If she wants to change that she must immediately: Mayor Bowser has shown she cares nothing for Black and POC communities. It is no coincidence that community members were the first to respond to the shooting of Deon, communities learned long ago not to expect help from the DC government and have found their own ways of coming together and staying safe – including peace vigils, mutual aid, and neighborhood protests. “Meeting violence with violence has never worked, yet the DC government insists on continuing that failed tactic - instead of providing well-funded resources and services like violence interruption, quality education, mental and physical health care, and housing.” “The idea that recovering a gun is worth the life of a child should be horrifying to every DC resident.” said Makia Green, a Core Organizer with Black Lives Matter DC. “The state creates the conditions to create a desperate and traumatic reality for many Black DC residents, particularly East of the River, and then responds to that desperation with murderous intent.” “Violence shows up in many forms - through gentrification, displacement, lack of food access, the school to prison pipeline and numerous other ways,” said Knapper.
In fact, the police and DC government have caused or perpetuated the violent conditions many of our city’s residents experience every day. “Every action she has taken - from calling for prosecutions of unlawfully arrested protesters to ignoring the killings of Black people in DC - is antithetical to the idea that Black lives matter.”īoth research and the lived experiences of those who have familiarity with it have shown that intra-community violence is not solved through policing, which only further traumatizes communities. “We refuse to allow the mayor to continue to insult the intelligence of DC residents,” said Black Lives Matter DC Core Organizer Nee Nee Taylor. “Perpetuating the myth that ‘perfect victims’ exist is dangerous and reinforces the myth that only some Black lives matter.” As described by the Guardian, it is standard practice for district attorneys and prosecutors to dredge up negative details about victims of police killings and promote racist tropes, adding to families’ pain.Īs Mayor Bowser is applauded for denouncing federal forces (with whom MPD collaborates) for using the very same tactics used by her own police force, and paints words she doesn’t mean outside the White House, her body count grows. “It seems everyone is committed to spending more perfect victim energy examining Deon’s life than the murderer that took it,” said April Goggans, a Core Organizer with Black Lives Matter DC. “Don’t be fooled - Deon was a child, barely 18, hunted and gunned down through the deeply woven slave-catching tactics cops have been using since the birth of policing in America.”
#Dc organizer terrorist ties full
“The same false, racist narrative that stole Deon’s boyhood and turned him into a full grown man out for blood is the same narrative we have seen from Mayor Bowser and MPD over and over again,” said Stop Police Terror Project DC organizer Natacia Knapper. Deon should be alive but on Wednesday he was murdered. Deon was murdered in broad daylight by Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officer Alexander Alvarez on September 2, 2020, and nothing that DC Police Chief Peter Newsham and Mayor Muriel Bowser do to distort the facts, or to smear a teenager as a violent threat, will take away from that truth. Stop Police Terror Project Lives Matter DC - Months of protests against police violence here in DC calling for justice for #DQuanYoung, #MarqueeseAlston, #JeffPrice and so many more, have culminated in another name being added to that list - Deon Kay.Įighteen-year-old Deon should be alive today.