Oakland Police Shoot and Kill Man in East Oakland

This Wednesday, police shot and killed a man who attempted to flee from police in the East Oakland area. Against Hired Guns, a group that was interviewed in the first issue of FireWorks, distributed a flyer in the surrounding neighborhoods that talks about the recent police shooting and puts the killing in a context of racist police power as a tool of social control. Recently, Oakland has seen a series of police killings and shootings of young men in the last several weeks with almost no uproar from the communities where they have happened; be it 'radical' or not. The text from their flyer is reproduced below.

Police at war. Against Hired Guns.  

On Wednesday afternoon, the Oakland police shot and killed a man at the corner of Bancroft and Ritchie. According to police statements, they found out that “occupants of a particular vehicle may be armed.” The cops chased the car until people hopped out and ran in different directions. A cop shot and killed one of them, who the police now say had a gun.  

The police haven’t even claimed that any of those men threatened them, which they always do in order to justify murder. That’s what they said when they killed Gary King, Andrew Moppin, Oscar Grant, Raheim Brown, Alan Blueford… The list goes on, and it’s an old story that they always repeat to justify murder.  

The only person who was hurt in the entire situation was the person the police murdered. Had the cops not chased them, there's no reason to believe anyone would have been hurt. When Derrick “Deedee” Jones was murdered by cops near Bancroft and Seminary in 2010, they said that he took out a gun. They told us later that he NEVER had a weapon, and one of the cops who killed him said: "We were just doing our job, as we were trained to do.”  

Just as that cop said, it is part of the job of police to kill people. It is a mistake to think that they kill people to make us safer, which is what they tell us. The reason they kill us is the same reason they lock us up. It’s the same reason they target us with stay-away orders, gang injunctions, Operation Ceasefire, or whatever their latest scheme is.  

In the 1970s, 44% of Oakland’s population was Black. The Black population has steadily decreased. Between 2000 and 2010, 25% of Oakland’s Black population left the city.  

Every time they kill someone and almost every time they lock someone up, the person is Black or Brown. Every time they make a new policy, it is enforced in working class Black and Brown neighborhoods but never in wealthy or white areas.  

The police are here to kill, contain, harass and cage. That is not how we make public safety. That is how we make war. There is a war against the people of Oakland and it is being facilitated by the cops.  

Fuck the Police. Know Your Rights. Never Snitch.