this is beautiful.
👏👏👏
Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
My aunt just shared a video on Facebook the gist of which is that statistically, if a person were to be beaten, raped, or murdered, there’s a very small chance the assailant will be a police officer, so police brutality isn’t as big of a problem as we all think. Which, okay, the stats are probably right. There are more people who aren’t cops, so it’s pretty obvious that there’s a greater chance a ‘civilian’ would be the assailant. I get that.
But is that a reason to turn a blind eye to police violence? If you want to say, “Well most cops are good people,” that’s fine. I mostly agree. What is stopping you from also admitting that the few cops who aren’t good people are creating a problem? Why is it that either cops are evil or they are saints? Can’t we admit that they are people, that some of them are very bad people, that some of them have made some very bad choices, and that they deserve to be punished for those choices, especially when those choices cost lives?
I don’t want to vilify an entire profession. I just want the members of that profession to admit they have bad members, and that those bad members deserve to be brought to justice.
The fact that trans women have just been completely booted out of this conversation on police brutality smfh…
In 2008, a black trans woman was severely beaten by police and was preparing to sue the Memphis Police Department. She was killed execution style shortly after and no one has yet to be arrested.. Her name was Duanna Johnson. Remember her name…
!!!!!
In Gretna, Florida, Juanita Donald called the police to come assist her and get her 24 year old son to take his medication, as she had done in the past.
On Tuesday morning, around 9:30 am, she called the police to help her with her son Kaldrick Donald and one officer showed up, Sergeant Charles Brown.
Charles Brown ended up tasing Kaldrick Donald repeatedly, and then took him into the isolated bathroom in the family’s house and shot him multiple times, killing him.
Brown murdered Donald in the presence his pregnant sister and mother, and no one can even say why. He was completely unarmed, and somehow not completely sane.
His mother said “I heard my baby say, I want my mama after he shot him, and then I didn’t hear anything else.”
His mother said she was “expecting them to take him to the Apalachee Center like before”, but instead a single officer came and escalated the situation, murdering him in front of his family.
Juanita continued to say “It wasn’t but one officer. Instead of him calling for backup, he took things in his own hands and he goes in the house and he rush him and shoot him.”
She continued to say he “didn’t want to be bothered”, and that he simply walked away from the officer.
She says Sergeant Charles Brown “Just grabbed him and he tased him. Then when he grabbed him and tased him, he rushed my son off in the bathroom and I heard three shots. I was like, you shot my son and he was like, I had to. I said, no, you didn’t have to.”
Charles Brown is now on ‘administrative leave’, or paid vacation, and if this story doesn’t blow up then this officer surely will see no charges.
Anonymous: I rlly want to spread awareness about Mexico, but I'm really confused on what's happening. Could you summarize a bit for me? Sorry if I'm being a bother!
vanellcpe:
No bothering at all my friend, in fact, thank you for asking. Basically, let me do a little timeline - summing up of the events that lead to this protests and events.
- October 2, 1968 - First, we gotta mention events where the government indeed made clear they killed students but of course they cleaned their names by saying they were against the communal peace and were in fact planning terrorists acts upon everyone in general and not just the government. I’m talking about Tlatelolco massacre. One would think that with such display of violence we would learn to not trust the authorities but actually, that was just the tip of the iceberg.
- December 1, 2006 – November 30, 2012 - As Felipe Calderon, our previous president took over the leadership of Mexico, he made it clear that his intentions were fighting the drug cartels and any sort of organized crime in the country in order to create a better and safer future for the upcoming generations, ironically slowly starting a war that has hardly gotten any better, but actually has caused deaths of over 90,000 people. Ever since this all started, it has become a normal practically daily thing to learn about another person being kidnapped, tortured and later disposed like garbage while the national administration does absolutely nothing.
- September 26, 2014 - 48 Students from a rural area of Guerrero, Mexico (Ayotzinapa) “disappeared” while they were on their way to a peaceful protest. These students were chased down and attacked by local authorities, luckily 5 escaped but later the remaining 43 were abducted, handed to a drug cartel and presumably killed to be disposed. All of this was done by the state, local authorities, the government.
- October 3, 2014 - ONU and IACHR demanded to federal authorities in Mexico to do something else, if not everything in order to locate the missing students.
- November 8, 2014 (Morning) - PGR (Attorney General of Mexico) declared that the 43 students who disappeared (Notice how the government refuses to say they were abducted, they just say the students pretty much magically vanished.) are most likely dead. According to their declaration, they have under their custody 3 members of the drug cartel that possibly are linked to the events of September 26th. These three men claim that the students were charred ALIVEusing mostly tires, plastic, disel, gasoline, and some other substances to perhaps cause them some of the most painful deaths, to later get their remains moved to a clandestine pit in the middle of nowhere to never be found.
- November 8, 2014 (Afternoon) - Thousands of people, students, teachers, mothers, basically a tiny bit of every social class marched down from the Attorney General of Mexico installations all the way down to the Governmental Palace / National Palace (where the Enrique Peña Nieto — him who I do not recognize as my president — and his political party resides at.) There they again peacefully lighted up candles to pray for those who were abducted.
- November 8, 2014 (Evening) - The National Palace is surrounded by elements of the national guard, military service and police men at practically all times, specially when protests like the one that took place earlier happen; however, for a good 60 to 80 minutes, they pretended to be blind, deaf and powerless as the government itself staged the violent act of lighting up on fire a door of the National Palace, letting it burn for a while and later extinguish that flame with an already prepared curtain of water conveniently right above the door the paid or false protesteracted on.
- November 9, 2014 (Right now) - You never know when you’re going to die, but I’m damn sure nobodyis supposed to open their eyes and see a gun pointing at them. Nobody is supposed to be left somewhere to char. Nobody is supposed to act ignorant and hesitate to raise their voice in order to not piss off those who take advantage of those less fortunate. We are not supposed to live in fear.
I am terrified for my country, I am scared for my life. I am horrified by the cruelty and I am furious about the government’s actions. I’m tired, drained, exhausted, sick of living like this.
And since a picture is worth more than a thousand words, allow me to demonstrate my point.
Mexico 1968:
Mexico 2014:
And if after this entire speech whomever reads this still isn’t convinced that Mexico needs all the support we can get, under the cut you’ll find stronger but also REAL examples of the aftermath of these two events. 46 years and nothing has changed.
