http://www.telesurtv.net/english/analysis/Black-Latino-Unity-Grows-Amid-Racist-US-Policing-20160713-0001.html
telesur: Black, Latino Unity Grows Amid Racist US Policing
Carla Osorio, a community organizer
from East Los Angeles, told teleSUR that with every publicized case of a white
cop killing a Black person—or a Latino cop killing a Black person—unity
has grown. Any differences between the Black and
Latino communities are being overshadowed by the
quickly-multiplying discussions on how poverty and the war
on drugs end up criminalizing, and in some cases killing, both
communities.
Laurie Valdez's partner was shot
twice in the back by San Jose, Calif. police officers in 2014,
she said she was denied the video footage, which the force kept under gag
order.
“My son had to see his father in a
casket sent to Mexico to be buried—there was no place here,” she told teleSUR.
Josiah was two years old back then and now acts up in preschool, still
traumatized. Based on patterns well-documented with Black children,
Valdez sees him falling straight into the school to prison pipeline.
“It’s not a journey (the
killing of a loved one) that any family should have to walk alone,” said
Valdez, who founded the anti-police brutality group Justice for Josiah to
support him and other children suffering from the trauma of losing a parent without
cause or consequence.
On July 4, 19-year-old
Anthony Nuñez was shot in front of his San Jose home from about three
houses away. Police said that he was carrying a gun and was suicidal.
His family said that two officers shot
him, did not allowed anyone to go console him while he was
still alive and then left his body where he fell the entire
afternoon and night, without trying CPR or calling an ambulance. A bullet left
a hole right under their doorbell, for every visitor to remember the shooting.
Valdez visited Nuñez’s family and was
not surprised at the discrepancy between their
story and the official one. She said that the San Jose police
department is notorious for being discreet after shootings and warping the
narrative to defend the killings as cases of police self-defense or
victim suicide.
The police write-up is by now
predictable: like the defense of officer Darren Wilson who killed Michael
Brown, George Zimmerman who killed Trayvon Martin, or Daniel Pantaleo
who killed Eric Garner, “the police officer is always the victim,” said
Valdez.
Records
for Latinos killed by police remain incomplete. Official
reports do not always include the category “Hispanic,” and people often check
their own demographic box, meaning that any full count would require a
guessing game. Deaths at the hands of immigration and customs officials
and border patrol—both law enforcement officials with notorious reputations for
their handling of migrant cases—are not systematically kept, which by
all accounts would be overwhelmingly Latin American victims.
Gloria Hernandez has been organizing
with the grassroots group Stolen Lives for decades and has made it
her mission to collect a full count of Latinos killed by police
in Fresno, Calif. When the ACLU was not interested in helping—until a
white person was beaten by police—she decided to file her own requests directly
with the police. She told teleSUR that the department questioned her for
three hours, demanding to know who was behind her project.
Valdez decided not to rely on police
records, and instead consulted the Chicano archive of La Raza Unida. Even that
list, compiled by the Latino community in San Jose, was
incomplete. People are still telling her about names that she missed, she said.
The 2010 census shows that
about one third of the San Jose population is Latino, and about 40
percent is Latino in Fresno. Both Hernandez and Valdez said that
Latinos represent a high proportion of police killings in these areas, up
to double their total population. Most were unarmed, some were
shot in the back, some with several bullets. Some cops’ names appeared up to
five times, but not one was indicted.
Besides noting that the city invests
“big money” in protecting the police department, Valdez said that Latinos
are not likely to bring the cases to light with public
protests or lawsuits because families fear deportation and cannot
afford the attorney bills.
Francisco Romero, an activist
with Todo Poder al Pueblo and Union del Barrio in Oxnard told
teleSUR, “You don’t call the police to come and help. You don’t trust
the police." He said that many immigrants are used to entrenched
police corruption and violence in their home countries, and
that the U.S. “war strategy” of heavily-militarized
police increases their fear of law enforcement. It doesn’t help, he said,
that Latinos are seen as non-citizens or second-class citizens.
Oxnard has one of the highest Latino
populations in the country—about 70 percent. Many have joined the police force
and the military, attracted by their state-funded benefits and
protections, and many dress their houses with the U.S. flag to help make
the case for their citizenship. The police killings, though, are a constant reminder of
the reality of being Latino in the U.S.
When Romero’s group first started
marching against the shootings, sending press releases ahead of schedule, local
media did not show up. With time, as they organized
community events like a people’s tribunal against police brutality,
the topic was not only of interest to the media, but also became “a
kitchen-table dinner discussion.”
Oxnard’s concentrated network has been
able to reach a wide audience, but Fresno, whose Latino population is
dispersed across fields and long stretches of highway, has had a tougher time
rallying the same numbers. It also lacks access to pro-bono lawyers, who tend
to be based in bigger cities.
Despite the practical hurdles,
Hernandez said that Fresno still has a decades-long tradition of organizing
Latino, Black and Asian communities against police brutality. The recent spike
in activism sparked by Black Lives Matter has changed little about the way the
police treat protesters, she said. Just as before, people of color have
been cited for disruption far more often than white people, even more
than those waving the confederate flag and shouting, “White lives matter.”
“It’s made very obvious and clear when
a white assailant with weapons is approach by law enforcement in a totally
different fashion than they approach brown people or Black people,” said
Romero. He said it is essential to hold discussions with groups like Black
Lives Matter to develop long-term strategies against police violence.
As Hernandez, Romero and
Osorio rally behind the national slogan “Black Lives Matter,” the
three said that they will continue to bring up the local threats to brown
lives. Linking the struggles, they said, will only strengthen the
solidarity needed to change the daily reality for Valdez’s
son Josiah and his classmates.
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