East London's Newham is a rough area to grow up in, by any standards - and among the many shootings, stabbings, muggings etc, one thing remains missing from the picture of these particular dark memories - and that is the presence of respectful and effective po po. Unfortunately (and I say that with sadness that it is unfortunate), for many of my crowd, we've grown up being made to feel guilty whenever even approached by the boys in blue, even when we're the ones dialing 999. Trust is further abandoned when the innocent die at the bloodied hands of the law - but it's too fewer a time we see the responsible receive the fate of a criminal commiting the same crime. The uniform gives you power to protect the people - NOT RULE THE PEOPLE. If my sentiments seem melodramatic, read my Ctrl.Alt.Shift report below of this march against police brutality; and pay special attention to the story of Sean Rigg, one of the many alledgely killed by police without justice:
Young Blood: Who Killed My Brother?
When it comes to an age of activism, some say there's a grey matter, somewhere between the late 80s and now. Some claim we've come down to an apathetic generation with a lack of fight - and in turn, certain sceptics identify an uphill struggle, in Ctrl.Alt.Shift's mission to make activism 'cool again'. Then again, certain others have then said to me (and rightly so) that it's not even a question of 'cool', but having the sense of fighting for what's important - yet repeating the same tone of scepticism with belief that the distant past movements for women's rights and racial equality have done the militant dirty work for us, leaving our present overly-comfortable, lazyboy state of mind. I mean, it's not crazy to think that some, at times, can find it difficult to get to grips with today's issues and injustices that are blowing up so far from home; things like Gaza, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Tamil Tigers, DRCongo and the rest of the world's tragedies that don't necessarily affect our everyday lives. Now stop in your tracks - as on Saturday May 23rd this entire notion died, as I listened to a woman scream for 45 minutes: "Who killed my brother?" Her gut-crunching wallows are important to the most apathetic of all of us.
This woman was Marci Rigg, sister of deceased Sean Rigg - leading the United Campaign Against Police Violence (UCAPV) rally from London's Trafalgar Square to New Scotland Yard last weekend. Let me set the picture for you: 21st August 2008, 40 year old Sean Rigg was arrested and restrained by four Brixton police officers, placed in a van and taken to the police station - one hour later, he was dead. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) are meant to be conducting an independent investigation into his death. However, so far, the Rigg fam claim to have experienced a cover up of vital CCTV evidence, a biased investigation in favour of the police (with interviews of the officers involved taking place a whole seven months after the incident). Sean was not formally identified by his family (in fact they were actively discouraged from seeing Sean) - and eventually after much fighting, the family were able to view Sean through a glass box, finding wounds to his head - described in the IPCC's post mortem as a 'wound to his cheek'. This bullshit farce is why Rigg's family cried down the speakerphone, "Who killed my brother?" with the crowd chanting back "The Police!"
Read the full article here
Prevacid is used to treat and prevent stomach and intestinal ulcers, erosive esophagitis (damage to the esophagus from stomach acid), and other conditions involving excessive stomach acid such as Zollinger-Ellison syndrome.
ReplyDelete