5.

“Never Again a World Without Us”: The Many Tentacles of State Violence Against Black-Brown-Indigenous Communities1

Roberto Rodriguez

 

“They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.”

–Popol Vuh

Between my eyes, I bear a scar in the shape of a “T” that I received on March 23, 1979, on the streets of East Los Angeles. It functions as a reminder that my skull was cracked, but also, more importantly, that I did not remain silent. I won two police violence trials, after witnessing and photographing the brutal beating of a young man by perhaps a dozen sheriff’s deputies.2

These events are seared into my memory. After coming back to consciousness amid violent threats, I was handcuffed and left face down on the cold street, bleeding profusely from my forehead. While in shock and unable to even lift my head, lying in a pool of my own blood amid flashing red and blue lights, I could see many dozens of officers giving chase and arresting everyone in sight.

This happened when I was doing research for Lowrider magazine, comparing mass violence, mass roundups and mass arrests against barrio youth in the 1970s to the violence that followed the Sleepy Lagoon murder during the Zoot Suit era of the 1940s.3 This mass law enforcement violence against Zoot Suiters included violence against Mexicans, African-Americans and Filipino youth.4

One of the most notorious cases of police violence prior to the 1960s was the Bloody Christmas incident of 1951, memorialized in the 1997 movie “LA Confidential.”5 It involved the 90-minute brutal beating of seven men, all but one of them Mexican, inside the Los Angeles Police Department’s central station, and one outside of his own home. Only a few of the police officers were put on trial, though none served even a year. This travesty was considered justice, an example of how the LAPD could “police its own.”

Even before I worked for Lowrider, I had covered the historic trial of a sheriff’s deputy, Billy Joe McIlvain, who had executed a teenager from San Gabriel named David Dominguez in 1977. At the trial, it was revealed that it was the deputy who had kidnapped and killed Dominguez, while the deputy claimed the reverse. The deputy was given a life sentence, an extreme rarity in the history of US jurisprudence, yet he served only 13 years. Nevertheless, the fact that he served those 13 years was significant because, in many cases, people who kill Mexicans serve no time at all. For example, a South Texas rancher who shot and killed an unarmed Mexican immigrant from behind in 2000 was not sentenced to any prison time at all—he was only fined $4,000, then put on probation and set free.6

This is the prism through which I approach the reality of police violence against communities of color—a reality that I track to 1492, and that today includes the criminalization and demonization of Black and Brown youth. Too many of us bear physical and psychological scars. Many are incarcerated due to the travesty of continual racial profiling, including beatings and killings by the police or the migra—often for simply breathing, sitting, standing, walking or driving while Black or Brown.

There is no shortage of recent examples of police violence against communities of color—violence which is primarily carried out against Black and Brown men and youth, from Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to Eric Garner in New York City, to 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio. Of course, it’s not a new phenomenon. I remember having similar conversations in the wake of the videotaped beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1992. Let it not be forgotten that the beating of King was followed, in 1996, by the nationally televised brutal beatings of Alicia Soltero and Enrique Funes Flores, who were brutalized by several Riverside County Sheriff’s Department deputies after a chase.7

Undocumented migrants are special targets of police violence. The recent Arizona Republic investigation “Force at the Border”8 revealed that from 2005 through March 25, 2014, immigration officers killed at least 46 people along the US-Mexican border (and they have killed seven more since). None of those officers has ever been convicted for the killings.

An egregious recent case of police violence against a migrant is that of 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, who was shot 10 times in 2012 while on the Mexican side of the border, by two Border Patrol officers on the US side. At the time, the Border Patrol issued a statement saying that one of its agents had “discharged his service firearm” after people suspected of smuggling had ignored commands to stop throwing rocks, but the Border Patrol did not specify whether it was specifically accusing Elena Rodriguez of smuggling or of throwing rocks himself.9 These killings do not wind up in police violence statistics, because the culprits are Border Patrol or migra officers, whom labor leader Cesar Chavez used to refer to as the Gestapo of the Mexican people. These officers are accountable to no one, precisely because those they murder are primarily Mexicans.

It is difficult to compile a full list of state-sponsored violence committed against undocumented immigrants, in part because there has never been a uniform standard for accurately reporting instances of police brutality. Moreover, much of the violence committed against undocumented migrants, especially against women (including rape), largely goes unreported due to fears of deportation. Even when we set aside the particularly difficult task of compiling records of state violence against undocumented people and seek to compile a list of state-sponsored violence against Brown and Indigenous people who are US citizens, the task is still a difficult one. The FBI creates an annual list of “justifiable homicides” by US law enforcement agencies, but this list only includes incidents that the law enforcement agencies have voluntarily chosen to mention, and it excludes homicides committed by the Border Patrol entirely. In addition, any killings that the authorities deem to be “unjustifiable homicides” are by definition excluded from the list, and there is no tally of non-lethal cases of excessive force. Given the difficulty in compiling lists of state-sanctioned violence against Brown and Indigenous people, perhaps the best way to understand the relentless quality of this violence is to consider a few highlighted stories.

On January 26, 2015, Jessica Hernandez, 16, was shot to death, purportedly for striking a Denver police officer in the leg with a vehicle.10 The month before that, on December 24, 2014, Francisco Manuel Cesena was tased to death at the Tijuana border crossing by Customs and Border Protection agents.11 Two days earlier, a Lakota man, Allen Locke, was shot five times and killed by Rapid City, South Dakota, police officers, a day after attending a Native Lives Matter rally in Rapid City.12 Across the country, five other native people were killed in the same two-month period,13 while others were attacked by vigilantes.14 Two weeks before that, a Victoria, Texas, police officer was caught on videotape unjustifiably taking down and injuring a 76-year-old man, Pete Vasquez, then tasing him twice.15 A few days earlier—and we’re still in the month of December—Rumain Brisbon was killed by Phoenix police. Two weeks prior to that, in mid-November, sheriff’s deputies in East Los Angeles shot Eduardo Bermudez and Ricardo Avelar-Lara to death.16

At the end of October 2014, Oscar Alberto Ramirez was shot four times in the back by sheriff’s deputies in Paramount, California.17 On August 14, 2014, in Denver, the police viciously took down a seven-months-pregnant woman, Mayra Lazos-Guerrero, who was pleading with them to stop brutally beating her boyfriend.18 A couple of months earlier, in Los Angeles, Ezell Ford was killed by the LAPD,19 and nine days before that, Omar Abrego was beaten to death by LAPD officers in the same vicinity.20 A few months before, in April, unarmed Richard Ramirez was executed, on camera, by a Billings, Montana, police officer, Grant Morrison, who was exonerated.21 The previous month, Alex Nieto was killed by San Francisco police officers, riddled with more than a dozen bullets from 75 feet away by police officers dispatched to look for a man with a holstered weapon. The “weapon” was Nieto’s black-and-yellow Taser, which he was required to carry for his job as a security guard.22 The previous month, in February, five law enforcement officers in Moore, Oklahoma, beat and suffocated Luis Rodriguez to death.23 His last words, eerily, were, “I can’t breathe.” And in a case similar to that of Tamir Rice, in 2013, a sheriff’s deputy in Santa Rosa, California, killed 13-year-old Andy Lopez, who was carrying a toy pellet rifle.24

The litany of state-sanctioned attacks against Brown and Indigenous people offered thus far has not even started to touch on the extreme violence endured by the portion of our transnational community that lives across the border in Mexico and Central America. Many Brown and Indigenous people became cognizant of this reality following the October 2014 kidnapping and disappearance of 43 Indigenous teaching students from Ayotzinapa in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. The students appear to have been killed by the police in collusion with a drug gang.25 In the past few years, upward of 26,000 Mexicans have been disappeared and at least 100,000 killed, caught between cartel and military violence.26

There has never been a time in the history of the United States in which people of color were treated by the legal system as full human beings with corresponding full human rights. Complicit in this dehumanization have been the nation’s official historians (the educational system and the mainstream media), who cling to fairy tales regarding the founding of this country. These official historians often refuse to tell this country’s full history, which includes genocide, land theft, slavery, state and vigilante violence (lynchings) against slaves, and violence against Blacks during the Jim Crow era. Another seldom-taught episode of US history is the widespread lynching of Mexicans from the 1840s to the 1920s, and the killings of several thousands of Mexicans by the Texas rangers on both sides of the US-Mexican border.

Mass state violence against Mexicans is not exclusive to immigration-related matters. Consider the Eastside high school walkouts, which were met by brutal LAPD violence. Memorialized in the 2006 movie “Walkout,” they involved 10,000 students, who demanded bilingual education, a culturally relevant curriculum, and the end of punitive measures against students.27 One of the founding members of the Brown Berets from East Los Angeles, Carlos Montes, related to me that the very first issue taken up by them in 1967 was the rampant issue of police violence, then the walkouts. Of note, on the other side of the country, the Puerto Rican community had rioted for three days in 1966 in Chicago, in protest over the shooting death of 20-year-old Aracelis Cruz.28

In those days, the Black Panthers and the Puerto Rican Young Lords formed to counter the rampant police abuse in their communities, and they supported each other.

On August 29, 1970, the National Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War took place, attended by some 30,000 protesters. Thousands of the rally-goers—who were also protesting endemic police abuse in the nation’s barrios—were brutally attacked by riot-equipped Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies and LAPD officers. This massive assault was memorialized in the documentary film “Requiem 29,” directed and edited by David García. On that day, three people were killed: famed Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar along with Angel Diaz and Lyn Ward. Salazar, who had been writing about police brutality, was killed by a nine-inch, armor-piercing tear-gas projectile. No one was ever prosecuted.

Despite many hundreds of killings, only a few other cases have made such an indelible imprint in national mass media, such as Santos Rodriguez’s execution in 1973 by a Dallas police officer playing Russian roulette on the 12-year-old boy’s head,29 and the 1997 shooting death of high school sophomore Esequiel Hernandez by four fully camouflaged US Marines in Redford, Texas,30 which highlighted that the US military has been deployed on US soil since 1981, assisting in the US war on drugs and migrants.

Prison and Plea Bargains

Of course, police violence is inextricably tied to another mass form of state violence against Black and Brown people: the sprawling US prison system.

That system today has expanded to become the world’s largest, filled disproportionately with Black and Brown bodies. Due to undercounts, the number of prisoners may be as high as 2.4 million, excluding immigration detentions.31 During law enforcement encounters, on the streets and in the courtroom, this system demands silence, speedy compliance and, ultimately, complete submission: in effect, emasculation. Failure to be docile often becomes the rationale for officers shooting and brutalizing those they question, not to mention pinning trumped-up charges on them, which subsequently causes prison populations to swell. In the past decade, federal immigration detentions have not only skyrocketed but have accounted for at least 50 percent of all federal crimes.32 This translates to nearly 100,000 detentions per year, often in for-profit prisons, for “crimes” that before 2000 resulted in simple deportation.

One population that the prison system almost never entraps is police themselves. One thing I learned when I worked for Lowrider is that plea bargaining, which has virtually been refined to a science, effectively guarantees that law enforcement officers never serve a day in prison. Police officers who brutalize Black and Brown people often try to protect themselves from scrutiny or reprimand by charging their victims with felonies afterward. In court, district attorneys then offer to reduce the charges against victims of brutality to misdemeanors, permitting them to plead guilty and walk away with no time or time served. After the victims plead guilty rather than face the possibility of many years in prison, the officers who beat them incur virtually no risk of being brought up on charges or losing in the event of a lawsuit. Even if a victim were to emerge victorious in a lawsuit, none of the money awarded normally comes from the officers themselves.

In “Ando Sangrando,” author Armando Morales pointed out that never in the history of this country has a police officer been convicted in federal court for assaulting or killing a Mexican (meaning a Spanish-speaking person) since records were started, and applicable statutes enacted, in the 1800s.

Once in a great while, “punishment” for police abuse consists of suspension or vacation with pay, while sometimes an officer gets transferred or loses his or her job—a paltry form of “justice” or accountability. Most of us who have lived or who live these realities have never equated beating back criminal charges, or dead relatives winning a lawsuit (which is extremely rare), with justice.

Young people are extremely vulnerable if law enforcement perceives them to be gang-affiliated. This criminalizing of youth has led to the use of gang injunctions and safety zones that restrict the association and mobility of suspected gang members, named and unnamed.33 These are many of the same youth who are profiled—and, when falsely arrested, beaten or killed. In the psyche of the community, these youth are presumed guilty: they “got what was coming to them.”

In 1970, the prison system in this country was perhaps one-tenth the size of what it is today. Many people attribute this immense growth to the war on drugs. But even more than that, the expansion of the prison system reflects a war being waged against people of color, against Black-Brown-Indigenous bodies—the very same colonial war brought to us by Columbus and the conquistadores. These European “civilizers” treated Black and Brown people as if their lives were worth nothing. In many parts of the country, the designated value of our lives continues to be zero.

The New and Flawed Racial Profiling Guidelines

Within the past generation, the border has become a killing field. It has become a cemetery for migrants from Mexico and Central America. And yet, in many ways, the border has extended to the entire country. Everywhere, our skin color is considered suspect. This expansion, coupled with the complicity of the mainstream media and much of civil society, means that the government can continue to act with impunity. For example, in December 2014, the US Justice Department put forth new racial profiling guidelines that formally ban racial profiling in the United States.34 There are, however, two huge exceptions that render these guidelines virtually meaningless for Brown peoples. Racial profiling is not banned in the “border region,” which legally includes land 100 miles from the actual border, and a variety of agencies within the Department of Homeland Security are still allowed to engage in racial profiling through an expansive exception granted for “national security” activities.

Meanwhile, across the country, brutal and dehumanizing immigration enforcement raids (such as the Postville, Iowa, raid involving 1,000 agents35) take place, not limited to the border or ports of entry. In many instances, the officials conducting these raids function like hunter battalions. Immigration authorities hunt primarily Mexicans, but also Central Americans and Black immigrants. (According to the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, there are a half-million Black undocumented immigrants in the United States.)

As most Black and Brown youth know, it is during these racially profiled law enforcement stops that trumped-up “crimes” are committed, such as failure to disperse, resisting arrest, and of course assault and battery on law enforcement officers. Sanctioning the ability of officers to pull over anyone suspected of being an “illegal alien” is a recipe for abuse and violent escalation wherever they operate.

Historically, harassment on the streets has been the norm in this country’s major cities. In New York City, it has been called “stop-and-frisk,” but it exists everywhere, with or without that name. For Border Patrol, it is their raison d’être, part of their job description.

Border Patrol officers do not single out anyone who looks “Hispanic” to them. They specifically target Spanish-speaking people with indigenous features such as brown skin, brown/black hair and brown/black eyes: people who are racialized as Brown, unwanted, “enemy others.” Immigration enforcement, in effect, amounts to modern-day Indian removal.

Any future immigration reform is likely to further militarize the “border.” Impending reforms are also sure to at least triple the size of Operation Streamline, which today facilitates the daily conviction of hundreds of migrants in mass show trials that last an hour only, sending them to private prisons or immediate deportations.36 According to Tucson human rights lawyer Isabel Garcia, a delegation from the Black Alliance for Just Immigration once tried to witness Operation Streamline but left in disgust because the Brown men, shackled at the ankles, wrists and waist, “all lined up on one side of the courtroom, created the imagery of Africans in slave ships.”37

Solutions and Black-Brown-Indigenous Unity

There is a crisis of state violence directed at Black people in this country. While mainstream news agencies still present this issue in a biased and ahistorical manner, at least the conversation surrounding police abuse has been opened up due to the insurrection Black Lives Matter. It is incumbent upon those who also live similar realities to both offer critical support to this Black insurrection and speak out about state violence against their own communities.

Many from communities targeted by state violence have been working toward building much-needed Black-Brown-Indigenous coalitions. There is precedent for this. At the behest of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., many Brown people were part of the Poor People’s March of 1968. And Ron Espiritu—who has been teaching a groundbreaking Chicano/African-American Studies class for the past 7 years, at Animo South Los Angeles High School—notes that the United Farm Workers (UFW) movement itself was heavily supported by both King and members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In “To March for Others,” Lauren Araiza chronicles how all the major Black civil rights organizations supported the struggle of the UFW. Most Native American activists of that era also joined in supporting the UFW movement.

Today, too, the silencing of Black, Brown and Indigenous peoples and the ways in which they are rendered invisible are unacceptable. The federal government, elected officials, states, municipalities and other institutions that hold power over law enforcement must be confronted. The mass media must also be confronted: We are silenced and made invisible as a direct result of where the lens is focused or where the microphones are placed. As the Zapatistas have proclaimed in their struggle: “Never again a world without us.”