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join the battle Oct 22 1998 wear black in memory of the victims |
National Day of Protest
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Video, speaker and discussion forum 110 Lee Hills Hall Thurs, Oct 22, 7:00 PM |
Non-violent protest rally Live music from Cloud 9 Speakers, poetry readings and open mic for all Peace Park Sat, Oct 24, 2:00 PM |
educate yourself and others
The epidemic of police brutality continues to intensify all across the U.S. Every year hundreds are shot down in cold blood, beaten to death or suffocated with pepper spray. Tens of thousands more every year suffer police abuse short of death. This brutality mostly targets Blacks, Latinos, and other people of color. But as the economic and social repression spawning this police violence deepens, it's spilling over into white working class neighborhoods. Often victims of police brutality are themselves jailed and charged with assault on a police officer. Hundreds of immigrants are killed or disappeared by the U.S. border patrol for trying to enter the country in search of work and survival. Immigrants who make it into the country are often victimized by the police and terrorized into silence by threats of deportation and worse. Who will stop police murder and brutality?
1.7 million people are in prisons across the country, most of them young, Black or Latino, and most are in prison for non-violent offenses. Congress is debating lowering the execution age to fifteen and imprisoning juveniles with hardened adult offenders. A whole generation of our youth is being treated like criminals based on how they dress, their attitude, the color of their skin or where they live. Who will stop the criminalization of a generation?
Very basic legal rights, such as the right to challenge wrongful imprisonment, are being stripped away from our people. Surveillance cameras are popping up at intersections, on buildings, in parks, high schools and even public bathrooms as the right to privacy is slowly whittled away. All this hits poor and oppressed people hardest as the authorities flood their neighborhoods with police who set up roadblocks, demand to see ID and conduct warrantless searches. More than 100 overtly "political prisoners" languish in U.S. jails--people like Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier--simply because they dared to resist this brutality and repression. Who will stop this growing government repression?
No one but us! People are already resisting in many ways. Parents and other family members of victims of police brutality are inspiring others with their resistance. Demonstrations and other forms of protest are on the rise. There has been just resistance to violent police suppression in St. Petersburg, FL, Chicago's Cabrini Green housing projects, and elsewhere. Many different kinds of people are getting involved in this fight--young people tired of being scapegoated for society's ills, ministers, lawyers, teachers, grassroots people and others. All this resistance needs to be brought together in a powerful movement that can say 'NO!' to the authorities' program of answering every problem with more cops and more prisons.
Sponsored by: MU Amnesty International, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Campus and Mid-MO Peaceworks, Flaming Flag, and Committee Against Intervention.
Read the news story from the Columbia Missourian
