The Niggerization of America

"Against a historical backdrop of a people who have been so terrorized, traumatized and stigmatized that we have been taught to be scared, intimidated, always afraid, distrustful of one another and disrespectful of one another.

When you niggerized you unsafe,unprotected,subject to random violence,hated for who you are and you become so scared that you defer to the powers that be and are willing to consent to your own domination"

Cornell West

Monday, July 23, 2012

Anaheim shooting: 2 cops on leave, 1 dead, 5 arrested

ANAHEIM – Two police officers have been placed on paid leave after one of them fatally shot an unarmed man as he attempted to flee on foot in a residential alleyway, police Chief John Welter said Sunday.
The shooting victim, 25-year-old Manuel Angel Diaz of Santa Ana, was pronounced dead at a local hospital at 7 p.m. Saturday after being shot in the alley a few blocks northeast of downtown Anaheim.
Police described Diaz as a "documented gang member," and said he was shot after the officers saw three men near a car in the 600 block of Anna Drive, near La Palma Avenue and State College Boulevard. Believing the activity to be suspicious, the officers approached the vehicle, and all three men fled on foot.

The officers chased Diaz and observed him throwing unidentified objects onto rooftops as he ran, Welter said. What led one of the officers to shoot Diaz remained under investigation Sunday, Welter said.
Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait said he would be asking California's attorney general to assist in the investigation.
"I'm asking for a full investigation," Tait said at a Sunday news conference. "Transparency is essential. Whatever the truth is, we will own it."

The dead man's sister, Lupe Diaz, said Sunday that her brother was "just hanging out with friends" before the shooting.
"There is no explanation," Diaz said. "It's not fair."

The Orange County District Attorney's Office already has launched its own investigation independent of Anaheim police's, said spokeswoman Susan Schroeder, which is standard protocol for officer-involved shootings that lead to injury or death. At the conclusion of its investigation, the D.A. will either file criminal charges or explain why no charges were filed, she said.
"We don't release any comment until we're done investigating and release that full report," Schroeder said.

As Anaheim city officials held the news conference Sunday afternoon, demonstrators coalesced in the lobby of the Anaheim Police Department headquarters on Harbor Boulevard, chanting messages such as "No justice, no peace," "Justice for Manuel" and "Cops, pigs, murderers" in front of a row of five police officers.

Anaheim police "are not judge, jury and executioner. Nobody is given their due process," said demonstrator Theresa Smith, a community organizer whose son, Caesar Ray Cruz, was fatally shot by Anaheim police in 2010.
"My heart is breaking right now for the mother who lost her son last night," she said. "I'm really hoping we can resolve this in a civil manner."
Sunday's news conference came a day after near-rioting by Anaheim residents protesting what they characterized as a series of senseless, unnecessary officer-involved shooting deaths in Anaheim in recent years.

On Saturday, as demonstrators gathered at the scene of the shooting, Anaheim officers fired bean bags and pepper spray into a crowd of protestors. Welter said Sunday the move was in response to "some known gang members" who had begun throwing bottles and rocks at officers.
Also, Welter said a K-9 police dog accidentally escaped from an officer's vehicle and rushed into the crowd, biting demonstrators in an attack caught on video.

At least one person received medical treatment; it was unclear if anyone else was injured, the chief said Sunday.

"Officers in this situation can't retreat," Welter said, defending the officers' decision to fire at the demonstrators. "If we would have abandoned the scene, we would not be doing our job."
Welter said some in the crowd seemed to be inciting the violence. Five people were arrested – two unidentified minors from Anaheim and Placentia, plus:
•Gabriel Calderon, 20, of Brea, described by police as a "documented gang member" and arrested on suspicion of public consumption of alcohol and later booked on suspicion of murder and street terrorism stemming from a May 2012 gang-related homicide in Anaheim.

•Jose Armando Herrera, 26, of San Bernardino, arrested on suspicion of resisting arrest and described as a "documented gang member."
•Jose Jaime Aguilar Lopez, 46, of Anaheim, arrested on suspicion of aggravated assault and the forceful taking of an individual from the custody of an officer.

"I don't have a problem with people exercising their First Amendment rights," Welter said. "I do have a problem when people start throwing bottles and rocks at my officers."
But Welter apologized Sunday for the K-9 dog that escaped.
"We are extremely sorry for the people who were bit," Welter said. "The city will be responsible for all medical bills associated with the dog. The canine officer responsible for the dog is devastated by this."

Also on Saturday night, a trash bin was lit on fire at least three times and rolled into the middle of the street, blocking traffic. Officers removed the bin each time.
Some of that same unrest unfolded again Sunday night. Trash bins were rolled onto the street at least twice, and the fire in one grew so intense that firefighters were called to snuff it out.
On Sunday, city leaders appealed to the community for calm while they continued to look into what happened.
"We will do everything we can to find the truth about what truly happened out there," Anaheim Councilwoman Lorri Galloway said.
Added the mayor: "As with many people, I viewed the events and was very, very concerned with what I saw."

SATURDAY'S SHOOTING

Anaheim's police chief confirmed Sunday the shooting victim on Anna Drive was unarmed. There were no weapons recovered at the scene that could have belonged to Diaz, Welter said.
Welter said he could not immediately confirm how many shots were fired or precisely where Diaz was shot, other than it was in the 700 block of Anna Drive.

The neighborhood surrounding Anna Drive has experienced escalating gang activity, which is why police have been regularly patrolling the area, he said.
Although just one of the two officers shot at Diaz, both were put on paid administrative leave, Welter said. Their identities were not released.
Diaz was taken to a hospital in critical condition, and died at 7 p.m., Anaheim police Sgt. Bob Dunn said. The two other men got away, and the car they were standing next to when the officers approached them was impounded, he said.

A 17-year-old who lives in the neighborhood said she saw the shooting from about 20 feet away. She said Diaz had his back to the officer and was shot in the buttocks area. Diaz went down on his knees, and she said he was struck by another bullet in the head. The other officer handcuffed Diaz, who by then was on the ground and not moving, she added.
"They searched his pockets, and there was a hole in his head, and I saw blood on his face," she said.
(The Register is withholding the girl's name at her family's request, because she is a minor and they are concerned for her safety.)

Police reportedly tried to buy any video taken by witnesses on their cellphones, residents said.
Dunn said he didn't know whether the allegations were true. He said it was unclear whether it's against Anaheim Police Department policy to do so, but said that the agency would investigate.
In the past, Dunn said, officers have asked for cellphone video as evidence, but he said he didn't know of instances where officers would pay for it.
Daisy Gonzalez, 16, who identified herself as Diaz's niece, said her uncle likely ran away from officers when they approached him because of his past experience with law enforcement.
"He (doesn't) like cops. He never liked them because all they do is harass and arrest anyone," Gonzalez said Saturday after lighting a candle for her uncle at the scene of the shooting.

SATURDAY'S MELEE

At the scene of the shooting on Saturday, where about 100 demonstrators had gathered to protest, officers shot bean bags and pepper balls into the crowd after some began throwing rocks and bottles at police.
It wasn't immediately clear whether the officers gave any warning, Dunn said.
Yesenia Rojas, 34, who lives in the neighborhood and knew the man as a "good person," said she was hit by a bean bag, pointing to a red and purple welt on the side of her stomach.
"Why kill this man?" she said.
Rojas said a stroller with her 1-year-old grandson was toppled over and the baby was nearly attacked when the K-9 police dog escaped from its handler.

Throughout the night, police in multiple marked and unmarked squad cars attempted to control the unruly crowd gathered near the shooting scene. Officers cordoned the intersection at East La Palma Avenue and Anna Drive with the same yellow crime-scene tape used by police where the shooting happened.

About 9:30 p.m., an Anaheim police helicopter was observed hovering above the crowd while police on the ground brandished batons and other weapons at the crowd, attempting to keep order.
Some in the crowd reported they had inhaled some of the pepper spray fired by police. Demonstrator Joel Hunt, 21, of Fullerton, who was in the area visiting a friend when the shooting happened, said Saturday night his throat was still burning from the effects of being sprayed.
On Sunday, Elizabeth Aguilar, 19, displayed a welt on her upper right arm where she said she was hit by a bean bag fired by a police officer at close range.

Aguilar said that when the K-9 dog was released on demonstrators, she was struck by a bean bag after trying to hit the dog as it lunged toward a stroller with a baby inside.
Her father was struck three times by bean bags and had to seek treatment at a hospital, she said.
"I thought (the police) are supposed to warn us if they are about to do something like that to clear the crowd," Aguilar said. "But they just started shooting at us.
"I used to look up to the police when I was a kid," she added. "But now I have no respect."

SUNDAY'S PROTEST

On Sunday, about 50 community members and activists staged a march from the scene of the shooting to the Anaheim Police Department's headquarters about two miles away.
Carrying signs that read "Stop the killings" and "You may be next," they entered the front lobby of the police station and chanted through bull horns: "No justice, no peace" and "Shame, shame."
Protesters also created a chalk drawing on the sidewalk outside police headquarters, writing messages such as "Shame on Anaheim P.D."

"I think when you see a community act up like that and lose their fear of police, it's a clear sign that they are angry over an injustice," said demonstrator Doug Kauffman, 24, a Long Beach resident and organizer with the Campaign to Stop Police Violence. "A man was murdered by police on their street. Of course they are angry and are going to protest."
A line of five police officers stood stoically at a doorway that led to the briefing room where Sunday's news conference took place.
Just as the meeting was about to begin, Diaz's family was escorted into the room along with reporters and photographers.
Lupe Diaz, 29, the man's sister, said her brother was unemployed, but had worked in offices and as a general laborer.
"He was a bright soul. Fun. Caring. He'd never hurt a soul," she said. "He had such a big heart."

HISTORY OF COMMUNITY TENSION

Saturday's shooting was the latest by the Anaheim Police Department, which is under scrutiny for several recent officer-involved shootings.
For nearly two years, families of others who have been fatally shot by Anaheim police in recent years have been holding protests at Anaheim police headquarters each Sunday.
Those protests led city officials last month to order an independent investigation of "major police incidents," several of which resulted in suspects being killed.
Galloway said Sunday that city officials were still working to find "a truly independent investigator that can find the truth."
Galloway, who has been on the council for eight years, headed a community initiative that worked to improve conditions in the neighborhood where Saturday's shooting took place.
She said her heart ached when she saw television footage of a police dog overturning a stroller and bean bags being fired at community members.
"I take this very personally because I know many of the people out there and there are a lot of good people in that neighborhood," Galloway said. "And I've also heard their cries about the rampant crime and the need to clean it up.
"I don't know the context of what happened out there yet, and that's why we need to find the truth."

–Staff writer Sean Emery contributed to this story.
Posted by at

The Oppression of Black people and the Crimes of this system

“The young man was shot 41 times while reaching for his wallet”…“the 13-year-old was shot dead in mid-afternoon when police mistook his toy gun for a pistol”… “the unarmed young man, shot by police 50 times, died on the morning of his wedding day”… “the young woman, unconscious from having suffered a seizure, was shot 12 times by police standing around her locked car”… “the victim, arrested for disorderly conduct, was tortured and raped with a stick in the back of the station-house by the arresting officers.”

Does it surprise you to know that in each of the above cases the victim was Black?

If you live in the USA, it almost certainly doesn’t.

Think what that means: that without even being told, you knew these victims of police murder and brutality were Black. Those cases—and the thousands more like them that have occurred just in the past few decades—add rivers of tears to an ocean of pain. And they are symptoms of a larger, still deeper problem.

But some today claim that America is a “post-racial society.” They say the “barriers to Black advancement” have been largely overcome. Many go so far as to put the main blame for the severe problems faced by Black people today on…Black people themselves. Others claim that better education, or more traditional families, or religion, or elections will solve things.

CLICK FULL STORY

2012: A Brave New Dystopia

by Chris Hedges

“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.

We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.



Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement.

Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” Orwell wrote in “1984.” “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”


The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin uses the term “inverted totalitarianism” in his book “Democracy Incorporated” to describe our political system. It is a term that would make sense to Huxley. In inverted totalitarianism, the sophisticated technologies of corporate control, intimidation and mass manipulation, which far surpass those employed by previous totalitarian states, are effectively masked by the glitter, noise and abundance of a consumer society. Political participation and civil liberties are gradually surrendered. The corporation state, hiding behind the smokescreen of the public relations industry, the entertainment industry and the tawdry materialism of a consumer society, devours us from the inside out. It owes no allegiance to us or the nation. It feasts upon our carcass.


The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like Barack Obama, control the uses of science, technology, education and mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television. And, as in “Brave New World,” they use these tools of communication to bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as Wolin writes, “block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, to its total impression.”


The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists, identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a radical left. Prescient social critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky, are banished. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B. The culture, under the tutelage of these corporate courtiers, becomes, as Huxley noted, a world of cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal optimism. We busy ourselves buying products that promise to change our lives, make us more beautiful, confident or successful as we are steadily stripped of rights, money and influence. All messages we receive through these systems of communication, whether on the nightly news or talk shows like “Oprah,” promise a brighter, happier tomorrow. And this, as Wolin points out, is “the same ideology that invites corporate executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but always with a sunny face.” We have been entranced, as Wolin writes, by “continuous technological advances” that “encourage elaborate fantasies of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, actions measured in nanoseconds: a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose denizens are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge.”


Our manufacturing base has been dismantled. Speculators and swindlers have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions from small shareholders who had set aside money for retirement or college. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus and protection from warrantless wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic services, including public education and health care, have been handed over to the corporations to exploit for profit. The few who raise voices of dissent, who refuse to engage in the corporate happy talk, are derided by the corporate establishment as freaks.

Attitudes and temperament have been cleverly engineered by the corporate state, as with Huxley’s pliant characters in “Brave New World.” The book’s protagonist, Bernard Marx, turns in frustration to his girlfriend Lenina:

“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?” he asks.

“I don’t know that you mean. I am free, free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”

He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We have been giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated.

The façade is crumbling. And as more and more people realize that they have been used and robbed, we will move swiftly from Huxley’s “Brave New World” to Orwell’s “1984.” The public, at some point, will have to face some very unpleasant truths. The good-paying jobs are not coming back. The largest deficits in human history mean that we are trapped in a debt peonage system that will be used by the corporate state to eradicate the last vestiges of social protection for citizens, including Social Security. The state has devolved from a capitalist democracy to neo-feudalism. And when these truths become apparent, anger will replace the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity. The bleakness of our post-industrial pockets, where some 40 million Americans live in a state of poverty and tens of millions in a category called “near poverty,” coupled with the lack of credit to save families from foreclosures, bank repossessions and bankruptcy from medical bills, means that inverted totalitarianism will no longer work.

We increasingly live in Orwell’s Oceania, not Huxley’s The World State. Osama bin Laden plays the role assumed by Emmanuel Goldstein in “1984.” Goldstein, in the novel, is the public face of terror. His evil machinations and clandestine acts of violence dominate the nightly news. Goldstein’s image appears each day on Oceania’s television screens as part of the nation’s “Two Minutes of Hate” daily ritual. And without the intervention of the state, Goldstein, like bin Laden, will kill you. All excesses are justified in the titanic fight against evil personified.

The psychological torture of Pvt. Bradley Manning—who has now been imprisoned for seven months without being convicted of any crime—mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith at the end of “1984.” Manning is being held as a “maximum custody detainee” in the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23 of every 24 hours alone. He is denied exercise. He cannot have a pillow or sheets for his bed. Army doctors have been plying him with antidepressants. The cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo have been replaced with refined Orwellian techniques, largely developed by government psychologists, to turn dissidents like Manning into vegetables. We break souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. Now we can all be taken to Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to become compliant and harmless. These “special administrative measures” are regularly imposed on our dissidents, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, who was imprisoned under similar conditions for three years before going to trial. The techniques have psychologically maimed thousands of detainees in our black sites around the globe. They are the staple form of control in our maximum security prisons where the corporate state makes war on our most politically astute underclass—African-Americans. It all presages the shift from Huxley to Orwell.

“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling,” Winston Smith’s torturer tells him in “1984.” “Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

The noose is tightening. The era of amusement is being replaced by the era of repression. Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails and phone records turned over to the government. We are the most monitored and spied-on citizenry in human history. Many of us have our daily routine caught on dozens of security cameras. Our proclivities and habits are recorded on the Internet. Our profiles are electronically generated. Our bodies are patted down at airports and filmed by scanners. And public service announcements, car inspection stickers, and public transportation posters constantly urge us to report suspicious activity. The enemy is everywhere.

Those who do not comply with the dictates of the war on terror, a war which, as Orwell noted, is endless, are brutally silenced. The draconian security measures used to cripple protests at the G-20 gatherings in Pittsburgh and Toronto were wildly disproportionate for the level of street activity. But they sent a clear message—DO NOT TRY THIS. The FBI’s targeting of antiwar and Palestinian activists, which in late September saw agents raid homes in Minneapolis and Chicago, is a harbinger of what is to come for all who dare defy the state’s official Newspeak. The agents—our Thought Police—seized phones, computers, documents and other personal belongings. Subpoenas to appear before a grand jury have since been served on 26 people. The subpoenas cite federal law prohibiting “providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.” Terror, even for those who have nothing to do with terror, becomes the blunt instrument used by Big Brother to protect us from ourselves.

“Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?” Orwell wrote. “It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself.”

Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.”

The Police Murder of Tarika Wilson

On January 4, a police SWAT squad broke into the home of Tarika Wilson in Lima Ohio. They shot Tarika dead and wounded her 14 month old son Sincere. The vocal outrage among Lima’s Black community has revealed a long and bitter history of police racism and brutalization.

LIMA, Ohio — The air of Southside is foul-smelling and thick, filled with fumes from an oil refinery and diesel smoke from a train yard, with talk of riot and recrimination, and with angry questions: Why is Tarika Wilson dead? Why did the police shoot her baby?

“This thing just stinks to high heaven, and the police know it,” said Jason Upthegrove, president of the Lima chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. “We’re not asking for answers anymore. We’re demanding them.”

Some facts are known. A SWAT team arrived at Ms. Wilson’s rented house in the Southside neighborhood early in the evening of Jan. 4 to arrest her companion, Anthony Terry, on suspicion of drug dealing, said Greg Garlock, Lima’s police chief. Officers bashed in the front door and entered with guns drawn, said neighbors who saw the raid.

Moments later, the police opened fire, killing Ms. Wilson, 26, and wounding her 14-month-old son, Sincere, Chief Garlock said. One officer involved in the raid, Sgt. Joseph Chavalia, a 31-year veteran, has been placed on paid administrative leave.

Beyond these scant certainties, there is mostly rumor and rage. The police refuse to give any account of the raid, pending an investigation by the Ohio attorney general.

Black people in Lima, from the poorest citizens to religious and business leaders, complain that rogue police officers regularly stop them without cause, point guns in their faces, curse them and physically abuse them. They say the shooting of Ms. Wilson is only the latest example of a long-running pattern of a few white police officers treating African-Americans as people to be feared.

“There is an evil in this town,” said C. M. Manley, 68, pastor of New Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church. “The police harass me. They harass my family. But they know that if something happens to me, people will burn down this town.”

Internal investigations have uncovered no evidence of police misconduct, Chief Garlock said. Still, local officials recognize that the perception of systemic racism has opened a wide chasm.

Surrounded by farm country known for its German Catholic roots and conservative politics, Lima is the only city in the immediate area with a significant African-American population. Black families, including Mr. Manley’s, came to Lima in the 1940s and ’50s for jobs at what is now the Husky Energy Lima Refinery and other factories along the city’s southern border. Blacks make up 27 percent of the city’s 38,000 people, Mr. Berger said.

Many blacks still live downwind from the refinery. Many whites on the police force commute from nearby farm towns, where a black face is about as common as a twisty road. Of Lima’s 77 police officers, two are African-American.

“If I have any frustration when I retire, it’ll be that I wasn’t able to bring more racial balance to the police force,” said Chief Garlock, who joined the force in 1971 and has been chief for 11 years.

Tarika Wilson had six children, ages 8 to 1. They were fathered by five men, all of whom dealt drugs, said Darla Jennings, Ms. Wilson’s mother. But Ms. Wilson never took drugs nor allowed them to be sold from her house, said Tania Wilson, her sister.

“She took great care of those kids, without much help from the fathers, and the community respected her for that,” said Ms. Wilson’s uncle, John Austin.

Tarika Wilson’s companion, Mr. Terry, was the subject of a long-term drug investigation, Chief Garlock said, but Ms. Wilson was never a suspect.

During the raid, Ms. Wilson’s youngest son, Sincere, was shot in the left shoulder and hand. Three weeks after the shooting, he remains in fair condition, said a spokeswoman at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus.

Within minutes of the shooting, at around 8 p.m., 50 people gathered outside Ms. Wilson’s home and shouted obscenities at the police, neighbors said. The next day, 300 people gathered at the house and marched two miles to City Hall.
“The police can say whatever they want,” Tania Wilson said. “Even before they shot my sister, I didn’t trust them.”

More Than Half of ‘Armed’ Suspects Shot by LA Sheriff Were Not Armed

A new study has found that in most shootings in which Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies fired at suspects who appeared to be reaching for a weapon, the suspect turned out to be unarmed. And in the last six years, all but two of those people shot were black and Latino, according to the study by the Police Assessment Resource Center for LA County Supervisors.
Over the past six years, approximately 61 percent of all suspects shot because an officer believed they were armed were confirmed to be unarmed at the time of the shooting. A little more than half of those suspects were holding an object such as a cell phone or sunglasses that was believed by deputies to be a possible firearm.
The analysis also found that 61 percent of those shot at by deputies were Latino, 29 percent black and 10 percent white. The LA Times provides some more context: “Waistband shootings” are particularly controversial because the justification for the shootings can conceivably be fabricated after the fact, according to the county monitor’s report. The monitor was careful to point out that the report wasn’t making the case deputies were being dishonest, simply that the spike in those shootings left the department vulnerable to criticism.
Merrick Bobb, special counsel to the county Board of Supervisors, also found a rise in shootings in which deputies didn’t see an actual gun before firing. In those cases, the person may have had a weapon on them, but never brandished it.
Those shootings spiked by 50% last year, according to the report. Last year also had the highest proportion of people shot by deputies who turned out to be unarmed altogether.
The sheriff’s department says these figures are not surprising because deputies patrol areas in south and east Los Angeles County that are home to “a plethora of black and Latino gangs,” the San Jose Mercury News reported.
But Bobb, the special council to county supervisors and the author of the report says training and time on the job has a lot to do with how officers react when suspects hands move. “Knowing that black and Latino men are more likely to be shot or shot at … the sheriff’s department should be doing a better job to reduce as far as possible mistaken shootings,” Bobb wrote.
His report found that in almost a third of shootings deputies had received no relevant training in the past two years.