The Detroit Free Press has released bodycam footage showing 18-year-old Alonzo Lee-Perkins, a working-class Black youth from Detroit, being shot in the back by Detroit police officer David Gonzalez who repeatedly used disparaging remarks at Alonzo. In the video you can hear Gonzalez calling Alonzo a “bitch” several times and threatening to shoot him before shooting him in the back four times.

Detroit police argued that Gonzalez was in fear for his safety because it appeared that Alonzo had a gun. Yet in court, Gonzalez’s partner Joseph Wafer testified that he never saw Alonzo with a gun, and that he could have been holding a cellphone or wallet in his hand. It is also clear from the video that Alonzo doesn’t have a gun in his hand while he is running and presents no danger to Officer Gonzalez or anyone else. Police only found a gun on Alonzo after he lay bleeding on the ground from the gunshot wounds in his back.

The video shows an all-too-familiar scene: a Black person running from police out of fear for their life.

Alonzo Lee-Perkins has no criminal record, and police did not stop him because he was committing a crime. They stopped him because they saw a Black youth and profiled him as a potential threat to society, even though Alonzo was, like thousands of Detroiters, hanging out downtown to enjoy the annual fireworks show.

This outrageous and unjust shooting, which could have ended in the death of Alonzo, was made worse by what police did next. They transported Alonzo to a hospital, chained him to the bed, and registered him under an alias that neither he nor his family used. His family said it took them several days to find out where he was. Two days after Alonzo was released, Detroit police charged him with three felonies (carrying a concealed weapon, felony firearms, and resisting arrest) that carry with them substantial prison time if he is convicted.

A Policy of Structural Violence and Criminalization Against Youth

What happened to Alonzo isn’t simply the result of a police officer going rogue and breaking department policy, which clearly states that officers are not allowed to shoot someone merely suspected of a crime or just because they have a gun. It is the result of a racist police department that has a pattern of shooting unarmed suspects and was given the green light to criminalize Black youth, especially those who dared to occupy public spaces, particularly in gentrified areas of the city like downtown Detroit.

In Detroit and other cities around the country, events called Teen Takeovers were being organized by teenagers like Demetrius Scott who told Outlier Media that the gatherings were “a chance to talk to girls and see people in person that they’d only known online.” The first Teen Takeover in Detroit went largely without incident, yet the scene of large numbers of Black youth evoked fear all its own. There were reports of physical altercations in later Teen Takeovers, but the number of incidents was minimal compared to the number of youth present. Unfortunately, there is no sense of proportion when it comes to the activity of Black youth who are not afforded the leniency that upper-class young men at Cornell University were afforded.

In an article for Metro Times, Eli Day aptly compares the hysteria whipped up around the Teen Takeovers to the “superpredator” narrative pushed during the height of neoliberalism during the 1990s by the mainstream media, as well as by Democratic and Republican politicians. This narrative helped push tough-on-crime legislation that paved the way for mass incarceration and was at the heart of the famous Central Park 5 incident where five Black and Latinx youth were falsely charged and imprisoned for the rape of a white woman jogging in Central Park, New York.

Day’s article points out that on the same day Alonzo Lee-Perkins was shot, Detroit police arrested 180 teens (who they zip-tied and loaded up on city buses) downtown Detroit for being under 18 and breaking the newly imposed 8:00 p.m. curfew.

We Need a Movement in the Streets to End Police Violence and Stop the Persecution of Alonzo Lee-Perkins

All of this is absolutely outrageous and needs to be condemned by the mayor, the city council, and labor and civil rights leaders in Detroit like UAW President Shawn Fain and NAACP President Wendell Anthony. Community and labor leaders should also call on Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy to drop the charges against Alonzo Lee-Perkins, especially because he is a victim of police brutality and was treated so poorly by police after he was shot.

To win justice for Alonzo Lee-Perkins and put an end to the over policing of Black youth in Detroit, we need a movement actively mobilizing in the streets and organizing in our communities, schools, and workplaces. We need to expose the brutal policies of the police and demand that all officers involved in incidents of police brutality be fired and prosecuted and put an end to the massive funding the Detroit police receive to hire more police and use surveillance technologies that they use to to criminalize Black and Brown working-class youth and communities.

In Detroit, the movement in solidarity with Alonzo organized by Black Youth Project 100 (BYP 100) and supported by Community Movement Builders (CMB), the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Detroit Will Breathe (DWB), and others, is calling on every social justice organization, union, and community association to join our campaign to get justice for Alonzo Lee-Perkins! Follow us on social media, attend our upcoming events, and donate to Alonzo’s legal fund.

The post Alonzo Lee-Perkins Bodycam Footage Reveals the Violence of Over-Policing Black Youth appeared first on Left Voice.

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