All Soul’s is near the Columbia Heights Metro (Green/Yellow). The meeting will be upstairs in the Tupper Room. Ron Thomas, the AV expert in Raphael Briscoe’s case will be joining us to show & discuss the infamous footage that shows the police shooting Briscoe in the back and then planting a gun on his body. The cops in were exonerated even after admitting in court they planted the BB gun on Briscoe. Last night’s shooting of two police officers in Ferguson will also be on the agenda. For further reading see Origins of the Police by David Whitehouse.
Last Friday I posted an event “Rally and March for Raphael Briscoe.” Having very little information about Raphael Briscoe, I did a quick Google search and proceeded to cross-post the first article I found which was from Homicide Watch DC. The article stated that Raphael was the third person killed by police in 2011. The other two were reportedly killed after a shoot-out with police following a botched robbery attempt. The article said nothing about how or why Raphael was killed by the police. Today, I did a little more research. Here’s what I found.
WJLA did report the story the day of the shooting. Below is the video they posted on their website. It’s worth watching, not for the information about Raphael Briscoe, but for all of the information that’s left out.
If the above video isn’t working CLICK HERE to watch the video on WJLA’s site.
According to the WJLA report, Briscoe had a gun. In fact, he had a BB gun, which is not quite the same as a regular gun that fires lead bullets at 2,500 feet per second. They also failed to report that Briscoe was shot in the back in the act of running from the police. To their credit, WJLA did report on their website a follow-up report with more details, but I couldn’t find any evidence that this report ever made it to television.
WASHINGTON, DC (WJLA), April 26, 2011 –Police Chief Cathy Lanier said officers with the Gun Recovery Unit confronted an adult male with a gun. An officer or officers fired on the suspect after the situation escalated. The suspect was struck at least once.
The suspect was identified as 18-year-old Rafael Briscoe of Southeast.
Lanier on Wednesday said the weapon the suspect pulled out was a BB gun. She said she has seen the gun and there was no way, under similar circumstances, that officers could have known it wasn’t a real gun.
The officer involved in the shooting has been placed on leave.
Witnesses said the shooting episode started in the Forrest Ridge Apartment complex. They described the victim as a “good kid.”
WUSA did a far better job, reporting not only that the gun wasn’t real, but also that Briscoe was shot after running from the police. In reality, he was running from an unmarked police car full of heavily-armed white men with guns.
WUSA’s website report had even more details …
WASHINGTON, DC (WUSA), April 27, 2011 — A day after an 18-year old man was killed by police in a Southeast DC neighborhood residents there continue to demand answers.
DC Police confirm a plain clothes officer shot and killed 18-year old Rafael Briscoe after he ran from them along the 2400 block of Elvans Rd., Southeast, Tuesday afternoon. The officer was part of an undercover detail known as the Gun Recovery Unit, a group of officers tasked with taking guns off the streets. Investigators say a BB gun resembling a real handgun was found on Briscoe.
The shooting has sparked outrage among community members who held a vigil for Briscoe Wednesday evening. Neighbors who live in the area are now turning their frustration at the police, claiming Briscoe was shot in the back and never threatened the officer.
Cherie Smith, Briscoe’s grandmother, said, “The police senselessly shot and killed my grandson, and they are making up all kinds of excuses for them doing it.”
DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier will only say the incident is under a full investigation. On Wednesday she said, “In any instance when we have use of force, especially deadly force that’s a serious matter and we’ll make sure that it’s handled properly.”
The events of the shooting were captured by a police surveillance camera along Elvans Rd. 9NEWS NOW has officially requested a copy of the surveillance video from DC Police.
It took four years and a lawsuit by the ACLU before surveillance video of the incident would materialize. WNBC reports on the case as it has developed after the policeman who killed Raphael Briscoe was cleared of all charges.
As is not uncommon, the text-based version of the story on WNBC’s website had more, and perhaps more incendiary details. Including, the knowledge that Raphael did not turn towards the car that was following him in the surveillance video, which calls into question reports that he brandished the offending bb gun at the police who pursued him.
WASHINGTON, DC (WNBC), February 23, 2015 –A jury cleared Metropolitan Police Department officers in the shooting death of a D.C. teen four years ago.
Rafael Briscoe, 18, was shot and killed in April 2011 in the 2400 block of Elvans Road SE after police say he brandished a weapon.
MPD surveillance video shows the former track star running from an unmarked D.C. police car filled with officers. Lawyers for the police department said the teen was seen carrying a gun, while Briscoe’s family lawyer, Billy Ponds, said what police are interpreting as a weapon is simply his finger and his cell phone.
Neither side disputes a single, fatal shot was then fired from the unmarked police car, but Ponds said a BB gun was thrown from the car toward Briscoe’s body. Still images taken from the crime scene show the gun broken in two pieces.
“[The video] did not depict Rafael turning toward the [car]. I’m astounded and ashamed by the outcome in the case,” Ponds said.
Briscoe’s mother Bridzette Lane Friday vowed to keep fighting to defend her son.
“Looking at the video, it was a drive-by on him,” Lane said. “So I’m just angry. I’m very, very angry. I’m not going to stop until justice is served for my son.”
The American Civil Liberties Union is using Briscoe’s death to call for an end to MPD’s long-used anti-crime tactic known as “jump out squads.” Monica Hopkins-Maxwell, the head of D.C.’s ACLU, told News4 the unmarked cars police use in similar cases should be clearly marked.
D.C. police released the following statement Friday afternoon:
“Plain clothes and undercover police operations are used by MPD for multiple purposes such as investigating robberies, burglaries, drug, prostitution, and gun offenses. They are not targeted at any particular community, but are used to address crime problems and citizen complaints.”
The D.C. Attorney General’s Office is preparing a statement.
WNBC’s television report is far more complete than the stories produced by WJLA or WUSA back in 2011, but even this report leaves out an important perspective–that of the part of the community that’s organizing against the police jump outs that killed Raphael Briscoe. To get that side of the story, we turn to the DC Independent Media Center.
DC Ferguson marches on 7th District police station
Submitted by Luke on Sunday, February 22, 2015
On the 22nd of February, DC Ferguson met at the Congress Heights Metro in Anacostia and marched on the 7th District police station. Protesters were demanding justice for Ralphael Briscoe, who was shot in the back by a police “jump-out” squad back in 2011 without having even been suspected of having committed a crime. The shooting was described by one speaker as being a “drive-by.” As usual, the police involved in this murder have been cleared of all charges and returned to duty. DC Ferguson is demanding that these murderers be punished and that police jump-out tactics be ended in DC forever.
Video recently emerged of the Ralphael Briscoe shooting and has been cited as proof that police jump-outs exist in DC. At first MPD tried to claim to have discontinued the use of jump-outs 15 years ago, now they try to claim this is only the “vice squad” in the face of flat out proof that jump-out tactics are in use. One speaker asked “if jump-outs don’t exist, how come everyone in DC’s African-American neighborhoods knows exactly what they are?”
#DCFerguson will hold a rally, 6pm, February 22 at the Congress Heights Metro Station in Washington DC and March to the 7th District Police Station. The purpose of the rally is to bring more awareness to the “Jump Outs” a military style tactical unit within the Metropolitan Police Department.
Justice for Raphael Briscoe Rally & March Congress Heights Metro Station February 22, 6:00 PM
#DCFerguson continues to stand in solidarity with the Ralphael Briscoe family and the sisters and brothers that are continuing to protest and resist the police murders of Black and Latino people every 28 hours in America.
ANSWER Coalition organizer Eugene Puryear says,”The murder of Rafael Briscoe should be a turning point. Where we finally come to terms with the root causes of these issues and address social deprivation and oppression and the police brutality that comes with it.”
The initial sponsors of #DCFerguson include the National Black United Front, the ANSWER Coalition, We Act Radio, the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the American Muslim Alliance, as well as independent organizing networks that have sprung up in the wake of Michael Brown’s killing.
If you haven’t heard of Raphael Briscoe, here’s some background information.
Rafael Briscoe Third Person to be Killed by Officers in D.C. this Year
Cross-posted from Homicide Watch DC April 27, 2011
Rafael Briscoe of Southeast, DC, who was killed Tuesday afternoon by D.C.Metropolitan Police officers, is the third person to die in a D.C. officer involved shooting this year. On Feb 13, Davon Sealy, 19, of Gaithersburg, and Akeem Jamaal Cayo, 21, were fatally shot in a shoot-out with officers after a botched home invasion robbery.
MPD’s protocol for deadly use of force is here. A good discussion of the use of deadly force, it’s impacts and how communities respond is on the FBI’s website, here. That document describes the general tension surrounding officer-involved fatal shootings as follows:
Some members of the public seem to automatically assume that the officer did something wrong before any investigation into the incident begins. Conversely, others believe that if the police shot somebody, the individual must not have given the officer any choice.
“…there is not a great American city from New York to Cleveland or Detroit, from Washington, the nation’s capital, to Chicago, from Memphis to Atlanta or Birmingham, form New Orleans to Los Angeles, that is not disgraced by the wanton killing of innocent Negroes.” – We Charge Genocide (1951)
On December 3rd of 2014, Daniel Pantaleo, the white NYPD officer responsible for the murder of Eric Garner, a middle-aged Black male resident of NYC, was not indicted for Garner’s murder by a grand jury overseeing the proceedings of the case. Given the recent history of massive protests in opposition to police brutality and anti-Black violence across the country, a wave of protests decrying the grand jury’s decision was inevitable.
Due in large part to the accessibility of information in today’s world, thanks to social media websites such as Twitter, people across the country, and even the globe, are showing solidarity to activists on the front lines of the Black Lives Matter movement.
This said, before the Black Lives Matter movement shifted a broader lens on the issue of police violence in Black communities, two organizations, the Stolen Lives Project and the October 22 Coalition, have been active in challenging anti-Black police violence for decades.
The Stolen Lives Project, whose mission, as quoted from their website, is “to assemble a national list of people killed by law enforcement agents from 1990 to the present.”, has documented over two-thousand cases of people killed by police officers, publishing this information in a book in 1999. While acknowledging the fact that the two-thousand cases they’ve documented are a small fraction of the number of people killed by police officers, the goals of the project are twofold; to maintain evidence of the epidemic of extrajudicial killings in the United States, and to preserve the dignity of those whose deaths would have been swept beneath the rug to maintain the myth of a policing system untainted by corruption.
Active since 1966, the October 22 Coalition began as the brainchild of various people engaged in radical politics during the 60’s. Working in tandem with the Stolen Lives Project, the Coalition helps organize those seeking to take part in the National Day of Protest. A mass database of resources and points of contact for those wanting to get involved in protest against police violence, the Coalition seeks to bring together “those under the gun and those not under the gun as a powerful voice to expose the epidemic of police brutality.”.
As exemplified by two organizations mentioned above, police violence in Black communities is not a new occurrence; however, neither is resistance.
I wrote this essay in response to liberal notions of nonviolence, which tend to be irritatingly sentimental and shallow. In the wake of this nation’s imprisonment system’s failure to indict Darren Wilson and Daniel Panteleo, the two police officers responsible for the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, respectively, much debate has been sparked about the nature of the rebellions, both peaceful and retaliatory, which have taken place across the country. Although not written in response to this particular series of tragedies, I believe the insights I offer in this piece shed light upon the necessity of transforming systemic manifestations of violence rather than condemning those groups and individuals who choose retaliatory tactics in response to the brutality they, and their community members, are subjected to.
Protest in Ferguson…
There is a force in our society, one that has come to manifest itself in countless forms, that many people are hesitant to name as a detriment to their lives. Most who dare to speak against this force, to utter the word that names it, are waved away as sentimental dunces, are charged with promoting lofty idealisms and are thereafter banished to society’s dim margins. Very few wish to acknowledge the hideous commonness of this force in its many manifestations.
That force’s name, that persistent presence, that scourge of pain, and fear, and shame, is ‘violence’. When most people hear the word ‘violence’, memories of physical brutality may replay in their minds. A vicious swat by an older sibling, a sailing fist cracked across a jaw, a bloodcurdling assault by an anonymous assailant. Although many are quick to decry the most intimate aspects of physical violence where it rears its head, the majority of those are also unwilling, or incapable, to enact healing work against those lingering traumas associated with having one’s body ravaged at another’s hands. Of course, they themselves are not to blame.
Ours is a society that seeks to, at every turn, devalue the significance of its citizens interior lives. We are encouraged to neglect our inner lives; religious practices are derided as narrow-minded and uncouth within increasingly secularizing cultural spheres, those who seek out therapists are snickered at in secret, and all who deeply ponder about human nature are handled with suspicion and apprehension. For most people, extended silences and solitude allow sinister things to bubble up to their conscious, and no one has taught them to be at peace with these haunts. Too many flee their demons by embracing addictions. Too many lack skills that would disallow past traumas to rend their spirits. Too many have been coaxed into allowing their interior lives to decay.
Yet, the state of people’s interior lives can never be divorced from the surrounding sociopolitical and sociocultural environments in which they’ve developed. Is it not violence when ours is a society that devalues the humanity of female-bodied people to no more than their sexual organs, their bodies violated time and time again, their appeals for justice ignored just as often? When young children, of all colors, point to dolls of darker skin and Afro-features as inherently nefarious? When indigenous voices of various tones seeking sovereignty over ancestral lands are constantly ignored and, instead, have the miniscule wedges of Earth they’ve been murdered onto bombarded with toxic wastes? When people of all races lacking in economic resources must either subsist on foodstuffs that poison their bodies, or nothing? What world do we inhabit where these realities often go acknowledged and, yet, unmanaged; where the suffering of another is commonly associated with a character flaw on the individual’s part and not symptomatic of systems of domination our society was built, and tragically thrives, upon?
Any path toward nonviolence that fails to acknowledge and work against physical, non-physical, and structural manifestations of violence is inherently lacking in depth. Any paths toward nonviolence lacking in strategies for justice and healing are underdeveloped. We are past the era where the division between mind, body, and spirit can be justifiably imposed upon the masses. We are past the point of presenting the populace with sparkling words in hopes that they will suffice for the arduous labor of transforming our world into one where harmony reigns.
Comprehensive nonviolent ideologies must offer tactics and solutions to address the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of evil, blatant and insidious. Nonviolence is only authentic when the livelihoods of all persons are accounted for, when voices resounding at the margins become centered and their requests heeded. Ultimately, the nonviolent path is one that aims for peace. However, peace will never exist without justice. Justice for everyone.
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