Black Lives Matter disrupts Mayor Bowser at council swearing-in

Update Jan 4:Mayor Bowser releases police body camera footage of Javon Hall shooting after two days in a row of protests directed at her. Protest works! Mayor Bowser had defaulted to refusing to release the footage, even though the general public is known to treat concealment, non-collection, or destruction of evidence as being itself evidence of guilt, in this case on the part of the police.

Update Jan 7: Twitter reports mulitple videos now in circulation of Javon Hall shooting, they differ from oneanother:

I"n one video @MPD officer opens the closed front door and immediately shoots. Events do not occur the same way in second video. #JavonHall"

Also this ugly report:
"DON'T SHOOT HIM" then MPD shot #JavonHall and proceeded to laugh with eachother

end updates

On the 2nd of January, DC Mayor Bowser faced the "little Counterinaugural" as Black Lives Matter activists set up in front of her demanding answers about the police shootings of Terrence Sterling and Javon Hall. Three people were forcibly removed while the Mayor went on bragging about private security cameras-and even about the police body cameras whose footage she refuses to release in the Javon Hall case. The cop who shot Terrence Sterling had his camera turned off entirely.

Many of the Mayor's boasts about economics rang as hollow as her body camera boasts. She spoke of funding the Housing Production Trust fund while studiously ignoring the DC residents being dragged away from her over the Terrence Sterling and Javon Hall cases. The Housing Production Trust fund is important, but she spoke of this while homelessness in DC soars to record numbers and concerned citizens were dragged away. She spoke of raising the minimum wage-even though this was made urgent in DC by her own efforts to bring in Wal-Mart. That led to a citywide campaign to raise the miniumum wage to $15 an hour, but she and the DC Council raised it only to a bit more than $12 an hour, and only after a massive public campaign.

Mayor Bowser also boasted about making it easier to arrest peope for defying GPS monitoring bracelet programs and of networking a Big Brother of privately-owned security cameras with police cameras. These sounded more like the programs of a Mayor who does nothing about police shooting Black DC residents dead while new condos rise. She was infamous in 2015 for a failed bill to impose a search clause on people released on parole, which would have forced housemates to refuse to take them back or submit to raids and searches themselves. "Safer streets" is one of those dog-whistle, law-and-order issues normally associated with the GOP, and it's what the big money people who live in upscale condos want to hear.

Video-three DC residents dragged from swearing-in over Terrence Sterling and Javon Hall signs