Calling the Police = Death Now-a-Days For Black Disabled People

Today, September 27th/2016 in El Cajon, CA. a Black man who was originally from Zimbabwe, Africa was having a siezure, Alfred Olango so her sister called the police for help and in seconds in front of her police shot her brother. I saw all of this live on a facebook video that Rumbie Mubaiwa recorded and tried to help, Alfred’s sister.

From the video Alfred’s sister ws crying and talking that the police who shot her brother in front of her and refused her to travel with her brother to the hospital. On Facebook Rumbie Mubaiwa post the video and United Against Police Terror – San Diego and other Cop Watch activists jumped to action and got intouch with Rumbie Mubaiwa to offer help.

This all came out on Tuesday morning on Facebook live and I’m becoming so numb by these police shootings almost every second of the day & to watch it live has my blood boiling as a Black disabled activist. Thank you to Cop Watch activists in San Diego like Shakina, Catherine and many others for jumping in and offering love, support and more.

This has been the fourth police shooting of Black men with disabilities in this month alone, Keith Lamont Scott, Terence Crutcher, Tawon Boyd, and now Alfred Olango in one moth that I know of.

Don’t be fooled we don’t need to give police more funding for police crisis training! We must flip the focus from what police need to what the community need. So we need to take the funding from police and give it back to the community with people with disabilities in control.

Poor Magazine just held a workshop in the Bay Area entitled How To Not Call the Cops Ever. Poor Magazine believes

“that Not calling the po’Lice is hard, so hard that most people aren’t ready to do it. Relying on the white supremacist crafted notion of “security” which was set up hundreds of years ago to protect the stolen indigenous territory and the settler colonizers that stole it, modeled after the “slavecatchers” of the 1st part of the genocidal project known as the United Snakes, is what comes easy. Not calling them, EVER, is the deep, hard, frightening and ultimately most revolutionary work.

From Poor Magazine site it says,

“POOR Magazine launched No Po’Lice/CPS calls mandate when we poverty and disability skolaz began fighting for justice with La Mesha Irizarry over 15 years ago on the case of her sun who was killed by San Francisco Po’Lice after a 911 call for help. POOR Magazine family member and race and disability scholar Leroy Moore, Mesha, myself and many more folks worked for years on mental health training for po’Lice, but lo and behold as we see now with the tragic case of Mario Woods, mental health training doesn’t really stop the paid murderers who are trained to kill us from killing us. So many layers of settler laws and post-settler protections continue to support them in their murderous ways, not to mention the kkkorts that support them once they kill as in the horrible cases of gentrification inspired murders of Alex Nieto and Amilcar Perez Lopez. Once you are in their jails, prisons and behind their razor wires you face more chances at their hands of murder such as the murder of Sandra Bland and so many in SF County jail.

This is why, we as a group of displaced, poLice harassed, colonized, incarcerated and profiled, disabled poor peoples of many nations, colors and cultures knew we could NEVER engage with the people who see us as the people to test, arrest, incarcerate and evict. We realized that we needed to create a way to hold each other with love but also discipline. The discipline launched by my strong Afro-Boriken mama who took no mess from no-one and held us together as poor people because she could smell a threat, an issue, a struggle a mile away, her coming from a long line of curanderas and ancestor talkers.”

My & my comrades at Poor Magazine hearts & activism goes out to the family of Olango. Justice for Alfred Olango

By Leroy F. Moore Jr.
www.poormagazine.org