Once again, the hour of tragedy strikes for another Black family, in another Black community caught in the grip of the pandemic crises of COVID-19 and racism.
First of all, we want to express our solidarity with the traumatized family of Jacob Blake, and the protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Sometime after 5 p.m. on August 23, Jacob was returning to his car, unarmed, after attempting to break up a fight between two women. The police arriving, guns drawn, were pleaded with by bystanders not to shoot, yet they shot Blake seven times as he was opening his car door.
They shot him while his 3-, 5- and 8-year-old children were screaming. Blake was taken to the hospital where he is still struggling for his life and his father has also revealed that Jacob is paralyzed from the waist down.
Protesters gathered at the site of the shooting, agitated by the militarized aggressive actions of the Kenosha Police Department, and began to express their anger. They chased cops away and some police cars were burned. This uprising was greeted by SWAT team trucks and rioting cops who were resisted by people with their arms locked, standing firm and chanting “No Justice No Peace!”
PHOTO: ALLEN HARRIS
It is the same old tired pattern of state-sanctioned racist violence where the police wantonly murder us in the streets and when our people in justified anger rebel they call out the militarized police, the National Guard and set the stage for mass arrests with a curfew.
What should be our response?
To put more people in the streets in organized protests. We don’t reject rebellion, we call on all the various strands of the people’s movement, every friend and ally we have in the struggle for justice to join with the protesters in Kenosha and throughout this country to take it to the streets.
Here are our demands:
We demand the National Guard that Wisconsin governor Tony Evers deployed to brutalize protesters be recalled.
We demand the Kenosha cop who shot Jacob Blake be immediately arrested, charged, and convicted.
We demand real police accountability through an all-elected Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) establishing community control of the police, shifting police funding to essential public services like education and regulating police to address the real demands for safety of the people.
We must protest until all the demands of the movement are met, until we have our inalienable democratic demand to determine who polices our communities and how our communities are policed.
No justice, no peace! No racist police!
(NAARPR) National Alliance Against Racist and Political
Repression –
www.naarpr.org
