Editor,
On Nov. 25 more than 300 citizens of Albuquerque collectively decided to take to the streets to disrupt business-as-usual in the wake of the decision denying young Michael Brown justice. Protesters marched peacefully between San Mateo and Yale Boulevard.
Brown was assassinated by the killer cop Darren Wilson and left in the street for four hours in a way that horribly traumatized friends, families and onlookers. The police in all cities act as a cartel or gang in that they are always sending a message about their capability to inflict violence and death.
Similarly, the Albuquerque families of Ken Ellis and Christopher Torres also were exposed to a loved one shot dead and the body left for hours. Ellis was shot dead near a dumpster, terribly underscoring Albuquerque police officer Trey Economidy's comment on Facebook that he is responsible for "human waste disposal." Torres was shot in his own back yard while his brother was locked in a police car for hours and watched officers eat hamburgers at the scene.
These are acts of militarized state violence that unabashedly connect to the same U.S. imperialist war machine funding the massacre of 2,000 in the Gaza Strip and implicated in the disappearance of 43 protesting students from the teacher's college in Ayotzinapa, Mexico.
The police demand and expect that people adhere to middle-class, heteronormative standards in protecting private property, private industry and multinationals. This structure of white settler coloniali sm attempts to disappear the original sovereign Indigenous inhabitants of all territories in its drive to displace Indians and replace them with settlers on police-protected stolen land.
On our streets every day, homeless, transgender, Navajo, Pueblo, Chicana/o people and youth of all ages and genders face down the verbal and physical assaults directed at them by APD, and encapsulated by officers who make comments like, "Why are you wearing skinny jeans? Are you a fag?" (from 2010 citizen complaints).
We are afraid of the police. We remember the Declaration of Independence, which reads that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, (i.e. life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, inalienable rights) it is the duty of the people to alter or abolish it.
We believe that abolishing the police force of this town is a necessary intervention that will greatly enhance the health and welfare of black, brown and Native youth and undocumented students and families. We hope that undocumented folks can come out of the closet, and we all deserve to not be in constant fear of rape, assault or murder by cops, or incarceration and deportation.
We the people ardently rise in dissent against the consent decree as the same people are in power denying victims of police violence any form of restorative justice or restitution!
New police cadets are still trained by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, someone who considers himself an expert in "killology."
As the district attorney in the only city office offering the potential of justice to victims of violence, Kari Brandenburg has not indicted one police officer for any excessive force criminal actions whatsoever.
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APD officer Jeremy Dear, who hunted down and assassinated 19-year-old Mary Hawkes in spring 2014, faces no charges or indictment. The gun that (Gorden) Eden keeps showing in local TV interviews is not Hawkes' alleged gun, but a facsimile of it.
Keith Sandy, who killed the Foothills camper James Boyd, also faces no criminal charges from Brandenburg's office.
On Nov. 21 Brandenburg announced that the white vigilante Donnie Pierson, who shot at Jonathan Mitchell from his car as Mitchell sat enjoying the lengthening shadows of the evening on his own porch, faces no charges. The African-American veteran had a survivable wound, but APD officers kept Mitchell's brother from continuing to give first aid. This is what is meant by the criminalization of a generation: APD officers did not understand the 24-year-old Jonathan as a victim but a criminal, which served to justify allowing him to bleed out in front of his family.
We the people demand that the killer cops of this city quit eating up 49% of the city budget until learning to give basic first aid.
To Albuquerque Mayor Richard Berry, Chief Administrative Officer Rob Perry, Chief of Police Gorden Eden, Brandenburg and the citizens of Albuquerque, we say that black lives matter. Palestinian lives matter. Navajo lives matter.
The lives of those daily targeted by the systemic and systematic, state-sanctioned violence of APD, police forces nationally, the U.S. global military machine and the international carceral prison regime, matter.
We the people act in solidarity and disrupt business-as-usual because all lives matter.
Sincerely,
Darcy Brazen
UNM student
