The Spectator The independent student newspaper of Valdosta State University
by Alex Corbitt
In one of the most recent cases of police brutality a man known as “Africa” was shot five times and killed after being hit with a taser beforehand.
The cops claim that he was reaching for one of their guns because the taser did not work, but Africa was an unarmed, homeless and disabled man who should have posed no threat to six cops at the scene. Not only did the officers attack him, but they dragged him out of his tent, corralled him and tased him while three of the officers appeared to be on top of him, yet did not handcuff him during this entire procedure.
The fact that they did not handcuff Africa, when in the video you can clearly see a homeless woman who picks up one of the police officer’s batons immediately get handcuffed, effectively shows that this was not normal.
They seemed to attack Africa with extreme prejudice.
Another unsettling fact about this whole incident is that the police were wearing body-cams during the whole ordeal; yet both these cameras and the surveillance footage have both been unreleased and unable to be seen to the public, possibly meaning that this footage could hold the truth about what really happened that day.
The death of Africa shows just how unprofessional and unorthodox the police can be, since an unarmed, disabled and homeless man should not have posed such a threat that he needed to be shot while still on the ground. This really raises a few questions about police conduct, and if an unarmed and disabled man can be shot for “he-said, she-said” speculation, when the other side of the argument is already dead, what does that really say about what the police can do? Do we want a legal system where things like this can get so far out of hand, or can we do better?
Yeah, this has actually been the norm for the last 200 years or so, its only now with viral-internet that people are starting to realize its imminence. Remember, in the 1800s police used to massacre factory workers just for trying to organize to get basic rights, even though police were allowed to have unions.
And before that, the earliest model for policing in America was the slave patrols, which became city garrisons and night police for controlling/spying on the movement of blacks and immigrants along the colonies. Modern Racial Profiling is the product of racially-focused law enforcement groups in the American South. Since the passing of agricultural (slave plantation economies), the focus of law enforcement has been to industrial urbanization for constricting black mobility…Our modern “War on Drugs” in conjunction with prison system, is basically a modern high tech Plantation economy.
The expansion of Police institutions always coincides with the whims of society’s Elites and the degree of social unrest or size of black populations vs white.
Community Policing is inherently militaristic occupation, its all about surveillance, setting up control grids and checkpoints, and indoctrinating people into accepting State interpenetration into personal life.
Something needs to done, they have been murdering people all over this country for years.