-Jamal case.

Demands for federal legislation to address racism-rooted abusive policing across America erupted again in the wake of the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols.

In September 2021, Republican United States Senators stifled approval of the "George Floyd Justice in Policing Act" - named after a Black man murdered by police in Minnesota the year before. Senators responded to police union demands to kill the George Floyd bill approved by Democrats in Congress over objections from Republicans in that body.

Reticence to approve federal legislation addressing abusive policing is reminiscent of the United States Senates century-long refusal to approve legislation outlawing lynching of Blacks. Lynching of Blacks raged from the end of the Civil War into the mid-1900s. Rampaging racist mobs, often with assistance from racist police, murdered thousands of Black men, women, and children - with few of those murders ever prosecuted for their crimes.

Capitol Hill did not approve anti-lynching legislation until March 2022. Members of Congress introduced 200 anti-lynching bills with only three successfully approved, each of those approved measures killed by racists in the Senate.

The first federal anti-lynching bill came in January 1900, introduced by the last African American to serve in Congress during the 19th Century. That measure introduced by then Congressman George H. White never received consideration.

When White, a Republican and former prosecutor in North Carolina, spoke on behalf of his anti-lynching measure, he poised a question relevant to the current need for anti-police-brutality legislation.

"Should not a nation be just to all of her citizens, protect them alike in all their rights, on every foot of her soil?"

Reprinted here with the permission of "This Can Not Be Happening" The only news organization in the United States to be labeled a threat by the Department of Homeland Security!!