Cross-Posted from WTOP By Michelle Basch
WASHINGTON — The stories of people dissatisfied with the tactics of the D.C. police were at the center of a hearing at Howard University Wednesday night.
“The ACLU and the Washington Lawyers’ Committee have documented vast racial disparities in the arrest rates in D.C.,” said D.C. Councilmember Tommy Wells, who chairs the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, which oversees the Metropolitan Police Department.
“Some of these officers treat the citizens who are black in this community like animals on a daily basis. They jump out on the street and confront us aggressively. They pull us from our vehicles for no good reason at all. They yank at our clothing violently while they search us for contraband,” said Patrice Sulton, with the NAACP’s D.C. branch.
Iman Hadieh, who describes herself as white and Palestinian, says that last Monday she was talking with a bunch of young black friends outside a bar along 14th Street in Northwest when jump-outs — police in unmarked cars — suddenly drove up and searched everyone in the group but her.
“I watched as these Black Americans were stripped of their human and Constitutional rights right in front of God and everybody. This was an all-out assault on the Black male. … I’ve never seen anything like this except in war,” she said.
D.C. police are now testing body cameras that film interactions with the public from an officer’s point of view, but Philip Fornaci, with the Campaign Against Police Abuse, says his group plans to start what they call a “D.C. Cop Watch.”
“We encourage residents to film the police themselves, to turn the videotapes and cameras into tools of self-defense. We’re creating a D.C. Cop Watch website where people can post those videos,” he says.
“What I’d love to see is a [police] chief that’s willing to think outside the box. That’s willing to start thinking about, ‘how do we engage in relationships with the community that are positive, that build trust?,'” D.C. Councilmember David Grosso said at the hearing.
“My staff won’t let me tell you that I think we ought to get rid of guns in the city, and that police shouldn’t have guns, so I’m not going to tell you that,” Grosso added, to some applause from the audience.
The hearing will reconvene at 11:30 a.m. on Monday, Oct. 27 at the Wilson Building, where Police Chief Cathy Lanier and other members of the police department are scheduled to testify.
This “controversial” art work by Mary Englebreit inspired a Facebook campaign.
During dire times, humans seem to have a natural inclination toward the arts as a mechanism to relieve the pressure of feelings otherwise incommutable. Whether we’re referring to the practices of the ancients to perform dance and song for their gods in exchange for blessings, or the sorrow songs passionately sung by enslaved Black people to convey their shackled inner lives and yearnings for freedom, art has been the medium people have turned to time and time again to give substance to that which can’t be said.
However, the so-called ‘cultural elite’, those who live under the impression that legitimate art is only that which is hung in the galleries of lavish neighborhoods, where hundred dollar wines flow like water. The art of this privileged few tries its best to erase the lives of the majority, giving special apathy to those who live on the margins. This is art produced under the delusion of plush fantasy, built upon others’ backs.
Despite the efforts of the upper classes to discourage the production of art that speaks to radically different experiences, where various societal structures are unabashedly named as the forces that cause suffering and notions of taboo are simply done away with. These works of art, where various societal structures are unabashedly identified as forces that cause suffering, have been essential components to movements for social justice; from Harlem Renaissance artists boldly proclaiming that “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.” , to writers living during the Civil Rights/Black Power era, such as Lorraine Hansberry, who actively chose to depict Black people’s lives without relying upon misinformed notions of Black humanity to give their works zest. Arts, in all of its manifestations, have pulled movements for change in directions that would have otherwise been inaccessible, because works of art constructed with an abundance of integrity and technical skill can activate people’s imaginations in ways that speeches and lectures can’t.
To not give those artists committed to liberatory struggle as well as the production of quality works of art credit is detriment to cultivating a world where people are able to creatively live as their entire selves. Artists dedicated to these missions are extremely reliable for capturing experiences that would otherwise decay into vague recollections and dust. To deny the contributions of these artists is to erase skillful encapsulations of human reaction to social phenomena.
Beginning with the writers, a poem entitled not an elegy for Michael Brown, by award winning poet Danez Smith, begins with the line, “I am sick of writing this poem”, and goes on to question the masses commitment to justice for Brown and other slain Black youth. In this same literary vein, various DC-area poets contributed to the development of Dear Ferguson – A DC Community Poem, searingly read by internationally renowned DC based spoken word artist Pages Matam. Both poems add compelling perspectives and fresh language to the discourse surrounding the events continuing to erupt in Ferguson.
Wallace lying face down in front of the ‘LOVE’ sculpture, wearing a ripped, bloody T-shirt. A young person holding a sign reading ‘Call Us By Our Names’ stands next to his body.
In Philadelphia’s iconic LOVE park, two actors, Lee Edward Colston and Keith Wallace recreated Brown’s last moments right in front of the park’s eponymous ‘LOVE’ sculpture. By having Wallace wear a white T-shirt with holes resembling bloodied gunshot wounds torn into the back while lying face down and motionless for an hour, the two artists received mixed messages from spectators; from those in respectful awe of the artists’ creativity to those who degraded the pieces message to pure spectacle by having their portraits taken in front of Wallace’s still body.
Within the musical realm, a deluge of tracks have been released by artists in various genres and all levels of fame. Releasing an intensely emotional track alongside a very vulnerable statement on the nature of living as a Black man in America, rapper J. Cole’s track Be Free is a somber conveyance of a simple desire for a liberty most African-American’s will never experience in today’s world. Getting to the root of the Ferguson community’s, and by extension all Black people engaged in struggle against the state, frustration, Lauryn Hill unveiled the melancholy Black Rage. Tenderly singing lines such as, “Black rage is founded on two-thirds a person”, a reference to the Dred Scott Case of 1857, Hill centers the history of Black people being dehumanized, abused, and exploited, revealing the historical context of the Ferguson community’s rage.
Are We Really Free? Are We Really Equal?, 2014. Via Tumblr, drawsandcries.tumblr.com
In the city of Ferguson itself, a Before I Die wall was constructed by a group of teachers in hopes that the community would use the artpiece to support their efforts in imagining a future without the realities that led to Michael Brown’s death. And, in their calls for acts of solidarity, the people of Ferguson requested those capable of organizing street theatre performances join them on the ground, hinting at an abundance of artwork created, and in production, by Ferguson community members themselves.
Events marking the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington are taking place across the country. Illinois State University students are organizing a series of performances to pay tribute to Bayard Rustin, an organizer of the 1963 march. In Detroit, where Martin Luther King, Jr. originally delivered a version of his “I Have a Dream” speech, thousands gathered for a march earlier this summer. Now, that energy is coming to Washington, DC, site of the historic march and rally. Several days of events kick off this weekend. Marchers will gather Saturday at the Lincoln Memorial to protest against a number of civil rights issues that persist: the attack on voter rights, racial profiling, poverty and discrimination. Local activists are organizing to have a share in the weekend’s events, and they hope to address racial profiling within DC law enforcement, which they say is part of the “New Jim Crow.” They are planning two feeder marches from opposite ends of the city, and hope to bring national attention to racial inequalities in the Nation’s Capital. Laura Lising, one of the group’s organizers, explained to FSRN why the group was formed and how they are plugging in their campaign to the March:
LISING: Well I think there has been a new life breathed into the march by the anger around Trayvon Martin’s murder and the acquittal of Zimmerman, despite the clear fact that he was the murderer. And so people are going to be going down there, not to just celebrate this event that happened 50 years ago, but to demand an end to continuing racist practices. And so we see ourselves in that spirit. Most of us, all of us who are involved in organizing were out for Trayvon, night after night after the Zimmerman acquittal happened… But we want to address local issues as well, and we bring the issue of racial profiling in DC to the national stage, and this is an amazing opportunity to do so.
The group of activists are united behind putting an “end to racial profiling.” They have been holding public meetings in neighborhoods across DC to share the findings of two studies published in July, one by the Washington Lawyers Committee and another by the American Civil Liberties Union. Both reports show a pattern of racial profiling by DC law enforcement. The reports look at overall arrest rates, and the ACLU’s study focuses on racial disparities for non-violent offenses, particularly marijuana arrests. The study revealed that African Americans in Washington, DC are eight times more likely to be arrested for a marijuana offense, despite near equal usage among black and white communities. Stuart Anderson, founder of the non-profit organization Family and Friends of Incarcerated People (FFOIP) said he began organizing when he himself was imprisoned.
ANDERSON: I started working with fathers in 1993, inside Lorton. When they closed Lorton, the onus of incarceration, the cost of incarceration was shifted from the city, from the state, or from the federal onto the backs of families.
Anderson said that creates a vicious cycle that weakens families and communities. His organization provides support and training to the children of those behind bars; children that Anderson says are at a higher risk of being incarcerated themselves.
ANDERSON: There are over 1.7 million children of people who are incarcerated in the United States right now today. And of those children, approximately half of them are under the age of 10.
Anderson’s group and other local organizations, are planning a rally for this evening, and will join the larger national contingent on Saturday to highlight ongoing problems with racial profiling. Other local leaders expressed skepticism that their voices would be included in the national program of events. Damian Smith, a DC artist and activist, echoed recent remarks by Cornel West that someone as outspoken as Dr. King would not be invited to speak at the march today.
SMITH: Martin Luther King would talk about extra-judicial assassinations. You know why I know Martin Luther King would talk about drones and extra-judicial assassinations? Because in his time when the war of his time was taking place he spoke at great risk to his own personal reputation about that war.
Like the organizers behind the original March in 1963, the coalition of local groups demands concrete policy change, including oversight of DC’s police department practices that criminalize African American youth. They plan to hold an open mic and neighborhood forum commemorating the original march date on August 28, the same day President Obama is scheduled to give a speech on race and economic injustice from the Lincoln Memorial.
On the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington, we gathered and marched to draw attention to racial profiling in DC. We marched to the Lincoln Memorial where we joined tens of thousands from across the country.
Fifty years ago, people demanded an end to Jim Crow and equal rights for all people of color. Today, the struggle continues. Though the old Jim Crow policies of the South are gone, we now see a prison industrial complex that feeds off Black men and women and a “justice” system that denies them basic rights before, during, and after their incarceration.
Racial profiling by police remains one of the worst problems of this system. A new study by the Washington Lawyers’ Committee has provided statistical evidence for what Black and Brown residents of D.C. have learned through bitter experience: extreme racial disparities exist in the pattern of arrests by police.
This study, and the systemic racism it uncovers, is igniting a larger fight against racism in the District. Town-hall meetings are happening around the city to publicize the results of the study and the reactions of the community. As the George Zimmermans of this world continue to get away with murder, it’s our job to fight back against the racist justice system.
No to racial profiling!
No to mass incarceration!
No to racism!
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