From Baltimore to Boston, a unified cry for justice

Protesters at a Roxbury march last week organized by Mass Action Against Police Brutality. A second march in Mattapan organized by We Are The Ones and Pan African Alliance happened on Saturday.

For a few brief moments on Saturday, all traffic stopped and everything was quiet at the intersection of Morton Street and Blue Hill Ave in Mattapan. Protesters organized by two grassroots groups, We Are The Ones and Pan African Alliance, had joined hands and formed a large circle stretching around the intersection.

“This is what community looks like,” one of the organizers proclaimed from the center of the circle. “It looks like everything on pause for one moment….to love each other.”

The Saturday march was one of two demonstrations last week organized by activists to express solidarity with protesters in Baltimore and draw parallels between the police killing of Freddie Gray there and other abuses of police power in Boston and nationwide. Although charges were filed last Friday against the six officers involved in Gray’s death, rally attendees at both marches emphasized that the issue extended beyond any one individual legal case.

At a rally on Wednesday, protesters spoke out against what they said was a pattern of impunity for police officers who use deadly force against people of color.

“Until the cops are held accountable, this is not going to stop,” said Nikia Ramsey, sister of Burrell Ramsey-White, who was fatally shot in Boston by a police officer in 2012. “Justice is bringing these people to justice by a jury of their peers – and that’s us.”

The officer in the Ramsey-White shooting was cleared of wrongdoing by the Suffolk District Attorney’s office in 2013, but his family is still seeking answers.

“I’m tired, people in Baltimore are tired, people in Ferguson are tired,” Ramsey said.

Sandra McIntosh, a community activist with the Coalition for Equal Quality Education, spoke about a narrative she found too familiar.

“It’s always a big, black man and ‘I’m in fear of my life,’” she said, referencing what she said was a common explanation from police officers following the fatal shooting of a citizen. “Well, we got a lot of big, black men…I got one of those big, black men – my son. And he’s a gentle giant.”

The Wednesday march was organized by the group Mass Action Against Police Brutality and wound through the South End and Roxbury. The march on Saturday that was organized by We Are The Ones and Pan African Alliance stretched from Mattapan Square to Dudley Square.

While both events focused on police abuse of power, attendees expressed a range of views about how far back the problem lay.

Bishop Felipe Teixeira of St. Martin de Porres Church in Dorchester spoke critically on Wednesday. “We have a lot of black people who are working against the interests of the community,” he put it bluntly, referring to black police officers.

Reverend Mark V. Scott of Azusa Christian Community expressed a desire for cooperation as he marched with the group through the South End.

“I’m here in solidarity for Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, and Michael Brown,” he said. “It’s troubling. At a certain level, it has an impact on your heart.”

He added some thoughts about the police.

“I live in Dorchester, and my experience has been that it’s possible to work with the police as you work with young people. You can have peace and justice.”

Later, a man marching in front of the procession called for reform.

“I’m tired of being treated like we don’t matter,” he said, declining to give his name. “They need to do a better of screening the police.” He added an after-thought a few moments later: “I love the police – quote that! But they need to be held accountable just like us.”

As he finished talking, a woman ran up, eager to volunteer her thoughts as well.

“They need to have a program where they unlearn their racist beliefs,” she said, referring to police officers. “Why do I have to beg you not to shoot me? Why are the cops not getting the educational component?”

The Saturday march in Mattapan included a similar cry of frustration from one attendee that resonated with his fellow marchers.

“I’m tired of hearing about ‘not all cops,’” said one man from Dorchester, referring to the argument that not all police officers should be labeled as bad. “If that’s true, where is the outcry from the cops?”

His words were met with vocal support from rally-goers.

Some change, long way to go

In conversations with the Banner this past week, several observers spoke to a larger context for the issues raised by march attendees.

Gia Barboza, a professor of African American studies and criminal justice at Northeastern University, said it was important to look at the issue holistically.

“By focusing on an individual, we’re not seeing the whole picture,” she said. “We [as a culture] construct young black men as violent.”

She also referred to the importance of economic factors in the so-called ‘Boston miracle’ during the late 1990s when street violence declined significantly. “There was an influx of funding and jobs [then],” she said, adding that such investments have since decreased, thereby exacerbating social problems again.

She added that, in terms of specifics, see saw a need for police training that addressed the reality of violence in the job. “Police are good people…but they are traumatized. You have no trauma-informed therapy and you expect people to behave well in these situations.”

Barboza added that the issue of trauma extended to citizens as well, especially those who had experienced a high level of personal violence.

City Councilor Tito Jackson also emphasized the convergence of underlying social problems that he said were large contributors to the week of unrest and property damage following the death of Gray, who was critically injured while in police custody.

“First, what happened in Baltimore is not only an issue of police brutality,” he said. “It’s symptomatic of issues of lack of education, [and] lack of economic investments.” He referred to Baltimore city councilor Nick Mosby, who gained prominence last week after a live interview with Fox News in the streets of Baltimore, in which he confronted media focus on the riots rather than underlying social inequalities that had long plagued the city.

When asked to compare the Baltimore and Boston police departments, Jackson recounted some of the ways in which he has seen changes in police-community relations during his own lifetime.

“When you go back to when I was a kid during the Carol Stuart case, that was a different time – a very divisive time,” he said.

Stuart was a white woman who was killed by her husband in 1989; her husband initially told police she was attacked by a black man during an armed car robbery in Roxbury.

“I was stopped and frisked at least five times – and they made you drop your pants at that time,” Jackson recalled.

He noted that the U.S. Department of Justice intervened in the Boston Police Department’s handling of the Stuart case – a parallel to the DOJ’s intervention in Ferguson and Baltimore this past year.

Part of the reason for improvements, Jackson said, is an emphasis over the past twenty years on a community policing model that emphasizes relationship-building with citizens.

He referred to the recent case of Angelo West, whom police shot and killed after West shot an officer in the face during a traffic stop. Jackson says that the police investigation in that case was “the model” of what should happen – “In every case of a fatality [they should] act swiftly, with transparency, and get the information to the community as soon as possible,” he said.

Following West’s fatal shooting, police publicly released the video of the incident– the first time local prosecutors had done so before an investigation was complete.

“The Boston police are far from perfect,” Jackson said. “This is an ongoing relationship – something people have to work on. We are not beyond reproach.”

Ron Sullivan, a professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in criminal law, said that he sees many parallels across police-community relations in American urban centers. He cited an October 2014 American Civil Liberties Union report that showed a high rate of police stops of young black and Latino males in Boston.

Sullivan added that insufficient data compounded the issue.

“The data is extremely noisy,” he said. “There is no national database for police-involved deaths….[and] FBI data is incomplete. There is no requirement that jurisdictions supply information to the database.”

Still, he reserved praise for Boston Police commissioner William B. Evans, whom he says is doing “incredible work” in examining issues of implicit racial bias in policing.

A revolution from within

The Saturday march that started in Mattapan emphasized self-love and community support as essential parts of any effort to address racial inequality. Along the way, organizers passed out small pieces of paper to onlookers watching from front porches and store fronts, each of which contained quotes from famous black figures such as Huey P. Newton and Nina Simone.

As marchers passed a group of young people from the Mattapan Teen Center cleaning up a land plot near Simco’s hot dog stand, they paused to pick up trash for a few minutes and give the young people a chance to speak to the group. The teens were participating in the Boston Shines initiative that had community members out cleaning the streets across the city on Saturday.

One young person took the opportunity to give an impromptu speech.

“We’re out here cleaning up to show that we really are doing something,” he said.

His words echoed a theme that was prevalent in comments at both marches, where many people expressed frustration at Baltimore media coverage from the past week that had often labeled young black men as thugs.