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HUMANITY IN TORMENT

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=By= Ana Biocini

 

“I can’t breathe….they’re killing me,” I heard my brother Hernan scream over, and over, and over again, while I watched police pin him to the ground with all of their weight on top of him, after beating him down on the street and dragging him out to the sidewalk in front of my house in Oakland. I pleaded for them to stop, but the police officers continued until he breathed no more. Click here to demand justice for my brother.

When I called the police for help that day, I never imagined that I was calling the same people who would kill my dear brother in the street just minutes later.

Hernan’s death was all caught on video. But the police hid the tape from the public for TWO AND A HALF YEARS — until it was recently leaked to the media by an anonymous source.(1) If it were up to the police and Oakland authorities, the public might never have known what happened. It’s been over two years, and there still hasn’t been a public investigation into Hernan’s death. There have been no charges against the police who killed him. No major public outcry. Nothing. We don’t even know whether any of the officers involved were disciplined. In fact, the Oakland Police Department refuses to answer any questions about his death at all.

Now that the video of the police killing my brother is finally public, this is our chance to demand justice for Hernan. My family and I can’t do it alone. We need your help, Rowan.

SIGN THE PETITION to demand Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf call on Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley and Police Chief Sean Whent to launch immediate investigations into Hernan’s death and hold the officers involved accountable to the full extent of the law.

My younger brother, Hernan Jaramillo, worked as a realtor for years, lost his job and house after the economy crashed in 2008, and returned to school. Prior to being killed, he moved in with me and worked as a salesman for a local solar panel company. Hernan was a good, innocent, unarmed man who wasn’t doing anything wrong.

I called the police on July 8th, 2013 for help because I heard noises from his room and thought that someone was trying to break in and hurt him. It was a false alarm, but instead of simply talking with my brother and trying to figure out what had happened, the police officers forced him out of my home in handcuffs — shoeless, wearing just boxers and a tank top  — and killed him. Then they kept the truth about his death quiet for two and a half years.

The truth is that the police beat him, threw him to the ground in the middle of the street, and dragged his body 20 feet to the sidewalk. For 15 minutes, an officer pressed his knee into Hernan’s back, while another officer’s hand pressured his lungs — repeatedly ignoring his and my pleas to let him sit up and catch his breath. And eventually Hernan went silent. That’s when one police officer said, “OK now, because you are quiet, you can sit.” But it was too late — they had already killed him. When the paramedics finally came, my brother’s lifeless body was still handcuffed.(2) Click here to demand justice for Hernan.

My brother did not deserve to die. And I am haunted by his death every day. But what bothers me the most is the silence that has surrounded his death, the inaction from Oakland authorities, and the lack of accountability for the police officers who killed him.

If the officers who killed my brother are innocent, why has the police department kept the video of his death hidden from the public? Why are they refusing to talk to the press or my family about what happened? Why hasn’t District Attorney Nancy E. O’Malley even investigated this case? And what is stopping Mayor Schaaf from taking action and holding all parties involved accountable?

These questions keep me up at night, and I can’t fight this alone anymore. I am so grateful to have Courage Campaign and Presente.org now helping with Hernan’s case, but we need thousands of compassionate people like you to join us if we are going to have a fighting chance at justice.

Join us to send an immediate message to Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf: “We demand justice for Hernan Jaramillo’s death!”

About a year after Hernan’s death, a New York City Police Department officer killed Eric Garner in a shockingly similar incident.(3) If the video of my brother’s death had been made public when he was killed, it would have created an important public conversation about the use of excessive force by the police.

What happened to my brother and Eric Garner are just two tragic examples of the epidemic of police violence against Latinos, Black people, and other people of color in our country.

My brother didn’t deserve to die like this, and neither did Eric Garner, or Michael Brown, or Tamir Rice, and so many others who have died at the hands of police. We must join together, stand up, and demand justice now!

Tell Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf to demand Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley and Police Chief Sean Whent launch immediate investigations into Hernan’s death and hold the officers involved accountable to the full extent of the law.

In honor of my little brother Hernan Jaramillo,

Ana Biocini

1. http://act.couragecampaign.org/go/2529?t=10&akid=2539.2106367.mxa6Va
2. http://act.couragecampaign.org/go/2530?t=12&akid=2539.2106367.mxa6Va
3. http://act.couragecampaign.org/go/2531?t=14&akid=2539.2106367.mxa6Va

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The campaign presented here is an email from Courage Campaign.

Additional information: ACLU of Northern California Statement on Hernan Jaramillo’s Death in Oakland Police Custody

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By Rob Kall, Editor, OpEd News

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Source: http://www.opednews.com/populum/printer_friendly.php?content=a&id=186225

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PBA Blasts “Anti-Police Rhetoric” After Eric Garner Death

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APPENDIX I
Surprisingly, the mainstream media, including the NYC metro tabloids that pretend to care for the working class have been divided by Lynch’s deranged accusations. The New York Post, a filthy tabloid controlled by Rupert Murdoch, the master of Fox News, an unmatched massmind polluter, has not surprisingly sided with Lynch, but the equally influential Daily News actually came out speaking in critical tones of the PBA’s chief.

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BELOW, SEE EXCERPTS FROM THE DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL AND OTHER MEDIA ON LYNCH’S RHETORIC, INCLUDING THE VOCALLY CRITICAL, AND SPOT ON, GAWKER.COM ANALYSIS.
[learn_more caption=”Cop leader Pat Lynch recklessly targets enemies, including Mayor de Blasio“]

Police union chief Pat Lynch recklessly targets “enemies,” including Mayor de Blasio

Friday, December 19, 2014, 4:05 AM

“Apparently believing his own angry, divisive rhetoric hasn’t done the trick, Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch has moved into calling on cops to split New York into their friends and their enemies. A recording of Lynch addressing PBA delegates reveals that he is also pointing his members toward an unlawful rule-book slowdown as a tactic in warring with Mayor de Blasio.

“If we won’t get support when we do our jobs, if we’re going to get hurt for doing what’s right, then we’re going to do it the way they want it. Let me be perfectly clear. We will use extreme discretion in every encounter,” Lynch said, adding: “Our friends, we’re courteous to them. Our enemies, extreme discretion. The rules are made by them to hurt you. Well, now we’ll use those rules to protect us.” He went on: “There’s a book they make for us where, if you carried it with you, you won’t need to go to the gym. Every time there’s a problem, they tell us what we can’t do. They tell us what we shouldn’t do. They never tell us what we can do. “We’re going to take that book, their rules, and we’re going to protect ourselves, because they won’t. We will do it the way they want us to do it. We will do it with their stupid rules, even the ones that don’t work.”

READ THE REST

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For its part, Newsweek, struck a more conciliatory tone, posting a more polished essay on Lynch, suggesting some explanations of why he sees the world through such a thuggish  fascistic prism:

It takes Patrick Lynch a very long time to get around New York: Merely walking to his SUV, parked around the corner from his office at the tip of lower Manhattan, can take 15 minutes. That’s because Lynch makes a point of shaking hands with every police officer within about a 20-foot range. A more distant officer will get a wave and a shouted greeting. The flesh-pressing is mostly just saluting the troops, but it is also good politics, since Lynch is up for reelection next year (his fifth term). With his graying hair perfectly slicked back and a pinstripe suit outlining solid features, Lynch has neatly transitioned from policing to politics.

The PBA’s communications director, Al O’Leary, believes Lynch is the most powerful police union chief in the world: His union has twice as many members as Chicago does police officers. Lynch’s loudest critics—for example, a city councilman who had once been a Black Panther and deemed the PBA the “Police Brutality Association” after the Stansbury shooting—would be dismayed to know how little impact they have on his ironclad convictions. He is not reflective, nor is he paid to be. His job is to be the strident, unflagging voice of his beat cops in contract talks and grievance hearings.

But as crack dens become condominiums, memories fade. In recent years, police officers have frequently found themselves vilified both by poor minorities pushed by gentrification into ever-more-distant neighborhoods and by the upper-middle-class whites who have replaced them in “up-and-coming” areas.

Perhaps that’s because cops serve as an uncomfortable reminder of what it takes to make Brooklyn a playground for the Lena Dunhams of this world. Like teenagers, we chafe at them, doubly so because we badly need them. Not that those who enforce the law always abide by it. To an unabashed cop defender like Lynch, what he says are rare instances of police misbehavior have received an inordinate response that points to a deeper antipathy, a growing ingratitude. “Maybe we’re forgetting what it felt like to be afraid,” he says with something approaching bitterness.

‘A Bunch of Thugs… ’

Patrick Lynch, now 51, was reared in Bayside, Queens, the last of seven children in an Irish-Catholic family. He went to Monsignor Scanlon High School, in the Bronx. There, he met Kathleen Casey, who became his wife. They have two sons. One is a police cadet. The other is a police officer. Lynch still lives in Bayside, close to where he was raised.

Nevertheless, recent events have provided a vexing challenge to Lynch: New York has never been safer, and the police have never been less popular. Last spring, the NYPD’s social media team encouraged city residents to use the #MyNYPD hashtag to tweet selfies with police officers. Within hours, Twitter exploded with photographs, coded with the hashtag, of NYPD officers looking like brutal foot soldiers of the 1 percent, swinging fists and crushing windpipes. Many were outraged by the social-media subversion, with the Daily News suggesting, in an editorial titled #ourNYPD, that the image of the NYPD as “a bunch of thugs haphazardly wielding force is gross, sloppy and plain wrong.” Yet a point had been made, in the plain sight of millions.

Lynch thinks that maybe it got too “good on the streets,” and that people have forgotten that they need the police. He thinks they will soon remember. He says he has seen an uptick in graffiti while driving around Brooklyn and Queens, a sure sign that the bad old days are returning.

A Slap in the Face

BY  ALEXANDER NAZARYAN  / OCTOBER 22, 2014)

Finally, for this roundup, we repost here some passages from a fraternal site, gawker.com. In a piece signed by J. K. Trotter, gawker.com stated,

“Patrick Lynch is the 51-year-old president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the largest and most influential union of the New York City Police Department. You might recognize his name: Over the weekend, Lynch blamed Bill de Blasio for the Saturday deaths of two Brooklyn cops who were murdered by a lone gunman from Georgia. “That blood on the hands,” he said at a press conference, “starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor.” 

To understand why he would say something so wrong and inflammatory, you need to delve into Lynch’s long, checkered history of issuing similarly insane statements. His public declarations over the past 15 years are essentially pro-police agitprop: Cops can do no wrong, while victims of their state-sanctioned violence always had it coming. They are also a deep well of masculine anxiety, hurt feelings, and barely disguised racism…”

Trotter proceeded to provide a list of Lynch’s big mouth “hits” over the years. He advised, “Please consult them whenever he opens his mouth in the future.”

[/learn_more]

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