The Language of the Unheard

[n2doc]

By Jamil Smith

Keith Kellom, like too many black parents lately, doesn’t understand why his son is dead today. One day after 20-year-old Terrance Kellom was shot multiple times and killed by an agent with U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement, the grieving father spoke at a press conference and gave an account of the incident drastically different from law enforcement's. According to Al Jazeera America, Keith asserted that the agents who arrived at his northwest Detroit home to arrest Terrance, a suspect in a robbery case, did not serve him with a search warrant, and that Terrance did not reach for a hammer, as the Detroit Police Department had reported. “My son died with clenched fists. He didn't have a hammer,” said the elder Kellom last Tuesday. “I don’t understand why my son was executed.”

Terrence Kellom’s death occurred on the same Monday that Baltimore experienced a spate of unrest that focused the nation on the death of another young black man at the hands of law enforcement, Freddie Gray. Perhaps that’s why we haven’t heard as much about Kellom. The 300 protestors who gathered in Detroit Tuesday to march and pray remained peaceful. Still, police commissioner Eva Garza Dewaelsche told the Detroit News that “corporations downtown want to know” whether Detroit cops have a plan to prevent and stem any possible uprisings. The civilian oversight panel expressed concerns at a meeting last Thursday night. Not to worry, the commissioner and her colleagues told them. They had a plan. (Not to address the concerns of the protesters, it seems, but to prevent them from breaking stuff.)

Before last week’s uprising made Detroit suddenly afraid of becoming “the next Baltimore,” many were asking whether the reverse would happen. Two years ago, a report commissioned by Baltimore’s city government stated that without major reforms, the city would be forced into bankruptcy by 2023. Detroit just got out of its own bankruptcy this past December, eliminating or restructuring some $7 billion city debt. A little more than a week before Freddie Gray was arrested and given a “rough ride” by six Baltimore cops on April 12, resulting in fatal injuries to his spine, the Baltimore Sun reported that Baltimore officials were sending 25,000 shut-off notices to delinquent water customers. The United Nations was among those that condemned a similar shut-off plan in Detroit last year.

City finances and the human rights debate around water utilities are now secondary. “The next” as a prefix to a U.S. city typically has one meaning now. Perhaps it is a testament to the increased visibility of police violence and killings of people of color that “the next” typically is looked upon as a harbinger of protest against police wrongdoings and an accompanying overcompensation by the militarized law enforcement that only exacerbates passions and conflicts. This cycle continues to repeat itself through our modern civil rights movement, so much so that we’re now taking polls asking people to predict whether black folks nationwide will continue to be so angered by police violence and a lack of legal recompense that they will riot.

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http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121711/cities-need-understand-what-riots-over-police-brutality-are-saying

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