Liberty Can't Breathe

By Biko Agozino

Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies,

Virginia Tech

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Firing four officers for killing unarmed, handcuffed, and non-resisting George Floyd while witnesses videoed the lynching and pleaded in vain for the officers to stop the assault was not enough to put out the fire of outrage. Not even arresting them and trying them would be enough especially given that the police union sought their reinstatement under the assumption that police brutality is business as usual. 

Washington Post and The Guardian reported that the police killed 2.5 white people for every African American they killed in the US. Police brutality is not a problem only for African Americans. Outraged white people also join the protests knowing that it could be them next or that injustice is an affront to all. The sorcerer's apprentice who concocts diarrhea cannot hide his own rear in the sky, according to an Igbo proverb. We just want to live like everybody else but for so many reasons, we just can't breathe.

Trump failed in leadership when he 'violated' Twitter rules against the 'glorification of violence' after he tweeted a threat that "looting comes before shooting". Trump did not call for the stopping of protesters who are armed with automatic rifles, confederate flags, and nazi swastikas, marching against only Democratic Party state governors enforcing lockdowns like all governors under COVID-19, he encouraged them with multiple tweets: 'LIBERATE MINNEAPOLIS ... MICHIGAN ... VIRGINIA and defend the great 2nd amendment right to bear arms'. The 'Meanerpolis' police officers had 18 previous police brutality complaints against them but continued to keep their jobs with impunity. Trump apparently wished that mean US city authorities would become meaner and go beyond  the 'homeycidal' kneeling against a man's neck, stomach and feet and preferably shoot innocent citizens for exercising the democratic right to freedom of expression. 

Trump thugged out when he reassured the police that they did not need to worry about hurting drug cartel suspects during arrests. Trump earlier called on NFL team owners to kick out athletes that he called sons of female dogs for taking a knee during the national anthem to protest lethal police brutality against innocent people in the US. George Floyd was neither a drug cartel suspect nor was he taking a knee, his neck was crushed by the knees of police officers who ignored his plea to 'please stop' for nine minutes. George Floyd was a deeply religious mentor of young people who spent his life in Houston trying to end violence in the predominantly African American community of the Third Ward. The police officer who continued kneeling on his neck (with a hand in his pocket as if wanking off with sadistic pleasure over the killing) even after he was lifeless worked at the same nightclub with Floyd but allegedly preferred to pepper-spray the patrons to control them, probably against the objections of Floyd. Ordering heavily armed military to 'dominate the streets' was not a power given to the government in the Constitution by 'We The People'.

Whoever called the police to arrest him for passing a suspected fake $20 note (that he may not have known was fake or may not even be fake) needs to tell the world what was alleged to the police on that call, how could they assert that he was 'incredibly' intoxicated? Instead of guarding their stores with huge rifles, why did they not join the protesters from all racial backgrounds against the unlawful killing of one of their customers? Was it like Amy Cooper, the unleashed dog-walker in Central Park who hoaxed about being threatened by an African American male, Christian Cooper, no relation? Thanks to Steve Jobs and all other smart phone inventors and CCTV monitors for arming the society with digital witnesses that never lie to enable the Black Panther tradition of policing cops by the community to remain alive and credible.

Policing emerged in America from the slave-catching posse of the 19^th century and so it is hardly surprising that Grand Juries rarely indict white police officers who kill African Americans even today. Since Indigenous Peoples went on for thousands of years without the repressive institution of the police until Robert Peel imposed the fetish in 1829 to help the public to control the fear of the increasing population of freed Africans formerly enslaved in the UK and those still enslaved on the plantations in the Caribbean, and enthusiastically adopted by the US to replace slave patrol posse, we can abolish the police and redirect their huge funds to community safety measures decolonize the police and prisons with civic education and not incarceration; with reparative justice and not criminal justice.

"The Pentagon's budget for fiscal year 2020—$738 billion—was the "largest on record" and came "at the expense of healthcare, education, infrastructure spending, and public health research." – Congress Woman Barbara Lee

 

"For years, our government has failed to invest in programs that actually keep our country safe and healthy," said Lee. "By over-prioritizing the Pentagon and military solutions, our country is drastically underprepared for any crisis that needs a non-military solution."

 

African rulers should go beyond the shedding of crocodile tears over the lynching of George Floyd and recognize that the police forces imposed by colonizers were designed to kill Africans in genocidal proportions. Decolonize the police and prisons in Africa!

Any grown ass man, six feet two inches tall, armed to serve and protect the people, who tells the Grand Jury that he shot someone dead because he felt ‘like a five year old struggling with Hulk Hogan’ and that he saw the unarmed college-bound teenage Michael Brown as a ‘demon’ must have been drunk on absolute power or on the prejudicial fear that forced him to cowardly quit his job afterwards.

The official toxicology report on Darren Wilson did not test his blood for ethanol but indicated an abnormally high level of creatinine that researchers say is usually an indication of alcohol in the blood.

Given that 86% of the 179 people who were killed by New York police officers since that of Amadou Diallo in 1999 were colored people like Eric Garner but with the grand injury of hardly any indictments by Grand Juries, Liberty Can’t Breathe!

No sane or moral society can breathe easily when the air is frequently polluted with the race-class-gender articulation of repression by agents of authoritarian populism. Sadly, moral entrepreneurs continue to support police homey-cide disproportionately against African American men because ‘when you carry the corpse of another, it feels like the carcass of a dog’, according to an Igbo proverb. 

Michael Vick’s dogs surely got more justice than poor African Americans because if the police lynched a dog the way they lynched George Floyd, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, etc, etc, there would be more outrage.

The war on drugs must end so police officers cannot claim as ‘probable cause’, the testimony by Darren Wilson that Mike Brown’s stockings had the images of green marijuana leaves painted on them. Marijuana remains medicinal and much safer than alcohol and tobacco that kill hundreds of thousands annually while 800,000 Americans are arrested yearly for marijuana possession but no one ever died from marijuana use. No one should die from mere allegations of fraud while pleading with his co-worker of many years of nightclub security job:

"It's my face man
I didn't do nothing serious man
please
please
please I can't breathe
please man
please somebody
please man
I can't breathe
I can't breathe
please
(inaudible)
man can't breathe, my face
just get up
I can't breathe
please (inaudible)
I can't breathe sh*t
I will
I can't move
mama
mama
I can't
my knee
my nuts
I'm through
I'm through
I'm claustrophobic
my stomach hurt
my neck hurts
everything hurts
some water or something
please
please
I can't breathe officer
don't kill me
they gon' kill me man
come on man
I cannot breathe
I cannot breathe
they gon' kill me
they gon' kill me
I can't breathe
I can't breathe
please sir
please
please
please I can't breathe"

And they claimed that he was resisting arrest! Was Elijah McClain also resisting arrest when he was lynched by officers despite his politeness and appeals to their common humanity?

Decolonize Policing! Decolonize Prisons! Demilitarize the earth. Let your people go! Protest!