Willie McCoy was a 20 year old musician who was executed by six police officers 1 year ago tonight. He had fallen asleep in the Taco Bell drive-thru (now Starbucks on Adm. Callaghan) allegedly with a gun in his lap, although no gun appears on the body cam footage of any of the officers. Instead of setting up at a distance and calling out with a bullhorn, to wake him up and give him a chance, police surrounded his car, aimed their weapons and shot him 55 times the first time he moved. If he indeed had a gun, please remember that possession of a weapon is not an executable offense.

Also, about a week later, in Suisun, a white man asleep in his car with a gun in his lap, was arrested by police without incident. It is clear to me, and to most people I've spoken with, that the police set up the situation with Willie McCoy so that it could only end one way. And that is not justice. Not by a long shot.

I am heartbroken after attending the vigil for Willie McCoy and Fight For Our Lives Rally. I am so sick and tired of hearing about police officers killing the people they are sworn to protect. Racism, biases, bad assumptions, misunderstanding or misinformation. It doesn't matter what the excuse is. "Reasonable use of force" simply doesn't mean the same thing to some police officers as it does to the vast majority of Americans.

There is a reason that police officers are not tasked with executing anyone they deem dangerous. Everyone is ENTITLED to a fair trial. Everyone. It's a huge conflict of interest to have police officers deciding guilt on the street and executing people, just like it is a conflict of interests to leave it up to a District Attorney to decide whether to prosecute people he/she works with.

I believe, as Rep. Ayanna Pressley wrote, that "The federal government has an obligation to rebuild the legal system so that it is smaller, safer, less punitive and more humane." It is past time to transform our racist, sexist and classist system into a system that works for ALL the people. And we can't rely on people with the power and wealth to do that for us. Change takes place from the bottom up. We all have to rise together. And that means showing up at rallies and protests, it means showing up at the ballot box, it means watching and paying attention to what our elected officials do and do not do, and it means calling and writing letters to express our voices.
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"In 1984, a Charlotte police officer sitting in his squad car saw a man who was in line at a gas station suddenly get out of line and leave the store. That man, Dethorne Graham, was a respected employee at the Department of Transportation, and also happened to be a diabetic in the middle of an acute insulin crisis. He had asked a friend to pull over at the gas station so that he could buy some orange juice, but when he saw how slow the line was moving, he decided against the purchase, and instead asked his friend to simply rush him home where he would take care of himself.

Having witnessed that exact scenario from his squad car, Officer Connor believed he must've just witnessed a theft or robbery of some sort. Neither were the case. He proceeded to follow Graham and his friend, William Berry, for half a mile before pulling them over. Connor, and other officers, then yanked Graham out of the car, broke his foot, cut his face and wrist and bruised his shoulder. Graham and his friend each begged the officers to give him some orange juice because of his insulin attack, but the officers refused, even when a friend brought the juice there. The officers insisted Graham must've done something, anything, illegal.

He hadn't. Eventually, suffering from the attack, Graham passed out in a medical emergency. Officer Connor then drove back to the convenience store to see if anything had been stolen. It hadn't.

Officer Connor and his partners had imagined the entire thing. No crime ever took place. Graham never stole the juice, and of course he never robbed the store. Armed with that information, the officers, instead of taking Graham to the hospital, literally dumped him on his front yard. The whole time, Graham had a diabetic medical card in his wallet, but police had refused to even look at it.

So, of course Graham sued the police force and demanded that the officers who did that to him be fired, but North Carolina fought back. The case eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court, and what the judges decided then has absolutely everything to do with why, in spite of video evidence, character witnesses, marches, protests, and everything else, we can't convict an officer for police brutality.

The Supreme Court, in Graham v. Connor, determined that "reasonable use of force" by an officer must be viewed from the perspective of what appeared reasonable in the moment of its application — not from 20/20 hindsight. In other words, even though those Charlotte cops were absolutely wrong to do what they did based on the actual facts of the case, because all of those facts were not available to them when they assaulted Graham and deprived him of medical attention, or even a bottle of juice, they can't be held liable for their actions. Officers, therefor, are fully empowered to act in the moment, even if just a little bit of restraint would've proven those actions to be completely egregious."

- Shaun King
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On February 13, 2018 Officer Ryan McMahon, of the Vallejo PD, saw Ronell Foster riding his bicycle without a light. He wanted to talk to him about bike safety, but Ronell ran. Officer McMahon chased him down an alley.

According to Times-Herald reporter John Glidden, McMahon said that Foster stole his flashlight. That's when McMahon shot Foster seven times, telling investigators that he feared for his life.
“This guy just took my light from me, we’re fighting and nothing I’ve used on him is working. He is gonna smack me in the head,” McMahon said to investigators, "He’s gonna take my gun and shoot me or he’s gonna beat me down with my own flashlight and there’s nobody here to help me and nobody knows where I’m at."

Now watch the video.
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The DA determined that this shooting was justified.

When the laws are working against the people, it is incumbent upon law makers to change the laws. Since I first declared my candidacy, I have heard of issues with police violence in Vallejo, Martinez, Santa Rosa and in lower Lake County. I assume that my opponent, Mike Thompson, has also been hearing about these problems. And this a national issue. Police shooting is now a leading cause of death in this country. Why has he never tried to do anything about this life or death issue, which affects so many people in this country?
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"Tennessee v. Garner seemed like a major victory for those fighting against police brutality. A young, unarmed black boy in Tennessee named Edward Garner was shot in the back and killed by police in Memphis. That boy, who posed no physical harm to the officer, was shot just so he could not get away from a non-violent crime he was suspected of committing. Edward weighed 110 pounds, was in the 8th grade, and was believed to have stolen a wallet with $10 in it. That was in 1974. His father fought for justice for his son, year after year, in court after court, and believed he finally received it in 1985 when the Supreme Court ruled that it is actually unconstitutional to shoot a fleeing suspect like Edward Garner. The court, in what appeared to be a tremendous victory, ruled,

"We are not convinced that the use of deadly force is a sufficiently productive means of accomplishing them to justify the killing of nonviolent suspects. The use of deadly force to prevent the escape of all felony suspects, whatever the circumstances, is constitutionally unreasonable. It is not better that all felony suspects die than that they escape. Where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others, the harm resulting from failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to do so."

Seeing that ruling, many activists and legal scholars believed it would mark a significant shift in the prosecution of police officers who were shooting and killing suspects at will. It didn't. In fact, one key sentence that came later in the ruling, did quite the opposite. That sentence says, "Where the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to others, it is not constitutionally unreasonable to prevent escape by using deadly force."

The operable word in that sentence is "believe." Tennessee v. Garner introduced the idea that officers did not need to actually be physically threatened in order to use lethal force — they just needed to have "probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or others" in order to use that force.

What looked like a victory for those fighting against police brutality was actually a neutron bomb that would destroy thousands of cases of legitimate instances of police violence. By introducing belief, which apparently does not have to be rooted in fact, into what police are allowed to claim, it is now nearly impossible to prove what officers do or do not believe. The burden of proof to refute the claims of what an officer says he or she believes is so outrageously high, that pretty much the only thing that could contradict it would be a recording or testimony of some type in which it is proven that the officer did not believe they were in danger and is only faking the belief for the sake of the legal case against them. Consequently, once an officer claims that they believed they were in danger, or that the community was in danger, that case, and any case like it, is dead in the water.

For instance, the officers who killed Philando Castile, Amadou Diallo, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, John Crawford and hundreds of others each claimed that they believed they were in grave danger when they shot and killed each of the victims. They weren't in danger, but that's not what Tennessee v. Garner requires. It simply requires that the officer reasonably believes that danger was a real possibility. Amadou Diallo could not have shot four NYPD officers with his wallet, but that didn't matter, because the officers sufficiently convinced the court that they believed his wallet was a gun, and that if they did not shoot him immediately, that they could all be shot and killed. Never mind that Amadou had never touched a gun a day in his life or that he was as sweet and peaceful as a man as you could ever meet. Tennessee v. Garner doesn't give a damn about that. If an officer believes something, they are empowered to use lethal force as an extension of that belief."

- Shaun King
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I'm proud to have the endorsement of Willie McCoy's brother, Kori McCoy, and uncle, David Harrison, as well as the endorsement of the family of Ronell Foster. When the laws are working against the people, lawmakers ought to be changing the laws. But lawmakers have really let the people down on the issue of police violence. It's time for a change.
My opponent is a champion of universal background checks, but police violence is also gun violence. And so is war and armed support of military dictatorships all over the world. It's time this country took a long, hard look at how we treat people that don't have a lot of money.
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This campaign is a campaign of the people, for the people and by the people. As such, it is funded by individual donations from people just like you. We do not accept corporate donations or money from lobbyists or super PACs.

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Jason Kishineff for Congress 2018 . 100 Via Belagio . American Canyon, Ca 94503 . USA