Police Killings Inaugurate New Year : NOLA Indymedia

Several young black men were killed across the nation in police shootings around the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. The shootings include two incidents of especially questionable police conduct.

In once case, a New Orleans man visiting his family on New Year’s eve was shot 14 times. Twelve bullets struck him from behind. In another case, transit police in Oakland, California detained and shot an apparently cooperative young man in the back in front of dozens of horrified train riders.

Both of these killings occur alongside a string of other questionable incidents in which the police have used deadly force in recent days, include a pair of shootings in Plymouth, Massachusetts (http://www.enterprisenews.com/news/x1060499363/Mom-of-Plymouth-teen-shot-dead-by-cops-sues) and Houston, Texas (http://www.afro.com/tabid/456/itemid/2576/Outrage-over-Racial-Profiling-Police-Shooting-i.aspx). All victims were young black men.

Adolph Grimes III, a native New Orleanian living in Houston had come back to the city for the New Year’s holiday. According to the Times-Picayune:

“Grimes, the father of an 18-month-old boy, returned to his grandmother's house in the 6th Ward at about 2 a.m., his family said. He took a long bath. Shortly before 3 a.m., they said, he went outside to wait in his car for a relative. They intended to go to an Uptown bar.” (http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/01/officers_shot_man_12_times_fro.html)

At this point an unmarked police car swooped in on Grimes and multiple plain-clothes officers confronted Grimes. In the shooting that ensued, Grimes was struck down by a hail of bullets, most of which hit him from behind. The city’s Police Chief has called the incident a “gun battle,” even though evidence that Grimes fired first has yet to surface. All city officials have claimed that once the case is examined the shooting will be justified. Police waited several days before searching Grimes’ car, in which they claim to have found a shotgun in the trunk along with pistol clips that fit his registered handgun.

Within hours of Grimes death at the hands of the NOPD another young black man’s life was taken by police in Oakland, California. The Bay Area Rapid Transit Police responded to a reported fight on one of the train system’s cars. Pulling a group of young men off on train in the Fruitvale station the police lined several up against a wall. Among them was 22 year-old Oscar Grant. At some point police singled him out and pushed Grant on his stomach. With three officers pinning him down, one pulled back, withdrew his pistol and fired a single shot into Grant’s back.

Several videos of Grant’s slaying by the police have surfaced, among them one which seems to clearly indicate this was a murder: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/01/05/18558793.php

Each of these holiday killings has created enormous rage among family, friends and communities effected. Grimes’ family in New Orleans has pushed for an investigation and one has now been opened by the FBI. Oakland’s loss of Oscar Grant has also prompted inquiries and protests. The convergence of both killings around the holidays seems to have created conditions similar to how people describe the mid to late 1960s – thick and hot with tension, rage and a lust for justice – even though it is the cold middle of winter.

Enough of your left wing ignorant propaganda. Grimes was not murdered, he shot at the police and the facts (not opinions) will come out to prove this.

Where are you when the nearly 200 other people, mostly black, were murdered this year. Were they not important enough for you to mention? Perhaps it just does not fit you agenda to get more money for your cause.

How sick to attack the very people who risk their lives to protect even those who hate them while walking pass the pile of young black on black victims. SICK.

Why didn't I see any angry posts on your communist site when Officer Cotton was murdered?

God's eye never blinks or grows tired and he knows all of our hearts, good and bad and he knows that you are the same as those fake inner city minister and the members of the SCLC.

Indymedia has reported on all kinds of violence in New Orleans, but the police murders of young black men are a particularly newsworthy problem.

I suspect you're either a cop or some kind of troll trying to skew the facts and public opinion.

By the way, as far as I can tell New Orleans Indymedia has no "communist" bias in its reporting. That's absurd. It's an open news site. It's also entirely volunteer. Reporters don't get paid to write news for "their causes," as you put it. Why don't you post some news, or at least contest the story's reportage in a rational way, rather than just hysterically calling things communist, etc.

The author of the above article has reported extensively on the hundreds of murders in New Orleans you bring up: http://darwinbondgraham.blogspot.com/2008/11/new-orleans-ranked-as-most-violent-city.html

Sheesh.

As an Indymedia editor, I would just like to say that, as a collective of media organizers trying to get news directly to the people without corporate infrastructure, we are NOT communists.

We are an open publishing news and story website, which allows people of all ideologies and those without ideologies to post.

Indeed, such openness (minus hate speech) allows people across the political and class spectrum to respond to articles through comments and to publish their own original material.

Continue to debate the article's premises, assumptions, etc. This is the basis of true democracy.