Does this Black Life Matter?

(re-printed with permission from COUNTERPOINTS)

THE OVERLOOKED DEATH OF RAYJON SIMMONS

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor

Do Black lives really matter?
The answer is, it depends upon which Black lives you’re talking about being mattered, and who is doing the mattering.
Sadly, an example comes immediately to mind.
This spring, as it has for the past several years, the Oakland Tribune published a summary of the past year’s Oakland homicides. This year’s story included a slideshow of photos from the 94621 zip code in the city’s Elmhurst District-what’s commonly referred to as Deep East Oakland-because that section of the city had the highest number of murders, 17, of any zip code in Oakland last year.
One of those photos in this year’s Tribune Oakland murder summary was actually from a murder that occurred earlier this year, not in 2014. It showed a young African-American man standing next to an Elmhurst District street shrine. The caption reads: “Ryan Lyons hangs out near a memorial on 89th Avenue at International Boulevard in East Oakland. The memorial is for Rayjon Simmons, 19, who was shot and killed there on Feb. 27, 2015.”
You can be forgiven if the circumstances of Mr. Simmons’ murder are not at all familiar to you.
That’s because when the Tribune ran the original story about Rayjon Simmons’ murder in late February, they did not even report his name. Instead, alongside a series of photos of the crime scene in the online version, the Tribune story simply read that: “Oakland police investigate the scene of a fatal shooting on 89th Avenue at International Boulevard in East Oakland, Calif. on Friday, Feb. 27, 2015. The shooting happened about 10:30 a.m. when officers responded to find a 19-year-old Oakland man with multiple gunshot wounds. He was pronounced dead at the scene.”
As far as I can tell, that was the only thing the Tribune mentioned about Mr. Simmons’ death until the photo of his street shrine appeared in the annual Oakland murder issue. No other media outlet appeared to have touched the Simmons story at all. And if any city or police official expressed any concern about Mr. Simmons or his murder, I missed it entirely.
Intentionally or not, the impression left was that Rayjon Simmons was simply one more young Black man murdered among many young Black men murdered in the high-crime, drug-dealing neighborhoods of Oakland’s Forgotten Lands.
Contrast the handling of the Rayjon Simmons murder with two Oakland murders that happened almost immediately afterwards.
On the day after Rayjon Simmons was murdered in the Elmhurst, 14 year old Oakland Tech student Davon Ellis was shot and killed while walking with friends in the Fruitvale. A little over a week later, 30 year old Kaiser human resources worker Chyemil Pierce was shot and killed while trying to get her young children out of the range of fire from a gun battle on her West Oakland street.
The response from Oakland city and police officials was immediate.
Bay City News wrote that Oakland Police Chief Sean Whent saying that the Oakland Police Department was mourning Ellis’ death along with the teen’s family and the Oakland community.
“All violent crime is tragic,” the news service reported Whent as saying, the chief adding, “but when the victim is a child it is even more so. The members of my department and I are committed to the safety of everyone in our community, especially our children.”
And after Pierce’s murder in West Oakland, the Oakland Tribune quoted Oakland Mayor Libby Schaff calling Pierce’s death “a tragedy,” adding that Oakland “cannot flourish as a city under siege. We must come together to end the violence.” A few days afterwards, Chief Whent came out with a half-dozen other OPD officers to a West Oakland community meeting to answer questions from Pierce’s family and the public and to pledge his department’s resources to finding the young woman’s killers.
Meanwhile, the Tribune and local television and radio stations went full force on both the Ellis and Pierce murders, publishing or airing several stories covering community reaction and the efforts by OPD to solve the two cases.

Coincidentally or not, in a city where most murders go unsolved and even unnoticed, suspects in both the Ellis and Pierce killings were arrested within days of the victims’ deaths.
If you believe that I am making, here, a complaint about the way the Ellis and Pierce killings and investigations were handled by police and city officials and the media, you’ve missed the point. Although an arrest can never be guaranteed, one only wonders why similar efforts and attentions were not made in the murder of Rayjon Simmons.
Like Mr. Simmons, both Davon Ellis and Ms. Pierce are African-American. So the issue here is not race, but a line drawn in the media and public mind over which deaths-even among African-Americans-are worthy of our general attention, and which ones are not.
One might argue, if you like, that it was the compelling circumstances of their lives that caused our hearts and our sympathies and-therefore-our city’s resources to go out to Davon Ellis and Chyemil Pierce, one a young football player and student, the other a young working mother, both trying to survive and succeed in one of the toughest cities in the country. Or one might argue that it was the special circumstances of the Pierce killing-a young mother dying while saving her children-that caused our hearts to go out to her.
The problem with that argument is, we have no idea if Rayjon Simmons’ life story was equally compelling, or what circumstances occurred in the moments when he lost his life on 89th and International.
Who was Rayjon Simmons? Was he a student, or unemployed, or working someplace? What high school did he go to? Was he married, or did he have a girlfriend? Did he have any children? What about his family or friends? Of these things, the general public knows nothing.
And what about his murder? Was there one assailant or more than one? Were there witnesses? Did any of the business cameras along that portion of International capture the shooting? And, most important, why was he killed? Are Oakland police actively trying to find out, or is Rayjon Simmons simply a name buried in a file underneath 25 or 30 other files on some Oakland homicide detective’s desk, waiting for a “break” that may or may not ever come?
You might have learned something about Rayjon Simmons if you had visited the street sign erected in his honor at the spot of his murder on 89th and International and read the messages and viewed the pictures put up by friends and family, the balloons and candles and other icons growing daily until it blocked out a whole section of the fence. But 89th and International is not a part of Oakland where most residents care to go, and so the chance was lost. The shrine is gone now, taken down suddenly not many days after the Tribune featured it in their Oakland deaths recap issue.
Why did most of us overlook the death of Rayjon Simmons?
All three of victims mentioned in this column-Simmons, Ellis, and Pierce-were African-American, but that doesn’t mean that race did not play a factor in our general disinterest. Perhaps the answer is simply that most of us were waiting around for someone to tell us-on Twitter, on Facebook, or in the general media-that there was something about Rayjon Simmons’ death that made it important enough for us to become interested. Or maybe the answer is more complex.
Whatever the case, there’s no doubt that Oakland’s general public didn’t consider the death of Rayjon Simmons to be worthy of special concern, if we even knew about his murder and thought about it at all. Hell, most who read about his murder in the Tribune weren’t concerned enough about Rayjon Simmons to even bother to find out his name.
Do Black lives really matter, all Black lives? I don’t know, friends. You tell me.

coalpoliceaccLeave a comment

Chicago Offers Reparations Package to Police Torture Victims

By DON BABWIN
Associated Press
CHICAGO (AP) – Victims of police torture under former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge would share $5.5 million, receive an apology and see their story taught in school under a reparations package proposed Tuesday that city leaders hope will help close one of the most shameful chapters in Chicago’s history.
More than 100 people who have accused Burge and officers under his command of shocking them with cattle prods, beating them with phone books and suffocating them with bags until they gave false confessions over nearly two decades ending in 1991. While some have already settled for thousands or millions of dollars, the dozens left can each receive up to $100,000 under the proposed ordinance. The proposal is scheduled to be introduced Wednesday and is widely expected to pass when it returns to the council next month for a vote.
“My goal is to both close this book – the Burge book – on the city’s history, close it and bring closure for the victims and make sure that we take this as a city and learn from it about what we have to do going forward because a police department is about public safety, community policing and building trust,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said.
Amnesty International USA applauded the proposal, which it said was unlike anything a U.S. municipality has ever crafted. “Calling it ‘reparations’ is itself momentous, and the spectrum of what is being presented – restitution, compensation and rehabilitation – is unprecedented,” said Jasmine Heiss, a senior campaigner for the organization.
The $5.5 million adds yet more money to more than $100 million that has been paid in court-ordered judgments, settlements of lawsuits and legal fees – most of it spent by the financially strapped city of Chicago and some by Cook County – over the years. And while the $100,000 maximum payment per victim is a fraction of some previous settlements, an alderman who co-sponsored the ordinance said for many victims this was the best they could hope for.
“While it is not perfect, it is a form of closure that each person would be able to get $100,000 and that is a meaningful settlement,” said Howard Brookins, chairman of the council’s black caucus, who proposed several months ago that a $20 million fund be set up for torture victims.
Attorney Joey Mogul, of the People’s Law Office and co-founder of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, said the “historic” settlement is a compromise that “takes into account” the city’s difficult financial situation.
At the same time, the city took steps to make sure what Burge and his infamous “midnight crew” did to suspects – most of them African-American – to extract confessions is not forgotten.
Besides a provision that calls for teaching about the Burge torture cases to 8th graders and 10th graders in public school history classes, the ordinance would include a formal apology from the City Council, psychological counseling and other benefits such as free tuition at city community colleges. And in recognition that the torture, and in many cases wrongful convictions and lengthy prison sentences, affected both the victims and their families, the e ordinance would extend some benefits to victims’ children or grandchildren.
Darrell Cannon – who told of having a shotgun shoved in his mouth and having his genitals shocked by a cattle prod by Burge’s men to confess to a killing he did not commit – said while the amount he would receive under the settlement is not nearly enough, he was proud of being a part of history.
“For those of us who have been fighting and struggling to set a landmark, this is that landmark,” said Cannon, who was freed after 24 years in prison when a review board determined that evidence against him was tainted. “This is the moment. What we do here will not be undone. People across the country will talk about Chicago.”
Burge, 67, was fired from the Chicago Police Department in 1993. He was never criminally charged with torture, but was convicted in 2010 of lying about torture in a civil case and served 4 1/2 years in federal custody. Still drawing his pension, he was released from a Florida halfway house in February.
___
Associated Press writer Sophia Tareen in Chicago contributed to this report.

coalpoliceaccLeave a comment
A WordPress.com Website.