What the Mayor Laughed At
Peter Linebaugh
Shirley Beckley stood to speak at the podium facing the City Councilors and their video camera.
It had been more than a month since an Ann Arbor police officer shot and killed a forty-year-old woman, Aura Rosser. People in Ann Arbor, as with people across the nation, have begun to stir—mobilizing, marching, rallying, meeting, dieing-in, speaking up, and speaking out against the rising number of racist acts of state terror, the police assassinations.
At the podium where Shirley Beckley was to speak there was a little mechanical device ticking off the seconds of time in illuminated red numerals. Either the mayor or one of his subordinates controls this clock. Members of the public are permitted, if they sign up early enough in the day, a chance to speak for three minutes. One of the City councilors was recently heard to call us “the three minute people.” Well, one of these “three minute people” is Shirley Beckley, a seventy-one-year-old African American senior citizen, and she rose to speak. In view of the fact that three children had lost their mother to a police bullet, she proposed that her three minutes to speak be kept in silent respect for these motherless children. Having said so, Shirley Beckley resumed her seat in the audience, and the mayor promptly adjusted the clock to move on to the next item on the agenda. What!?
Anthony Morgan, Aura Rosser Plaza, Dec. 15, 2014
The Nature of Police, the Role of the Left
Peter Gelderloos
A young black person was killed, many people brave enough to take to the streets in the aftermath were injured and arrested, and the only real consequences the police will face will be changes designed to increase their efficiency at spinning the news or handling the crowds, the next time they kill someone. Because amidst all the inane controversies, that is one fact that no one can dispute: the police will kill again, and again, and again. A disproportionate number of their targets will be young people of color and transgender people, but they have also killed older people, like John T. Williams, Bernard Monroe, and John Adams, and white people too. The Right has seized on a couple cases of white youth being killed by cops, like Dillon Taylor or Joseph Jennings, throwing questions of proportion out the window in a crass attempt to claim the police are not racist.
Radical Washtenaw 