DC Ferguson marches in solidarity with Charleston, S Carolina against racist terror
On the 21st of June, DC Ferguson marched in solidarity with African-Americans in Charleston, S Carolina. On June 17, a white supremacist invaded the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and opened fire. Nine people were killed and one more person wounded. Signs in the DC march read "Stop the war on Black America."
DC Ferguson has also spent much energy in the last year opposing jump-outs, which have been called "Stop and Frisk on wheels." Police deny they use the tactic, but everyone on gentrification threatened blocks knows exactly what a jump-out is. Now police chief Lanier says she will "restructure" police to eliminate vice squads, who MPD has grudgingly admitted use tactics similar to what seemingly everyone knows as a jump-out. A jump-out is when a swarm of armored but plainclothes cops swarm from an unmarked car and attempt to intimidate every young Black male into submitting to an illegal search. These searches are presumably an effort to find drug dealers by unlawful group searches of entire blocks of people. The "restructuring" promise is an implied promise to eliminate jump-outs by focussing on top-level drug importers instead, but activists fear vice squads will return under another name and jump-outs continue. The obvious precedent here is the continuation of the School of the Americas as WHINSEC, the Western Hemisphere Institue for Security Cooperation-new name, same game.
