[Peace-discuss] Fw: [socialistdiscussion] Oscar Grant/Mehserle

[David Johnson]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: John Reimann 
To: socialist discussion 
Sent: Saturday, November 06, 2010 10:59 AM
Subject: [socialistdiscussion] Oscar Grant/Mehserle


  
Johannes Mehserle, the cop who shot and killed a young black man (Oscar Grant) while he (Grant) was lying face down on a train platform was sentenced yesterday. He got two years, meaning that with time served and time off for "good behavior" he'll be out in a few months. There was a protest in downtown Oakland yesterday. Afterwards, a small group of about 150 marched through downtown and into a residential neighborhood about a mile away. I went with them for part of the way and then headed home. What happened next was that the cops - hundreds of them from Oakland and many surrounding cities, all dressed in riot gear - surrounded the protesters and hemmed them in on one block. The newscasters caught it all. The crowd - mostly young people - were just trapped on this one block for over an hour. Sonja and I walked down towards there, but about a block or so away the cops had the area surrounded. They wouldn't let anybody in or out. In fact, Sonja and I were separated and she made the mistake of trying to walk along one street to find me and almost got stopped and arrested. After a couple of hours the cops arrested the whole group.

The newscaster on tv then went on about how the previous Oscar Grant protest had ended in the protesters smashing store windows downtown and then he asked why would they possibly want to attack people's homes - something that never happened. He called them a "violent mob" which was an outright lie.

So here's the scorecard: First a cop murders a young black man in cold blood. Then he gets a two year sentence, meaning he'll serve about a year. Then the protesters are arrested. Then the news lies about the whole thing.

Justice and democracy, American style.

John

-- 
"Poems don't belong to those who write them; they belong to those who need them" - from movie "Il Postino"
Check out:
http://www.iww.org/en/blog/1411
http://worldwidesocialist.net/blog/



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