EVENT ALERT: 17th National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation TODAY
Posted on October 22, 2012
The 17th National Day of Protest
to Stop Police Brutality, Repression,
and the Criminalization of a Generation
WEAR BLACK-BLOW THE WHISTLE-BREAK THE SILENCE
MASS INCARCERATION + SILENCE = GENOCIDE
Chicago Area Meet-ups for Monday, October 22:
South Side: 1 pm 63 & Halsted
West Side: 3 pm Division & Pulaski
North Side: 3:30 pm Milwaukee, Division & Ashland
City Wide Convergence: 5 pm in front of the Cook County Courthouse/Cook County jail complex 2650 S. California Ave.
October 22, 2012 needs to be a day marked by varied forms of determined resistance that bring together those who bear the brunt of the brutality and murder this system enforces on the oppressed with people throughout society who don’t want to live in a society where people face this kind of injustice because of the color of their skin or because of their country of origin.
October 22, 2012 has to be more than a day of protest as usual. It must be a day when our rage at the whole criminal “injustice” system in this country is manifested. A day when people go to the prisons and call for an end to mass incarceration. When there is mass political resistance against the institutions and officials involved in profiling Muslims, Arabs and South Asians and against those carrying out raids and deportations aimed at immigrants. People have to figure out the ways to creatively make our determination to end all this injustice real and powerful.
October 22, 2012: We face an emergency situation. The powers-that-be have unleashed their whole criminal “injustice” system to carry out an intensifying murderous assault on oppressed people across the country. Law enforcement treats whole generations of Black and Latino youth like criminals, guilty until proven innocent-if they can survive to prove their innocence. This approach is concentrated in policies like the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk, under which almost 2,000 people, most of them Black or Latino and almost all of them doing absolutely nothing wrong, are subjected to harassment, disrespect, brutality and worse EACH AND EVERY DAY. And police departments across the country carry out the same kind of racial profiling.
Close to 2.4 million people are warehoused in prisons in the U.S. More than 80,000 of them are held in solitary confinement, subjected to conditions that fit the international definition of torture.
More than 5 million people who have already served their sentences and been released face discrimination when seeking work, are banned from living in public housing, can’t get government loans and aren’t allowed to vote.
All this adds up to tens of millions of people living their lives enmeshed in the web of the criminal justice system.