"We have a right to be in the streets for Freddie"

"In February of this year, 30-year-old Travon Scott died in a holding cell after allegedly being found having difficulty breathing--although police say no force was used in his arrest. Nineteen-year-old George V. King died from injuries related to officers striking him with a Taser in May 2014, but the officers were not charged.

At age 44, Tyrone West was beaten to death by police and a Morgan State University security guard during a traffic stop in July 2013. No one was charged in his death. Forty-six-year-old Anthony Anderson's death in September 2012 was ruled a homicide by blunt force trauma after police tackled him. But prosecutors decided the officers didn't use excessive force--once again, no one was charged.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, between 2010 and 2014, 109 people died in Maryland after encounters with police--Baltimore City had the highest number in the state at 31. Around 70 percent of those who died from police encounters statewide were Black...

THERE ARE many activists and organizations in Baltimore that have been doing long, painstaking work against police brutality for years, but their struggles have gone largely unreported.

Baltimore Bloc has organized with the families of the victims of police brutality and monitored police activity to keep communities informed. They supported Tawanda Jones, the sister of Tyrone West, who was beaten to death by police in 2013, in her organization of weekly "West Wednesday" protests since her brother was killed.

The Baltimore Algebra Project has called attention to the school-to-prison pipeline and successfully stopped a new youth jail from being constructed. City Bloc is a group of students at Baltimore City College who have led young people in protest against police brutality. The Right to Housing Alliance has been instrumental in fighting the economic violence against targeted Black communities around tenants' rights and the water shutoffs, while also speaking out against police misconduct.

This year, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle and Rev. Heber Brown III of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church worked together to push for legislation to amend the "Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights," which is a barrier to police accountability and hinders investigations of civilian complaints...

So far, the response of the political and press establishment to the Baltimore protests has centered on minor vandalism and the 34 arrests. Those arrests were mainly of young Black men, including those who had not been violent, but were targeted for merely being vocal. Many who protested peacefully refuse to distance themselves from those who broke windows because they can see how the media are using this issue to discredit the movement as a whole.

In fact, the massive police mobilization--an estimated 1,200 cops from Baltimore and other jurisdictions, along with state troopers, took part in policing Saturday's protests--has stoked entirely justified anger. In effect, the city mobilized an occupying force to stand guard in front of an empty stadium, long before sports fans arrived--a clear display of the city's priority of protecting property, and not the lives of Black city residents."

http://socialistworker.org/2015/04/27/in-the-streets-for-freddie

A great background on Baltimore and the activism occurring right now.

(Credit to EF)