They heavy on weaponry like Charlton Heston

Seattle Police Officer shoots thirteen-year-old boy
Story from the Post Intelligencer here.

Now, if you were a thirteen-year-old boy, and a cop car came out of nowhere at you, wouldn't you run? If the car caught up with you and froze you in its spotlight, wouldn't you also seem a little "agitated," maybe take off your jacket to show you don't have weapons? Or hell, maybe you take off your jacket and throw it on the ground because you've seen the kind of things cops have done to people in your community, to people who have dark skin, like you, or who are young, like you. And you don't want that happening to you so you want to act tough. Maybe you pull out your cell phone to call your dad or maybe to make the cop think you are armed.

And if you're the cop, what do you do when you meet this thirteen-year-old kid? Are you honestly threatened by his "agitated behavior" or his "large jacket?" Are you scared when he pulls out something black from his pocket? You, protected by your armor and weaponry and training and patrol car. He's an adolescent. He's scared and confused and angry and your bright spotlight and barking commands are *not* making anything better. Are you so scared of a thirteen-year-old Filipino boy that you shoot him TWICE? And then, even though you know he ain't goin' nowhere since you just shot him in the leg, you handcuff him?

This incident is so similar to the one in Palmdale. Why does a heavyset grown male need to hold down a teenage girl with so much force he breaks her wrist? What oh-so-dangerous activity (besides being young and not white) are these kids doing that warrants that level of violence?


And I want to bring this back to Mychal Bell too. Because, with the question I just raised, there is the implicit assumption that past a certain level of innocence, a young person *does* deserve harsh treatment. Mychal Bell, one of the Jena 6, did more than drop cake or run from the cops. He beat someone up, and is now in jail for battery charges he faced even before that. Some people would say that because he has done something violent, because he isn't Gandhi, that we can't defend him (or the rest of the Jena 6). He needs to serve his time.

The harsh truth is *prison* is just as painful, violent, degrading, racist, unfair and brutal to youth (and to everyone it touches) as bullet-wounded legs and broken wrists are.

The Seattle Police Officer's decision to shoot the boy, the Knight High School guard's violent reaction to Pleajhai Mervin dropping cake, and district Judge Mauffrey's ruling to send Mychal Bell back to jail for previous charges from before the Jena incident . . . they all came from the same place inside these people. A place of fear. And, sometimes more hidden, sometimes displayed brightly, a place of hate. The justice system *has* to keep Bell in jail, or the "black power" people will win. Heaven forbid substantial steps actually be taken to solve teen violence, or to provide teenagers with the tools they need so they don't beat each other up, or to hold white people accountable for the daily insidious, cutting racism inflicted upon black people. Heaven forbid anyone in the justice system even try to understand the context in which the Jena violence ocurred. Nope. There is a crime, and there is punishment. Mychal Bell broke the law, and must be removed from the community.

State violence serves as many purposes as ways in which it manifests itself, but it has one main objective. The fuel that keeps its engine burning white hot: making sure the disenfranchised stay that way. State violence can be a police officer "overstepping their bounds" (though really working within a perpetualy violent system) and wounding or killing an unarmed person of color they mistakenly thought was drawing a weapon on them. Or state violence can be wrought not by guns but by gavels. A series of rulings and hearings probably won't cause any broken wrists or bleeding legs. But they render a person just as powerless. And can, as D.A. Reed Walters promised to do to the black students in Jena, "end lives with a stroke of a pen."