It’s happened again. GEO condemns the police murders of Tyre Nichols, Tortuguita, Chiewelthap Mariar, and far too many others. We stand with communities in Memphis TN, Atlanta GA, Guymon OK, Los Angeles CA, Raleigh NC, Seattle WA, Toledo OH, Detroit, MI, and elsewhere across the so-called United States. All this after 2022 was the deadliest year on record for police killings.
Only seven months ago did we condemn the murder of Patrick Lyoya by Grand Rapids police. In our statement, we emphasized that Lyoya’s death reflected existing patterns of anti-Black racism in Michigan, and we again lifted up the name and memory of Aura Rosser, a mother and artist, killed by Ann Arbor then-officer now-Sergeant David Reid in 2014. We also cannot forget that the then-police chief of AAPD, John Seto, now works for UM as head of housing security. Now, we lift up the memories of three more Black people killed in the month of January by police.
We condemn the murder of Tyre Nichols, a skateboarder, photographer, and father to a 4-year old. Though the Memphis PD acted in order to preempt protest and fired the cops responsible, the murder of Nichols remains unconscionable and unforgivable. There is no amount of performative firings, additional trainings, bodycams, citizen oversight committees, PR statements, or legal action that can make up for the loss of Tyre’s life, as well as the pain inflicted on his friends, family, and community. We condemn the capitalist media that profits by circulating images of Black death; we have seen enough, enough to know this system has to be abolished. We offer our sorrow and rage to Tyre’s friends and family.
We condemn the murder of Manuel “Tortuguita” Páez Terán, a brave forest defender fighting to protect the Weelaunee Forest from the development of a police training facility colloquially known as “Cop City.” The development of Cop City in Atlanta, GA represents the connected interests of capital and the ever-increasing tactics of police repression and brutality against protestors. Costing $90 million and spanning 300 acres, Cop City will feature a mock city for training police to repress future protests and uprisings – the same uprisings we saw and were inspired by in the summer of 2020. It has been a site of racialized state violence for centuries, as stolen Muscogee Creek land, a slave plantation, and a prison farm. Tortuguita was murdered by Georgia State Troopers for fighting to defend the flowers, trees, deer, and wildlife, and for getting in the way of the development of a hyper-militarized police training center. We have our own fight against a similar project here in Michigan: “cop city north,” the expansion of a military and National Guard training center in Grayling, MI by more than 160,000 acres, which will double the size of the current camp. We offer our solidarity, love and rage to forest defenders who continue to fight in Tortuguita’s memory.
We condemn the murder of Chiwelthap Mariar, a Sudanese refugee killed at work by police in Guymon, OK. Chiwelthap was fired from his job at a Seaboard Foods meatpacking plant on January 9, but ordered to finish his shift by human resources. When he followed HR’s instructions, his supervisor called the police on him, and he was murdered on the shop floor. We join Chiwelthap’s union, UFCW Local 2, in their support of their union brother and his family, and we affirm that police do not belong in our workplaces. There was no reason for Chiwelthap to be killed by police, let alone to be killed by police at work. We offer our love to his family.
The sick process that we repeat every year has not numbed us or desensitized us to the problem: policing anywhere is violence, and as long as police exist, they will continue to kill with impunity. And while we condemn all police murders, we emphasize that these murders, and the terrible cycles that follow (murder, protest, criminalization of protest, counterinsurgency, co-optation, rinse, repeat) only clarify our overall political goal: to abolish policing.
People in our community are building alternatives to policing that create actual public safety that the University of Michigan can support now. The community-based, multiracial Coalition for Re-envisioning Our Safety (CROS) has been developing a non-police, unarmed crisis response program for Washtenaw County for over a year. Over 40 community organizations (including GEO) have endorsed CROS, which draws on best practices from models around the country. In a recent City survey, over 90 percent of Ann Arbor residents supported creating an unarmed, non-police crisis response program. In the meantime, GEO insists on the parallel and simultaneous fight against police while building anti-carceral, anti-racist alternatives in the present.
GEO supports striking back against policing, in all its forms, by any means necessary. In Fall 2020, we went on strike for a safe and just campus, and will continue to fight for a world where police are obsolete, as Derecka Purnell recently wrote. We hope to never have to write a statement like this again, but the killings will not stop until this world of prisons and police is ended.
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