Oscar Grant’s Killer Gets Slap on Wrist, Protesters Get Thrown in Jail

Oakland Cops Gun Down Another Unarmed Black Man

The killing of Oscar Grant, a young black apprentice butcher, by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) cop Johannes Mehserle on New Year’s Day 2009 was literally a shot heard around the world. Video images recorded by horrified passengers on the platform of the Fruitvale BART stop in East Oakland showed Mehserle as he stood over Grant, methodically drew his Sig Sauer P226 semiautomatic and fired into Grant’s back, as another cop held him face down with his hands behind his back.

On November 5, Mehserle got the minimum sentence of two years, less time served, for this coldblooded execution. Declaring that the evidence was “simply overwhelming” that Mehserle had mistaken his gun, weighing over two and a half pounds, for a taser weighing less than a pound, Los Angeles County Superior Court judge Robert Perry wrote off the killing as an “accident.” He also charged that Oscar Grant was coresponsible for his own death, retailing the cops’ allegation that Grant was involved in a fight on the train. Arguing “this is not a case about race,” the judge sneeringly dismissed as ill-informed the hundreds of letters appealing for justice from black people and others in Oakland, who are all too familiar with racist cop terror. As he stood outside the Los Angeles courthouse, where Mehserle’s trial had been moved and conducted before a jury that included not one black person, Grant’s uncle Cephus Johnson powerfully indicted the judge’s ruling as but another example of this “racist, criminal justice system.”

That night, following a protest rally in downtown Oakland, the cops told protesters that their planned march to a West Oakland park would be blocked by police barricades. When the protesters instead began to march toward the Fruitvale BART stop where Grant had been shot to death, they were trapped by an army of cops. With an armed personnel carrier on the ground and police helicopters buzzing overhead, riot-equipped cops rounded up and arrested 152 people.

Three days later, two Oakland city cops gunned down another unarmed black man, Derrick Jones, a 37-year-old barber in East Oakland and father of a two-year-old girl. Claiming that Jones was fleeing the scene of a reported domestic disturbance, the cops said they shot him several times through the chest because he was allegedly reaching for his waistband. One is reminded of the case of black African immigrant Amadou Diallo who in 1999 was cut down in a hail of bullets by New York City cops for reaching for his wallet. “Fleeing while black” is another “crime” punishable by death at the hands of the Oakland Police Department (OPD). In 2008, the cops killed Jodie “Mack” Woodfox, shooting him in the back as he “fled.” The year before, 20-year-old Gary King Jr. was also shot in the back in broad daylight by an Oakland cop who claimed that King was reaching into his waistband as he held up his pants trying to flee an OPD posse. Derrick Jones is the third person to have lost his life at the hands of the OPD this year.

At a November 11 protest that began at Jones’ barber shop and marched to the Fruitvale BART station, a multiracial crowd of 100 chanted, “Oscar Grant, D.D. Jones! We won’t let them kill our own!” Speaking to the protesters, Cephus Johnson pointed to the two-year sentence for Mehserle as a license for cops to kill black people. This license is granted by the capitalist rulers, whom the police serve as an occupying army in the inner cities, as anti-union strikebreakers and as the fist to be brought down to repress social protest.

Hundreds mobilized for an October 23 protest in Oakland, initiated by International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10, to demand “Jail Killer Cops!” The unionists and others who came out that day reflected widespread anger over rampant cop terror. But, as we underlined in “There Is No Justice in the Capitalist Courts!” (WV No. 968, 5 November), the outrage over the slap-on-the-wrist verdict for Mehserle was seized upon by left-talking union misleaders to “try to lull the working class into believing that they can obtain ‘justice’ from the courts of the capitalist class enemy.” The capitalist rulers are hardly going to punish their own police guard dogs for the crimes they commit in the capitalists’ service. And even if one cop were charged and imprisoned, it wouldn’t stop police terror.

The burning anger of the ghettos and barrios against the rampaging cops must be linked to the social power of the multiracial working class mobilized in class-struggle opposition to the capitalist state—its cops, courts and military—and all of its political parties. There will be no end to police terror short of the destruction of this entire system of exploitation and oppression, which the cops “serve and protect.” Our purpose is to build the revolutionary workers party that can lead the fight for a socialist America. Only then will there be justice for working people and all the oppressed.

We reprint below a November 10 letter by the Partisan Defense Committee to the Alameda County District Attorney protesting the mass arrests in Oakland following the sentencing of Mehserle.

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The Partisan Defense Committee condemns the massive police assault on the November 5 Oakland march in solidarity with Oscar Grant by an army of cops in riot gear from a slew of different police agencies. The marchers were expressing their justified outrage at the token sentence for Johannes Mehserle, the BART cop who killed Oscar Grant in cold blood on New Year’s Day 2009. The November 5 police assault was a repetition of what happened following the July 8 slap-on-the-wrist “involuntary manslaughter” verdict against Mehserle.

In the media, the cops claimed that they expected protesters to march as planned to deFremery Park, but the police told demonstrators that any march to the park would be blocked. The march instead went east and, according to witnesses, the cops—who heavily outnumbered the marchers—eventually formed a wall on 6th Avenue near East 17th Street, declared the demonstration an “unlawful assembly” and the entire block a “crime scene,” and gave protesters no chance to disperse before they moved in. The cops threw many demonstrators to the ground and arrested 152, almost the entire march. As of November 8, six were still being held. At least one protester, Stephanie McGarrah, has been vindictively charged with felony arson. We demand their immediate release and the dropping of all charges against everyone arrested!

This assault on protesters in Oakland is just the latest brutal attempt to silence and intimidate those who would protest rampant, racist police terror. Only three days later, on Monday, November 8, the Oakland police killed another unarmed black man, Derrick Jones. Free all the Oscar Grant protesters! Drop all the charges!