WEDNESDAY, JUNE 23, 2010
Remembering the Victims of Made-For-TV Police
By Judith Moriarty
Try to imagine a TV reality cops show – hunting down a supposed murderer in Martha’s Vineyard where the Obama family vacations. Imagine if, oops, they’d gotten the wrong house and killed little Malia, two yrs older than little Aiyana, killed, as she slept on the vacation home couch. The point being one can imagine the OUTRAGE – the horror – the demands for instant justice! Not so with this innocent little child. Detroit police, playing macho men for a reality TV show, following them around, shot an incendiary device through the front window of little Aiyana’s home – followed with gunshots! Little Aiyana was first burnt and then the bullet pierced her and she died. Police barged in – still playing for the cameras.
It was only after terrorizing this family that they discovered they’d gotten the wrong house! Even so they lied, made up some tale of the grandmother attacking them or some such nonsense. Only thing is the REALITY TV cameras caught it all. This is NOT an isolated occurrence. All you have to do is Google victims of false drug raids. Dozens of innocent people – thinking they were SAFE in their own homes – ended up being killed due to a wrong address. Many times police acted on information obtained from street snitches / crack heads.
The death of this innocent little child, asleep on the couch, never made the major national media. But she is no less newsworthy than the child of the President or a celebrity. There’s a certain madness in today’s law enforcement SWAT teams. This policemen is still on duty.
Woody and…
There are many such such stories. The police who shot Woody (VT) in a church back in 2001, after only being 60 sec on the scene, is another innocent, who received no justice. Nor did the mentally ill man (VT) shot down in the woods by a SWAT team. Then there was Rev Williams – a 74 yr old black minister/ was quietly reading his Bible – Boston. His elderly wife had stepped out to the store. A SWAT team crashed through the sparsely furnished apt door. Masked – the Rev was sure they were some local gang. He ran for the bedroom, was tackled – vomited, and died of a massive heart attack. I wrote to the Boston papers, the Mayor and the police dept. Nobody was found at fault. And, per usual, I never received a response. We hear of these things and maybe for a moment in time, shake our heads in disbelief, and then forget. We remain silent in the face of these terrible abuses. We shouldn’t. We need to care. How many more are there? See below the story of the more recent voiceless little victim.
DN: In Detroit, a funeral will be held on Saturday for Aiyana Jones, the seven-year-old girl who was shot dead by police while she was sleeping in her own home. On Tuesday, a lawyer for the Jones family filed a pair of lawsuits against the Detroit police for the killing that has sparked outrage in the Motor City. The attorney, Geoffrey Fieger, says video of the incident shows police opened fire before they had entered the house. We speak to Ron Scott of the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. [See video, includes rush transcript]
The girl was shot through the top of the head.