Then in February 2012, a vigilante, George Zimmerman, killed Trayvon Martin.
Two years ago today the acquittal of George Zimmerman re-kindled a movement against impunity for police and vigilante killers. Yet, despite the outrage over the state’s protection of Zimmerman, and the spotlight on impunity of police who summarily execute Black people on camera, the killing continues with shocking regularity. And the impunity of police, and even vigilantes, proceeds apace.
A cornerstone of police impunity is the failure of the federal government to require reliable and accurate reporting. Even organizations that have the resources to amass and disseminate the data, still must rely on police accounts of the killings that invariably justify their mayhem. Impunity breathes life into chronic assaults by cops and the state’s privatized killers. In May and June 2012, Operation Ghetto Storm (OGS) documented 30 Black people killed per month by police, security guards and vigilantes. In May 2015, The Guardian’s website counted 26 killed by police alone. Their count for June 2015 is 19. If they followed OGS methodology to include vigilantes and security guards, the total for June 2015 would be at least 28 or one every 25.7 hours for the month.
Initially enraged by the Florida police’s refusal to arrest Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin, we began to collect names of murdered Black people to demonstrate that Trayvon’s killing was systemic. We found that in 2012, police, security guards and vigilantes killed a total of 313 Black people. Divide the number of hours in a year by 313 and you get one every 28 hours. We called the Report Operation Ghetto Storm (OGS) because the name encapsulates our conclusion that the mission, white supremacist state policies and institutions, high tech military hardware, and military mind-set that characterized the invasion of Iraq also sustain the occupation and war on Black and Brown communities inside the U.S. Security guards and vigilantes, protected by “stand-you-ground”, “self-defense”, the “home as castle doctrine” and other laws, join the 18,000 law enforcement agencies employing approximately 250,000 police and sheriffs in the occupation and containment of Black communities.
White supremacy is much more than the ideology or ranting of a right-wing extremist, admirer or member of organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. White supremacy has flowed in the mainstream since the beginning of U.S. history. According to Elizabeth Martinez, an early member of the Black Southern Freedom Movement organization, SNCC and Latina activist,
“White Supremacy is a web of interlocking, mutually-reinforcing institutions – economic, military, legal, educational, religious and cultural – that propel a system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples of color by white peoples and nations for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power, and privilege.”
The system of slavery enlisted white settlers – including those who owned no land – to control the lives of enslaved Africans. The earliest “law enforcement institutions” or police forces grew from networks of white people whose task it was to contain and control enslaved Black people, especially those who attempted escape. After the Civil War and end of Reconstruction, between 1877 and 1950, white supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, civilian mobs, local sheriffs and police colluded to enforce sharecropping – different from slavery in name only – and to maintain Jim Crow – de jure apartheid and denial of citizenship. They institutionalized a system of omnipresent surveillance, prison plantations and more than 4000 lynchings to terrorize Black people into submission and to re-entrench white supremacist power.
While this state-sanctioned terror was centered in the South, many Northern and Western states were sites of lynching and all practiced some form of slavery and then Jim Crow. White riots or pogroms against Black people mobilized white mobs in many northern cities to contain the Black people who had migrated North during and after World War I. Local police throughout the country enforced ordinances that barred Black people from living in the “Sundown towns” where they worked. Despite numerous proposals, the federal government never passed an anti-lynching law or any other legislation to protect Black people against the excesses of police and white citizen attacks. Rather, when Black people’s tradition of resistance to white supremacy gained strength in the 1960’s, the federal government launched COINTELPRO. Under that program, dissent was criminalized, leaders and militants were assassinated or incarcerated and their activities were disrupted.
As early as 1960, in an essay published by Esquire, James Baldwin explained the mission of the “modern” police in Harlem, New York: “… the only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive….. Their very presence is an insult, and it would be, even if they spent their entire day feeding gumdrops to children. They represent the force of the white world, and that world’s real intentions are, simply, for that world’s criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man corralled up here, in his place. The badge, the gun in the holster, and the swinging club make vivid what will happen should his rebellion become overt.”
In 2013, the New York State Senate heard testimony that the former NYPD Commissioner Kelly told the NY State governor that his aim was to instill fear in young Black and Latino men every time they left home. A recording made at a Brooklyn Police Station showed that Kelly’s views permeate the NYPD: “If you get too big of a crowd there, you know, they’re going to get out of control, and they’re going to think that they own the block. They don’t own the block, alright? They might live there, but we own the block, alright? We own the streets here.”
In Part 2 of this series we’ll investigate the enduring ideological and structural underpinnings of police state occupation and control of Black communities.
Arlene Eisen is the author of the study called “Operation Ghetto Storm: 2012 Annual Report on the Extrajudicial Killings of 313 Black People by Police, Security Guards and Vigilantes” (Also known as the #every28hours Report) originally published by Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. The revised edition is available at www.operationghettostorm.org. She can be reached at arlene_eisen@sbcglobal.net
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1 Comment
So the idea is then to empower Black people so Whitey can get a taste of his own medicine. It’s just getting so darn hard (in this age of, “I identify as a Black Native American Transgender Shaman even though I’m an Irish Setter.”) ….you know, like, some white people think like Black people, and some Black people think like white people…perhaps that makes them all Grey people. Hey Black people, you’ve got the “Rambo Advantage” you know. White people drew first blood. Apparently you’ve got the entire planet on your side except for a handful of geriatric, racist white billionaires and their minions. I say, “REVOLT now!”. Take back your streets from the evil clutches of “law and order”. Whose law!? Whose order!? I say “OUR law. OUR order.”. Hell yeah! Where do I sign up?
Sorry. I got a little carried away with the whole self-loathing because I was born a white guy thing. Can I have a black friend? Just one? Is that possible, or does my white privilege and my inbred supremecism completely eliminate that possibility? How about a slice from your own desert rack? WHITE SHAMING IS BULLYING AND MUST BE STOPPED (chanted 7654 times per hour by our extremely well paid cultural mouthpieces).
P.S. The cops are f$#%ing with everybody.