[ We are left wondering on what planet does distraught black man
Keenan Anderson begging "Please help me" to police become "Please
brutishly kill me"?]
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THEY’RE TRYING TO GEORGE FLOYD ME!  
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Abby Zimet
January 17, 2023
Common Dreams
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_ We are left wondering on what planet does distraught black man
Keenan Anderson begging "Please help me" to police become "Please
brutishly kill me"? _

Keenan Anderson and his son., Twitter/Facebook family photo

 

On a day honoring Martin Luther King Jr. - fierce warrior for racial
justice and, despite his "Santa-Clausifying," against poverty,
militarism and "the unspeakable horrors of police brutality” - we
are left wondering on what planet does distraught black man Keenan
Anderson begging "Please help me" to police become "Please brutishly
kill me"? In an America, still, that MLK called "the greatest purveyor
of violence in the world." Eloquently, achingly, he, Baldwin, Coates
tell of white men who "have caused the darkness."

A 31-year-old black man, father, and charter high school English
teacher "beloved by all," Keenan Anderson died entirely senselessly
Jan. 3 from cardiac arrest after he was tased to death
[[link removed]...] by Los
Angeles police following a traffic accident, marking the city's third
grisly death-by-cop in this very new year and suggesting once again,
per one patriot, "American law enforcement
[[link removed]] is
the KKK...This was sadism and a lynching, pure and simple." 

Police first encountered 
[[link removed]]Anderson,
a 10th-grade teacher at Digital Pioneers Academy in DC who was
visiting family over winter break, following a traffic accident at an
intersection in L.A's Venice neighborhood; they said Anderson was
“running in the middle of the street and exhibiting erratic
behavior.” Made hideously clear in multiple videos from police
body-cam footage but oddly never mentioned in their report was the
fact he was also frenziedly, fearfully, repeatedly beseeching them to,
"Please help me" in an agitated manner that any sentient being would,
you'd think, recognize as connoting a mental health crisis. 

When a clueless phalanx of thug cops nonetheless brutally,
inexplicably escalated the situation, attacked him, and wrestled him
to the ground with an elbow to his neck, he cried out, "They're trying
to George Floyd me!", thus offering up
[[link removed]] the
gruesome spectacle of rendering George Floyd a verb as "another black
man describes the exact same public lynching that is about to fall
upon him by way of cops sworn and paid to protect him."

This horror saw the light of day 
[[link removed]...]last week when
the LAPD released  [[link removed]]an
edited, nearly-20-minute long video
[[link removed]] that includes
perspectives from several cops' body cameras, as well as cellphone
video from a female eyewitness with the perspicacity to note, "I think
that guy needs help." The entire release can be seen on the
department's YouTube channel here
[[link removed]]. There is another,
shorter version here. 
[[link removed]...]

Many on social media purposefully declined to post links because they
are "tired of sharing black trauma." (We've posted a very short
segment below; we couldn't get through the whole thing.) If you find
it easier to read, not see, genocidal violence by agents of the state
hired to protect and serve, _Law and Crime _posted
[[link removed]...] a detailed,
blow-by-blow ((literally) description. 

A reasonably humane first cop on a motorcycle urges Anderson to "get
up against the wall," Anderson nervously implores him, "Please, sir, I
didn't mean to, please help me, somebody's trying to kill me," the cop
almost gently says, "Stay down for me, hey, hey, stay here," 

Anderson says he wants "people to see me...Somebody's trying to kill
me," and moves toward a curb, cop says, "Ok, you can sit right there,"
Anderson, spooked, starts to run off, the cop coaxes, "Come here, come
here, we don't want you in the road." In seconds the tone turns ugly:
A second, thuggish cop grabs Anderson while furiously shrieking, "GET
DOWN on the ground, get down, get down on your stomach NOW!" as
Anderson entreats him, "Please sir, please sir, don't do this, sir."

Things escalate once several other cops arrive, pile on him, push an
elbow into his neck, yell, "Stop resisting!" as a panicked Anderson
cries, "Help, they're trying to kill me." One frantic cop repeatedly
shouts to "stop" or he'll tase him. He finally starts to tase him
multiple times, each one a chilling clatter. Over 42 seconds, with
some pauses, he tases
[[link removed]] him six times,
or with about 50,000 watts, while pinned on the ground with his hands
behind his back. 

Police research says a person should not be hit by a taser for more
than 15 seconds total; one report 
[[link removed]]cites the 15-second
rule four times, warning that any longer exposure "may increase the
risk of serious injury or death and should be avoided.” Anderson,
limp, is handcuffed and shackled, put on a gurney, and taken to a
hospital; a few hours later, he went into cardiac arrest and was
pronounced dead. 

Mashea Ashton, the head of D.C's computer-science-focused
[[link removed]] Digital
Pioneers Academy, described Anderson as "a deeply committed educator"
who "would brighten up a room with his smile" and the father of a
six-year-old son. "The details of his death are as disturbing as they
are tragic," she wrote.
[[link removed]...] "Our
community is grieving. But we’re also angry...Angry that another
talented, beautiful black soul is gone too soon.” She added "Keenan
is the third member of our school community to fall victim" to gun
violence in the past 65 days; two students, 14 and 15, were also
killed in separate incidents. Almost 98% of the student body is black.

On social media, the rage was palpable, especially after police
released an autopsy detail that Anderson had tested positive for
cocaine and marijuana - crimes whose punishment does_ not _include
extrajudicial execution. People said the cops know how lethal tasers
can be, they could see he was a "nerdy," terrified, disoriented black
man "who had no idea how to run away from the police," he was having a
psychotic break or under the influence of something requiring medical
attention. 

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, a black former mental health
professional, issued 
[[link removed]]an
angry statement about "deeply disturbing tapes" and the fact mental
health experts weren't called instead of Nazi cops, noting at least a
third of victims of police brutality were experiencing a mental health
crisis. 

She also called out to the families of two victims of police shootings
this year: Oscar Sanchez, 35, and Takar Smith, 45, whose wife called
police when he violated 
[[link removed]]a
restraining order while mentally unwell; video shows him trying to
fend off police by pushing a kid's bike at them, then picking up a
knife. The family is suing: "When people call for help, we're not
calling for executions." 

On Saturday evening, in pouring rain, activists held a candlelight
vigil
[[link removed]] for
Anderson, who was the cousin 
[[link removed]]of Black Lives
Matter co-founder
[[link removed]] Patrisse
Cullors [[link removed]].
She noted  [[link removed]..]it
was not a protest but "a spiritual 
[[link removed]]gathering,"
held ten years after BLM's founding at the intersection "where my
cousin begged for his life," and on the night before MLK's birthday.
"My cousin would be alive," she said, "if we had actually manifested
King's dream."

Events on what would have been King's 94th birthday included a statue
unveiled in Boston, a symposium on police brutality in Akron, Ohio
where Jayland Walker, 25, died after police shot him 46 times as he
fled, and Biden speaking at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, where
King served, to praise "the sacred proposition we are all created
equal for which Dr. King gave his life." 

He did not point out King also gave his life for a country where in
2022 police killed  [[link removed]]more people
than any other year in the past decade, and black and brown 
[[link removed]]people
in wildly disproportionate numbers; where 1,081 people were tased 
[[link removed]...]to death in one
recent year, with over 32% black victims; where police misconduct
is uncovered
[[link removed]...] in over 35%
of wrongful convictions, 
[[link removed]]too
often of black people, ultimately overturned; where in his 1963 "I
Have A Dream" speech in Washington, he not only envisioned a nation of
people judged "not by the color of their skin but the content of their
character" but declared, "I am not unmindful that some of you have
come here out of great trials and tribulations....fresh from narrow
jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for
freedom left (you) staggered by the winds of police brutality”;
where he recognized police violence 
[[link removed]]as
not just part of southern segregation but northern indifference
[[link removed]] and denial
[[link removed]],
a “system of internal colonialism” where police and courts act as
“enforcers....armies of officials clothed in uniform, invested with
authority, armed with the instruments of violence (to) kill Negroes
with the same recklessness that once motivated the slave-owner.”

Thanks to conservative revisionism 
[[link removed]]Cornel
West has called 
[[link removed]-]"the Santa
Claus-ifying" of King, his true radicalism - his incorporating into a
fight against racism his fierce stances against economic inequality,
militarism, acts of imperialist aggression, notably the Vietnam War,
and "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world - my own
government" - has long been muted. 

Far easier for those threatened by his egalitarianism to view the
fight for racial justice through the lens of protests, buses, lunch
counters "safely in the past," says 
[[link removed]...]Mehdi Hasan,
rather than reckoning with our ongoing crimes of racism. Citing a
revolutionary Poor People's campaign now revived 
[[link removed]]by Rev. William Barber, Hasan
notes King was, gasp, "a proud Socialist" who in one patient, painful
interview pointed out
[[link removed]] that, given "no other
ethnic group has been a slave on American soil," it is "a cruel jest
to ask the bootless to raise themselves by their boot straps." 

Through the upheavals 
[[link removed]...]of the 1960s,
King kept speaking his truth. When the police killing of a black
15-year-old sparked an uprising in Harlem, he was called 
[[link removed]...]by the mayor
and police commissioner to ease tensions; he blasted them for being
“unresponsive to the demands or aspirations” of Black people, and
was "almost run out of town by both when he said cops needed oversight
by a civilian board. In 1965, when Watts exploded, he insisted on
citing "the tinder" - bad housing, schools, jobs, police - that led to
them: "It is purposeless 
[[link removed]]to
tell Negroes they should not be enraged when they should be." Always,
he laid police abuses 
[[link removed]]at
the feet of those in power who "made a mockery of the law: "The
policymakers of white society have caused the darkness."

King's radical integrity is long gone. Happily, activists and artists
echo his eloquence, keeping his legacy alive, still bearing witness.
There are movies; 
[[link removed]...]there are
always movies. And there are writers, primary among them the
ever-fiery James Baldwin. In his searing 1966 "Report from Occupied
Territory" in _The Nation, 
[[link removed]...]_he described
another daily act of police savagery against "a bad nigger" in Harlem
who'd done nothing wrong; then came the police killing of the kid
"which overflowed the unimaginably bitter cup, the thunder and fire of
the billy club, the paralyzing shock of spittle in the face." "These
things happen, in all our Harlems, every single day," he wrote. "If we
ignore this fact, and our common responsibility to change this fact,
we are sealing our doom." 

He goes on, "In every Northern city with a large Negro population, the
police are simply the hired enemies of this population...They are,
moreover quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know they are
hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more
surefire formula for cruelty...This is why those pious calls to
'respect the law' (each) time the ghetto explodes are so obscene. The
law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my
torturer and my murderer." 

Speaking  [[link removed]...]to
Berkeley students in 1979, he came right to the scathing point: "The
intentions of this melancholy country, as concerns Black people, and
anyone who doubts me can ask any Indian, have always been genocidal."
On "the latest slave rebellion": "Our presence in this country
terrifies every white man walking. They needed us for labor and sport;
now we cannot be exiled, and we cannot be accommodated. Every white
person in the country, I do not care what he or she says, knows one
thing - they would not like to be Black here."

For many, the natural successor to the inestimable Baldwin is
Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of _Between the World and Me,_
[[link removed]..] an extended
letter to his son about how "afraid we are for our bodies..for our
loved ones"; thus, "Black people love their children with a kind of
obsession...You come to us endangered.” In a speech 
[[link removed]]launching his book,
he describe [[link removed]...]s
the murky death of Prince Jones, a friend from Howard, and Jones'
stoic mother; having risen in life from enslaved ancestors, she
"carried "a great fear echoed down through the ages" and showed "great
composure and greater pain...all the odd poise (the) great American
injury demands of you...She could not lean on her country for help.
When it came to her son, Dr. Jones’s country did what it does best -
it forgot him." 

In_ The Atlantic,_ he often wrote about "
[[link removed]...]the reality
that police officers have been getting away with murdering black
people since the advent of American policing...The destroyers will
rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.” 

In _Between the World, _he warns his son to "resist the common urge
toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that
imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your
road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive
history...All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and
girls to 'be twice as good'....words spoken with a veneer of religious
nobility, as though they evidenced some unspoken quality (when) in
fact all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the hand in our
pocket... America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the
black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of
men.”

Finally, there is Colson Whitehead, author of the harrowing _The
Underground Railroad 
[[link removed]]_and _The
Nickel Boys
[[link removed]]__, _based
on the real story of a barbarous Florida reform school of "broken
boys" that operated for 111 years and devastated thousands of young
lives. The hero of his wrenching re-creation is Elwood Curtis, a black
innocent raised by his grandmother when his parents abandon him, who
on Christmas 1962 "received the best gift of his life," a recording of
Martin Luther King speeches at Zion Hill: "We must believe in our
souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are
worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this
sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness." 

Elwood tries to rise above the cruelties of the Jim Crow South until
he's randomly arrested for hitching a ride in a car, the surly cop
notes, "only a nigger'd steal." He's sent to Nickel Academy, where
boys are sexually abused, worked to exhaustion, savagely beaten, often
to death. Locked in a dark sweatbox - "Their daddies taught them how
to keep a slave in line, passed down this brutal heirloom" - he
summons King's lofty hope: "The world had whispered its rules to him
for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher
order...Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous
path and it will lead you to deliverance, fight and things will
change." 

Like King, Keenan, Till, Trayvon, Tamir, all the broken black bodies,
he doesn't get to the Promised Land, 
[[link removed]...]but retains the
fervent, yearning dream he will. Just not yet. May they all rest in
peace and power.

_ABBY ZIMET has written Common Dream's FURTHER
[[link removed]] column since 2008. A longtime,
award-winning journalist, she moved to the Maine woods in the early
70s, where she spent a dozen years building a house, hauling water and
writing before moving to Portland. Having come of political age during
the Vietnam War, she has long been involved in women's, labor,
anti-war, social justice and refugee rights issues._

 

* police killings
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* Black Lives Matter
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* Keenan Anderson
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* Los Angeles
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