Cries for Vengeance Against L.A. Cops Who Shot Knife-Wielding Thug

Pajamas Media ^ | September 16, 2010 | Jack Dunphy

[Kaslin]

Manuel Jamines went after the responding police with his blade, but the mob wants the cops on trial for murder because he was "unarmed."

Everyone knows there are few certainties in life. Yes, you always hear about death and taxes, but recent events here in Los Angeles have revealed other certainties which are, perhaps not coincidentally, related to the first two.

The first is this: If it is your custom to spend your afternoons getting drunk, wielding knives, and menacing passers-by on busy street corners, and if, after the police have arrived as they must when this behavior has been brought to their attention, you fail to drop your knife when ordered to do so, and if then you further tempt fate by advancing toward a police officer with the knife raised in such a way that the officer reasonably believes his life is imperiled, it is as close to a certainty as this world can produce that you will be shot and maybe even killed.

So discovered — too late — one Manuel Jamines (a.k.a. Manuel Ramirez, a.k.a. Gregorio Luis Perez, a.k.a. heaven knows what else) on the afternoon of September 5 at the corner of 6^th Street and Union Avenue, just west of downtown Los Angeles.

The facts presented by the Los Angeles Police Department are these: At about 1 p.m., three officers from the LAPD’s Rampart Division were patrolling that area on bicycles when they were flagged down by people who informed them that Jamines (or whatever his name is) was brandishing a knife and threatening people, including a pregnant woman and some children.

The officers stopped and got off their bikes, and at least one of them ordered Jamines — in both English and Spanish — to drop his knife. Rather than comply with the order and surrender, Jamines raised the knife and advanced on one of the officers as if prepared to attack him. That officer fired his service pistol, striking Jamines and killing him on the spot. The entire encounter lasted about 40 seconds.

There followed four nights of protests, some of them violent, when area residents and some outsiders took to the streets and challenged the many LAPD officers who were called in from all over the city. Protesters threw all manner of projectiles at officers, including rocks, bottles, and eggs, they lit trash cans on fire, they rolled fully loaded Dumpsters weighing hundreds of pounds downhill at them, and when officers chased some of them into nearby apartment buildings, they threw microwave ovens, air conditioning units, television sets, and a variety of other items from upper-floor windows and rooftops. Some also armed themselves with slingshots and used them to shoot marbles at police officers and reporters.

The protests were fueled by what LAPD Chief Charlie Beck has described as a “deliberate campaign of disinformation about the facts concerning this shooting,” the most egregious example of which was the claim that Jamines was unarmed when he was shot. Why some people have chosen to believe this assertion, made by a woman who was on the other side of a traffic-filled, four-lane street rather than the version of events provided by those who were themselves threatened by Jamines and his knife is a mystery that will no doubt go unexplained.

But then again, perhaps it’s no mystery after all. In fact it involves yet another certainty, one involving both death and taxes, which we may sum up simply thus: When a police officer kills someone, no matter how clearly justified he may have been in doing so, there will soon come forth relatives of the deceased who will tearfully claim he would never, never hurt anyone and certainly wouldn’t have threatened a police officer. These assertions will be made in preparation for the inevitable lawsuit and demand for millions of dollars in compensation to be extracted from the taxpayers’ pockets. And, just as anyone who follows these stories here in L.A. might have expected, along came Los Angeles attorney Luis Carrillo, sometimes referred to as the Latino Johnnie Cochran, who joined the protesters on Tuesday and presumably handed out a business card or two to Jamines’s relatives.

But no one should expect an easy payout to emerge from this shooting. For proof of this, one need look no further than the statement made on Sept. 9 by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

“Let’s be clear, and I will be, about what happened in the Westlake area,” Villaraigosa told reporters. There was a man with a knife. That man with a knife was threatening individuals, innocent people who were on the street there. That man was in close proximity – in fact, the facts will show that actually he had his hand on at least one person at some point in that altercation.”

“We’ve got to go through an investigation,” Villaraigosa continued. “But when it’s all said and done, I’ll guarantee you what’s going to come out is that these guys are heroes, and I stand by them.”

There is nowhere in this country a politician more sympathetic to immigrants — both legal and, like Jamines, illegal — than Mayor Villaraigosa. Nor is there one quicker to wet his finger and test the political winds before taking a stand. If there were even the slightest doubt as to the propriety of the officers’ actions in this shooting, Villaraigosa would have — as he’s done in the past — straddled the fence between supporting the officers and allowing for the possibility that they may have acted improperly. Given how politically charged the Jamines shooting has become, it was a pleasant surprise to see him come out so forcefully in support of the officers.

So too, was Chief Beck quick to come to his officers’ defense, something his predecessor, William Bratton, was famously loath to do even when the political downside was minimal. Beck recorded a video, posted on the LAPD’s internal website, in which he thanked the officers who had been deployed to deal with the protests. “You’ve been the subject of taunts,” he said in the video, “you’ve been the subject of slurs, none of which you deserve, and none of which the department deserves. But you’ve handled it as professionals. I want to thank you for that.” He concluded the video by saying, “You do a dangerous job, you’ve got to know that I’m standing with you.”

It’s inconceivable that Bratton would have made such a tape in the same circumstances.

But Beck’s tone did not sit well with the editors at the Los Angeles Times, who criticized his performance at a community meeting held Sept. 10 at a school a few blocks from where Jamines was killed. “[Beck] was booed, denounced as the protector of a killer and as a chief of assassins,” said the Times.

In response, Beck promised a fair and transparent investigation that would determine whether the shooting was within departmental policy. It was the right message, no doubt, but his words struck a clinical, dispassionate note to a crowd shouting for justice. To them, Beck did not seem to be addressing the fundamental question, which was not whether the shooting was justifiable according to the rules, but whether it was just.

I was not present at the meeting. Instead, I was near the scene of the shooting, dodging the odd egg and what have you, and enduring those taunts and slurs the chief referred to in his video. But I disagree with the Times’s characterization of the people at the meeting, most of whom went directly from the school to the shooting scene. They did not shout for justice, as the Times claims; they shouted for vengeance. They demanded, against all evidence thus far produced, that the involved officers be arrested and tried for murder, and that the LAPD in effect surrender control of the neighborhood to the residents, a good number of whom are illegal aliens from Mexico and Central America.

I had the opportunity to have a discussion with a few of the more rational and sober members of the crowd, all of whom asked me why the officer had to shoot Jamines rather than use some lesser level of force. Like many police officers, I carry a folding knife similar to the one Jamines was said to be wielding when he was shot. I showed it to my interlocutors, holding the serrated blade close to their faces. “Do you think I could hurt you with this?” I asked, watching their eyes widen at the readily apparent lethality of the blade. “And do you think you could stop me from hurting you without shooting me?” None of them had a ready answer.

And no one else does, either. Because if you come at a cop with a knife, you’d better plan on getting shot.

It’s a certainty.

[Haddit]

On this video he has a lead-in with www.uniondelbarrio.org address.

As of today, uniondelbarrio has this:
Raza rebellion in Los Angeles in protest of Guatemalan worker Murdered by LAPD
Manuel Jamines Xum, a Mayan worker and father of three, was murdered by LAPD on Sunday September 5th, after supposedly threatening police with a pocket knife. However, witnesses of the murder say that Manuel was not armed and that police barked orders at him in English. LAPD claim they issued orders to him in Spanish, yet Manuel spoke K’iche, a Mayan language spoken throughout Central America.

Unión del Barrio has joined the communities demand for justice not only in this case, but in all the instances of police terror directed towards our people; police investigating themselves is not and will never be justice. Historically we have demanded that independent, community based, tribunals be established to investigate these and other acts of police abuse. We demand that these murderers be put on trial for their crimes. And demand full community control of the police. We say that the police must be accountable to the people, not the institution of repression that only serves the interest of the rich.

The police are killing us in record numbers throughout the occupied territories! In Seattle a Native American deaf man was killed because he could not hear the cops yelling at him to drop his knife, a tool he used for his wood carvings for work. In Oakland, there was Oscar Grant, murdered by police officers who were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, a less serious crime than what the cameras as the scene recorded: cold blooded murder. At the US-Mexico border we have Anastasio Hernández, and Sergio Adrian Hernández both murder by Border Patrol.

We know what is necessary to defend our neighborhoods and our people is organization, Barrio/community defense committees. Now, more than ever, it is important for us as Unión del Barrio, other revolutionary and progressive people and organizations to be with the people in the streets with our brothers and sisters in action.

¡YA BASTA CON LA REPRESION!
¡YA BASTA CON EL TERROR DE LA POLICIA!
¡BASTA CON EL RACISMO Y VIOLENCIA CONRA NUESTRO PUEBLO!
¡BASTA!

If you watch the uniondelbarrio Flickr pictures, it looks like Ron Gochez in the first frame.

[thecodont]

“These frail racist white people want to keep us out of this country. It’s not simply because of the color of our skin, it’s not simply because they just want to exploit us, let me tell you why. Because on this planet right now, 6 billion people at the forefront of the revolutionary movement is La Raza.”…

…

“So what do they fear? They know that every single country, they know that we no longer will fall for these lies called borders, they know that a Salvadorian, that a Guatemalan and a Nicaraguan and a Mexicano, there is no damn difference, we are all one people. So with that in mind, we see our selves, all of us here, as the Northern front of a Latin American revolutionary movement.”

*********************************************************************

The ONLY thing that unites them is that they all speak Spanish, a language of the “frail racist white people.”

[Haddit]

It’s not just in L.A., watch this video from Georgia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LHRzxgAxRo
Mayday 2010 Flyer in Atlanta, Georgia
The following is what the communist agenda is pushing on illiterate squatters:

We live under a system of capitalism-imperialism…a system in which U.S. imperialism is the most monstrous, most oppressive superpower, a system driven by a relentless chase after profit, which brings horror upon horror, a nightmare seemingly without end, for the vast majority of humanity: poverty and squalor…torture and rape…the wholesale domination and degradation of women everywhere…wars, invasions and occupations…asassinations and massacres…planes, missiles, tanks and troops of the USA bombarding people in faraway lands while they sleep in their homes or go about their daily lives, blasting their little children to pieces, cutting down men and women in the prime of life, or in old age, kicking down their doors and dragging them away in the middle of the night…while here in the USA itself the police harass, brutalize and murder youth in the streets of the inner cities—over and over again—and then they spit out their maddening insults, insisting that this is “justified,” as if these youth are not human beings, have no right to live, deserve no respect and no future.

For millions in the iner cities, if they are not killed at n early age, their likely future is prison. This system has robbed so many youth of te chance for a decent life and has got far too many living, dying and killing for nothing-—nothing good-—nothing more than messing up people and murdering each other on the streets of the cities here…or joining the military, being trained to be murderers on a mass scale, massacring people in countries across the globe. A system which offers millions and millions of youth no greater purpose, no better fate, than crime and punishment, or to become a mindless killing machine for the system itself-—that alone is reason enough to sweep this system from the face of the earth!

Some say this is all “gods’s will” and we just have to “put it all in god’s hands.” But it was not some god that got us in this situation…and it won’t be some god that will get us out of it. The truth is there are no gods…and we don’t need them!

THE REVOLUTION WE NEED
It is this system that has got us in the situation we’re in today, and keeps us there. And it is through revolution to get rid of this system that we ourselves can bring a much better system into being. The ultimate goal of this revolution is communism: A world where people work and struggle together for the common good…Where everyone contributes whatever they can to society and gets back what they need to live a life worthy of human beings…Where there are no more divisions among people in which some rule over and opress others, robbing them not only of the means to a decent life but also of knowledge and a means for really understanding, and acting to change, the world.

This revolution is both necessary and possible. This is the truth that is covered up and lied about, but we have the facts and te analysis to back this up.

This capitalist-imperialist system is in crisis…This system is bankrupt…This sytem is rotten to the core…This system is based on ruthless exploitation…This system commits so many monstrous crimes, and causes so much unnecessary suffering. We do not need to be sacrificing even more to “rescue” this sytem. This system needs to be swept aside…its crimes against humanity stopped cold…its intitutions dismantled, and replaced by ones that empower people to build a new society free of exploitation and oppression.
snip