Graffiti the Ghost

M. C. Ren, will you please give your testimony to the jury about this fucked up incident.

Last night I was riding my bike home from BART after work, and right on the corner where the relatively good-natured crackheads always hang out (along with some goofy old people and bored teenagers), there were like 4 news vans with their bright-ass spotlights, and about 50-60 people, including at least a dozen news people and an equal number of police, milling around. I just rode on through, because a throng like that is not something whitey is encouraged to get up in.

Finally caught the news at 9pm, and it turns out that earlier in the afternoon, there was a drug bust, and a 34-year-old man was apparently brutally beaten by the police, in front of about 30 witnesses, including his mother. Then he died while in police custody. Now that is one fucked-up incident.

It just doesn't add up. Most of the incidents I've witnessed in West Oakland that involve police have been pretty much by the book. The cops seem to be as racially diverse as the rest of Oakland. And I'm sure that being a cop in West O, you've got to have some amount of street sense, from knowing when to let someone slide to being able to subdue a potentially armed, possibly drugged-up, certainly amped-up crack dealer.

But taking a dude down in front of 30 witnesses and beating him to death? That's like a formal invitation for people to riot, not to mention bringing massive criticism on your squad and probably a hell of a lot worse. It doesn't make sense. I'm curious to see how it all shakes out when more light is shed on the incident and the police start talking. Did the guy O.D., flip out on the cops, and just coincidentally die while in custody? Or did police really beat a man to death in front of his mother, right in the heart of West Oakland? And if so, why does it seem to be buried in the news?

Any way you cut it though, it's tragic. Someone put a big sheet up on a building where the incident occurred, for people to write tributes and such. The neighborhood was as quiet as usual last night, and this morning there were just the regulars sitting out in their lawn chairs on the corner of 8th & Campbell, where it all went down. If I hadn't caught the tail end of it, I wouldn't have known anything unusual happened at all.


Newsflash:

George Bush still doesn't care about black people.



11/14/05 Update

posted by stefbot @ 10:01 AM