Will the racist DA, Pamela Price, bring murder charges against little Jasper Wu’s killers?

Pamela Price, whose tenure as Alameda County D.A. got off to such a rocky start, is shortly to be confronted with the test of her career: Whether or not to charge Jasper Wu’s murderers with murder.

Little Jasper, you’ll recall, was less than two years old when he was shot and killed by three rampaging Black men during a heated gang battle on the 880 Freeway. Jasper was asleep in a car seat, as his mom drove their way home, when a stray bullet from the gunfight passed through the car’s window and shattered his head. Former D.A. Nancy O’Malley brought murder charges against Trevor Green, Ivory Bivins and Johnny Jackson, but Price, who replaced O’Malley, now says she’s considering lowering the charges her predecessor brought against the three gang killers.

Price released a video to the community attempting to reassure us that she’s committed to prosecuting the case. She refused to explain, though, why she rejected O’Malley’s original charges, or what lesser charges she has in mind. In reality, all Price did was bleat sugar-coated “thoughts and prayers” to Jasper’s parents. Clearly under pressure to say something to an outraged public, Price resorted to her usual practice of race-baiting. She accused those who have suggested she’s soft-pedaling her prosecution because the three killers are Black as having “a political agenda to divide our diverse community…Those who claim that race has somehow influenced the prosecution of this case,” she added, “are wrong.”

I’m among those who believe that race is influencing Price, as it always does. In giving preferred consideration to Black criminals, Price shows herself to be the racist. When Black men commit awful deeds of murder and mayhem, she goes soft on them, on the premise that they are the real victims of “racism” by “white supremacists.” I even perceive hints by Price that, because little Jasper was Asian, she’s taking the crime less seriously. Had the toddler who was shot and killed been a Black child, and the shooters White men, Price would be screaming from the rooftops for maximum justice. I know this is true, and so do you.

Jasper’s grieving parents, meanwhile, are publicly expressing their concern over Price’s dithering. With reports that Price could “drastically reduce the sentences” for the three killers, An Wu, Jasper’s mom, said, through tears, “If that happens, if the new DA, that's the direction she goes lowering the sentencing, what kind of message are we sending to the public?"

What kind of message? If you’re a victim of crime by Black people in Alameda County, don’t expect justice while Pamela Price is in charge.

Price, who’s been ducking interviews all week, is going to have to go public soon. She won’t be able to pull her stunts in the dark, which is where she prefers to burrow, nor will the public be satisfied with her self-serving videos. The whole world, in effect, is watching. If she charges the three killers with anything less than a heinous murder, she will be revealed, once and for all, for what she is: a racist who lets Black men off, while persecuting cops and firing dedicated veteran prosecutors.

For additional reporting on this situation, watch this short video from NBC Bay Area News.

And please try to attend this very important rally later today:

JUSTICE FOR JASPER WU RALLY

Monday April 10

Noon

Alameda Courthouse

1225 Fallon Street Oakland

(near the Lake Merritt BART station)

Steve Heimoff

“Abolition Democracy” Explained

One of Cat Brooks’ favorite concepts is “Abolition.” By it, she doesn’t mean the Abolition of Slavery, which President Lincoln declared in 1863 with his Emancipation Proclamation. Instead, Brooks means abolishing the police: not simply defunding them, but going all the way and eliminating all police departments. As she herself writes on her website, “We believe defunding the police is [only] the first step towards abolition.”

Her next theoretical steps are incremental and increasingly drastic: reducing the Oakland Police Department’s budget by 50%, then gradually “to interrupt and eliminate the need for law enforcement” altogether, while at the same time “addressing [crime’s] root causes: white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism.”

This abolition movement long has had broad support in the more radical extremes of the Black community. W.E.B. Dubois himself coined the term “Abolition Democracy,” in his 1935 book, “Black Reconstruction,” and while he never explicitly defined it, others interpreted it to mean “to tackle the constellation of social factors that lead to mass incarceration.” Many years later, in 2005, Angela Davis, the Black Panther and Communist, wrote a book, “Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons and Torture,” in which she argued that the torture incidents at the Abu Ghraib prison, during the second Iraq War, were simply reinterpretations or grotesque simulations of what had been happening to Black Americans in the years following formal Emancipation. We come now to today, when U.C. Berkeley has started a Black Studies Collaboratory that includes an “Abolition Democracy Fellowship Program,” one of whose Fellows is Cat Brooks, whose specific title is Activist-in-Residence. Brooks is now promoting an April 5 event at U.C. Berkeley she’s moderating in her Fellowship capacity, called “White Supremacy: Black Trauma and Healing Justice.” Thus, a straight-line connection between DuBois, Davis and Brooks.

These abolition democracy theorists have long traced the origin of police departments to the men who were hired to track down slaves who had escaped from their plantations. As the NAACP puts it, “The origins of modern-day policing can be traced back to the ‘Slave Patrol.’ The earliest formal slave patrol was created in the Carolinas in the early 1700s with one mission: to establish a system of terror and squash slave uprisings with the capacity to pursue, apprehend, and return runaway slaves to their owners. Tactics included the use of excessive force to control and produce desired slave behavior.” This is a tempting, plausible explanation for the origin of police in America, but it isn’t true. For one, it fails to take into account that “The first organized, publicly-funded professional full-time police services were established in Boston in 1838, New York in 1844, and Philadelphia in 1854,” and they had nothing to do with escaped slaves. Nor does the slavery origin theory explain the rationale that policing in America began with: namely, that people behave indecently, and civilized society always has had some form of behavioral control and punishment. For example, even when New York City was New Amsterdam, “In the Dutch era from 1625 to 1664, the first professional police department was created” in the city, and “focused on such offenses as excessive drinking, gambling, prostitution, and church service disturbances.” So it is incorrect and terribly misleading to state that modern-day policing has anti-Black DNA in its blood.

Which leaves us to imagine, or to “re-imagine” to use that catchy phrase, what society would be like without police. I, myself, can only come up with the most lurid and frightful images of dysphoria and anarchy. There are bad people around, people who would rather steal than earn an honest living, and if they have to attack and hurt, or even kill, someone, they will not hesitate to do so. This is why we need cops. Police departments are not relics of “white supremacy.”  They are a necessity of the reality that too many human beings remain feral and violent.

I think I know where people like Cat Brooks are coming from. They feel themselves to be, in effect, sent by God to right the wrongs of the past. People who feel God-sent run the risk of becoming fanatics. Their motives may be pure, even admirable, but that doesn’t pardon them from coming up with illogical, dangerous ideas. I can hardly believe that anyone thinks that abolishing police departments—much less shutting down the jails and freeing all the prisoners, which Brooks also advocates—would result in anything but carnage and the breakdown of civilized society. We can talk all we want about hiring mental health professionals to intercede with crazies on the street—that’s a good idea, no one says it isn’t—but to talk about “abolishing” law enforcement is absurd. Just why respected institutions like U.C. Berkeley sponsor such concepts makes me wonder what the heck they think they’re doing.

P.S. Seneca Scott sends out this important message:

“We are reaching out in the hopes that you will join us for a rally at City Hall on Tuesday, 4/11 at 11am. We are organizing neighbors and local businesses to demand an end to the theft from small property owners and the brutal lawlessness local businesses are forced to endure.”

I will be there to protest the unfair moratorium on rent, and I hope to see you. Thanks.

Steve Heimoff