Opinion

‘Failure to Supervise’ Goes All the Way to the Top

Published

9 years ago

January 12, 2016

By Erica Garner, Huffington Post

My father, Eric Garner, was killed by New York Police Department officer Daniel Pantaleo a year and a half ago, but last week marks the department’s first official charge of wrongdoing in his case.

The charge was not made against Pantaleo, the officer who placed my father in a fatal — and illegal — chokehold, but against Sgt. Kizzy Adonis, one of two supervising officers at the scene.

We know Sgt. Adonis wasn’t even assigned on patrol during the incident. According to Ed Mullins, head of the sergeants’ union, she “responded at her own initiative.”

She wasn’t the borough or zone commander. Yet Sgt. Adonis, stripped of her gun and badge, is now being charged on four counts of “failure to supervise.”

Though I never find myself agreeing with Mullins, a pathetic imitation of Pat Lynch, we share this opinion: The charges against Adonis are ridiculous.

Adonis, who was promoted to sergeant two weeks before my dad’s death, wasn’t part of the team that piled on his back. In the video that captured the incident, we all see Adonis creep away.

What we didn’t see? She went to the ambulance stationed on the corner of Bay Street. According to witnesses at the scene, Adonis spoke to an EMT and made an additional call for assistance — I guess no one else planned on saving my father’s life that day.

So why is Sgt. Adonis the only one facing charges? One guess: like my father, Sgt. Adonis is black.

We know black police officers can feel like outsiders within the force. We know that black officers in Chicago are punished more than twice as often as white ones.

Sgt. Adonis witnessed an incident of anti-black police brutality, one that would inspire protests around the world, and had to hold her composure among her white colleagues. I can only imagine what was going through her mind.

The manager of Bay Beauty Supply heard Sgt. Adonis say to the other officers, “Let up, you got him already.” Maybe she knew her day was coming. Maybe it was just a matter of time.

If Sgt. Adonis can be charged with failure to supervise, then I expect the other sergeant at the scene to be charged as well.

Charge the zone commander. Charge the borough commander. Charge the Police Commissioner. Charge the Mayor. Our entire political system justifies the murder of black citizens, and the “failure to supervise” goes all the way to the top.

Look at Freddie Gray’s case. Look at Sandra Bland’s. Instead of transparency and accountability, we get wrist slaps and scapegoating — and make no mistake, the charges against Sgt. Adonis are no more than this.

We can’t be satisfied with these meaningless actions. If we want true accountability for racist state violence, we’ll need to raise our voices and call out these moves for what they really are: failure to protect, failure to serve and failure to lead.

After a grand jury failed to indict the officers responsible for 12-year-old Tamir Rice’s death, his mother, Samaria Rice, laid the matter out plain and simple:

“Due to the corrupt system, I have a dead child.”

We need leaders willing to call out the corruption of our criminal justice system and clean it top-to-bottom. This year, as candidates run for local and national offices, we’ll hear them claim black lives matter. They’ll promise change. They’ll do their best to win over black and brown voters longing for justice. Then, once elected, they’ll turn their backs on us and uphold the same corrupt status quo.

Not me.

If I run for congress, I guarantee full transparency and accountability. It’s time to step up and become the leaders we’ve been waiting for. It’s time we stopped demanding justice from others and started creating it for ourselves. For Freddie Gray. For Sandra Bland. For Tamir Rice. For Eric Garner. Who’s with me?

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Oakland Post: Week of December 18 – 24, 2024

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of December 18 – 24, 2024

Published

2 days ago

December 20, 2024

Oakland Post

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Activism

Post News Group Hosts Second Virtual Town Hall on Racism

“While our society tends to rebrand over the decades, we find hate as the new word, broadening its arch of issues in society,” said show host and Post News Group Global Features Journalist Carla Thomas. “However, the very first form of hate, which is racism, built this country.”

Published

1 week ago

December 14, 2024

Oakland Post

Photo courtesy of Post News Group

By Post News Group

Post News Group Global Features Journalist Carla Thomas recently hosted a second Virtual Town Hall on Racism, with guests including community builders Trevor Parham of Oakstop and Chien Nguyen of Oakland Trybe.

Thomas opened the town hall by paying homage to the ancestral losses of the African diaspora and to the Indigenous tribes, the enslaved, the freed, and the trailblazers of the Civil Rights Movement, Black Lives Matter Movement, and those more recently victimized by police brutality.

After thanking Bay Area non-profits for their work, Thomas led a thoughtful discussion on the importance of acknowledging racism as the first form of hate that built America.

“While our society tends to rebrand over the decades, we find hate as the new word, broadening its arch of issues in society,” she said. “However, the very first form of hate, which is racism, built this country,” she said.

“That act of othering, creating a narrative that made African people, indigenous people, and ultimately melanated people, labeled as less than human justified the colonizers act of subjugating our ancestors to inhumane, incomprehensible treatment for over 400 years,” said Thomas.

Parham of Oakstop, located at 1721 Broadway, explained that Nazi Germany patterned its mistreatment and extinction of Jews in the Holocaust after chattel slavery in America and the Jim Crow apartheid system that followed it.

“Nazi Germany found America’s treatment of Blacks so inhumane and denigrating that they (decided) it would actually be the perfect ingredient to undermine another group of people,” said Parham. “So, they essentially borrowed from what Americans did to Black people.”

Thomas pivoted the discussion to the limitations placed on Black America’s generational wealth through policies of red-lining, redevelopment, and title deeds to this day, based on the idea that no Black or indigenous person is allowed to purchase property or land.

“For this reason, there continue to be impoverished Black communities throughout the nation,” she said.

“The structures of racism from red-lining to lack of access to capital continue to restrict Black (people) in America; this structural racism kind of finishes you before you even start,” added Parham. “The lack of generational wealth has left our communities at a disadvantage because with generational wealth we’d have the resources to police our own communities and build further.”

Nguyen, Clinton Park site director for Oakland Trybe, spoke about his parents’ journey as immigrants from Vietnam, the challenges of being teased in school, and how his troubled brother was murdered.

Nguyen has turned his personal tragedies into triumph, pivoting from a career as an eight-year business owner in the Little Saigon community of East Oakland, to now a non-profit leader transforming and reclaiming the community’s Clinton Park at International Boulevard and Sixth Street..

“A park represents community, and between the pandemic, illegal activities, and homelessness, the park needed to be re-established, and we now offer programming for the youth and extended community,” he said.

“Between Oakstop’s business model of purchasing commercial properties and transforming them into beautiful spaces for community ownership, business space, and special event hubs, and Oakland Trybe’s ability to transform public spaces central to a community and empower our communities, we have solutions,” Thomas said.

Throughout the conversation, Parham referred to a press conference hosted at Oakstop in August where NBA icons Jason Kidd and Jaylen Brown pledged to raise $5 billion for Black businesses in the nation.

“Inspired by Black Wall Street, Jaylen began with Boston and created the Boston Xchange because he became aware of a statistic noting that white households in Boston average $250,000 and Black households averaged a mere $8 in wealth,” Parham said.

In Oakland, he established the Oakland Xchange to expand the movement right at Oakstop, he said.

Thomas encouraged viewers to connect with her guests and tap into the dozens of organizations making a change. “I encourage you to join your chambers of commerce, your community-based organizations, non-profits, and churches to uplift and rebuild the community,” she said.

Thomas also suggested that the NAACP as a great start. “The Oakland chapter’s resolution developed around racism was adopted by the national NAACP, and at the Afrotech Conference, national NAACP leader Derrick Johnson announced a $200 million fund to support Black funders.”

Thomas informed viewers of the California vs. Hate, initiative, a non-emergency hate incident and hate-crime reporting system to support individuals and communities targeted for hate.

“Your reports inform the state of where to designate resources and extra support,” said Thomas.

For more information, visit PostNewsGroup.com, CAvsHATE.ORG or call 1-833-8-NO-HATE.