In the quiet of 4:00 on a Sunday morning, in the darkness, alone in the front seat of a car, the short, sweet life of Devin Brown was ended in a violent burst of gunfire. A night-riding Los Angeles police officer stood near the car he was in. It took him seconds to draw his gun and fire: Five shots. Then five more. Half of them struck and killed the boy in the car. Devin Brown was 13.
The whole incident that ended with murder of this Black 8th-grader took less than five minutes from start to finish. Cops started chasing the Toyota Camry that Devin and another boy were in during the early hours of Sunday, February 6. They said later they thought maybe it was a drunk driver. A chase lasting three or four minutes and covering a few miles, ended when the small car crashed onto the fence of a used tire place at 83rd and Western in South Central L.A. The police say that one youth got out of the car and ran, leaving Devin alone. Within seconds, a cop got out of his car and started shooting. He was so trigger-happy that five of the bullets hit his own car. The police said that the small compact backed into the police car, and the cop fired "in fear of his life." "They assassinated him twice," a friend of the family of Devin Brown told an abc news reporter.
They not only murdered him, but tried to make him sound dangerous. They said the car was stolen, though they didn’t know it at the time they shot him. LAPD Chief William Bratton talked about a "high-speed chase," when the top speed they cited was 40 to 50 miles per hour. When speaking of the bullets the cop fired into his own car, Bratton said there was a danger of police being caught "in a crossfire," when Devin had NO KIND OF WEAPON.
Devin’s father, Charles Brown, had quit a construction job to go to work for the school system in order to spend more time with his family. When he died of respiratory disease, Devin was devastated. At first he missed a lot of school, but he had recently started back improving. He could do impressions, and he made his whole class laugh at his renditions of TV commercials. Other kids called him, "Willie B," a name they inscribed on a banner that they all signed and hung by the memorial that people made at the corner of 83rd and Western. One message said, "Now you rest, and we’ll do the rest." Many wrote short notes: "I love you." "It’s fucked up."
The corner of 83rd and Western became the focal point of the anger and outrage that burst forth all over Los Angeles. Beginning Sunday, people came with signs and flowers. Over 200 candles were placed on the corner, I brought one as well. Didn't know the boy personally, but how could I not feel for him? There was so much pain in the air. You could still see Devin’s blood staining the street. Everyone was hype- yelling profanity at the patrol cars on cruise.
People in the neighborhood disputed many aspects of the police version, casting doubt on whether Devin was ordered to get out of the car before the police opened fire, and even whether he was driving. Because I’m outraged that a policeman following a car for miles would not be able to see that it was a child driving the car. Instead, they took it as an opportunity to open fire and to kill, to take someone’s life. It is indicative of the racist society we live in.
There are lies the police tell that are so familiar that anyone can recite them: "Reached for the waist band"; "Pointed their hand at the police in a threatening manner."
Another one— "Backed the car toward the officers" —was used a year ago when the LAPD shot and killed Nicholas Killinger outside Santa Monica High School, a shooting they just decided violated department guidelines for shooting and killing people. In November 2002, two weeks after William J. Bratton became police chief of the LAPD, his cops killed four people in two days in several incidents. At that time, cops twice claimed there was a vehicle backing toward them, even though there were witnesses who said they were cold-blooded killings.
What were they there to do? You know, fuck all this ‘serve and protect’ bullshit. If they were there to serve and protect, they would have found any way but the way they did it to handle this scene, they could have and would have found a solution that was much better than this. This is the way the proletariat, when it’s been in power, has handled and would again handle this kind of thing—valuing the lives of the masses of people—as opposed to the bourgeoisie in power, where the role of their police is to terrorize the masses, including wantonly murdering them, murdering them without provocation, without necessity, because exactly the more arbitrary the terror is, the more broadly it affects the masses."
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