Parable of Oakland Pigs
Firstly, I am highly upset that my friend and supporter, Attorney Walter Riley was beaten and jailed by the Oakland police during the police riot. How did the police have time to focus on Walter entering his law office while people were looting the Footlocker next door? One would think they would be concerned with the looters rather than an "old man" going into his office. It is possible they knew who he was and purposely attacked him since he is a well known radical attorney.
Walter told us today he was not released from jail until 2pm the next day, thus we know he suffered one of the worse rituals endured by persons arrested in Alameda County, the trip from Oakland to the Santa Rita Jail, a process than can take 24 to 48 hours, a ritual of repeated strip searches, sitting and sleeping on concrete benches. It is one of the most inhumane treatment human beings will endure during their lifetime. Yet our brothers and sisters endure this on a daily basis. Ones hunger is relieved with Bologna sandwiches throughout the process, with an orange thrown in. But mostly it is the numerous concrete holding cells wherein inmates must often sleep on the concrete floor full of inmates, some sleeping on the toilet or beside the toilet.
The young brothers can endure this process standing up, but concrete is hard for an old man such as Attorney Riley. I have endured this process many times throughout the years, mostly for traffic tickets.
The police attack on Attorney Riley was an admiral job on the part of the OPD, according to Mayor Ron Dellums, OPD Chief Bates and City Councilpersons. The naked truth is that the OPD is a vicious gang of brute beasts in blue uniforms who oppress the citizens under the color of law.
This police gang has terrorized the people of the hood, the flatlands, for years, committing acts of homicide, shaking down drug dealers, planting false evidence and making false reports for years.
They are just another gang who operates under the color of law. They are clearly implicated in the assassination of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey, another friend and colleague.
How long can we allow these beasts to operate under the color of law? They provide no public safety. Year after year we pass Columbus Church on San Pablo Avenue with crosses in the yard on the Convent house. At the beginning of the year, the crosses are few, but surely as the year progresses the crosses grow into a garden of white symbols of death, like a garden of flowers, yet each cross is identified with the name of a young black man slain in the streets of Oakland. Few of the murders are solved. Only a few families get the attention of the Oscar Grant family, most suffer in silence and bitterness because nothing is solved, there is no murderer apprehended, no trial, no one found guilty, no healing, no closure, only trauma and unresolved grief. The families wonder why their loved ones could not get the attention of Oscar Grant?
Yet public safety consumes the City budget. Not youth programs, not jobs, not education, not housing, but public safety for those who wreak havoc on the community in the name of peace officers and correctional officers who give no peace and provide no correction, but are themselves in urgent need of peace and correction.
The true solution is not to employ more outside agitators in the guise of police, who deliver guns and drugs in the hood to expand the destabilization, but to employ the tactic used so successfully in Iraq and Afghanistan: pay the boys and girls in the hood to secure the public safety of their communities. The police are nothing but an alien occupying army and will never secure the peace because they are the peace breakers. How can you enforce peace in the hood if you are not from the hood? You can't sell dope in the hood if you ain't from the hood! You can't do nothing in the hood if you ain't from the hood. Fuck that bullshit community policing if the police ain't from the hood! The very notion is total and absolute bullshit.
Let the motherfucker who knocks on my door not only look like me but he better have a heart like me. Don't send ET to my door because I am not going to open it, warrant or no warrant.
--Marvin X
7/13/10
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