At five in the morning, the medical alert device of 68-year-old Kenneth Chamberlain Sr. went off by accident, setting off a chain of events that for most people would have resulted in a bit of embarrassment. For Chamberlain, a Marine veteran and retired corrections officer in New York, this occurrence wound up costing him his life. Local police officers, responding to the device, ended up tasering and then shooting him, first with a bean bag shotgun and then with live ammunition.
The whole ordeal was recorded by Chamberlain’s medical alert device and the uniformed killers were caught calling the elderly man with a heart condition the n-word before they barged into his apartment.
Chamberlain can be heard on the audio recording repeatedly telling the police officers that he was okay and asking them to leave. After convincing Chamberlain to crack open the door slightly “just to see” him, they would not leave and wound up literally unhinging the door to gain entrance and then ultimately gun him down.
Like the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida, the case of Kenneth Chamberlain highlights one simple fact: if you are Black in the United States, you are assumed guilty until proven innocent. Even though the police officers were ostensibly responding in order to aid someone with a medical condition, Chamberlain was treated as a criminal rather than a person possibly in need of medical attention.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation is the only party running in the 2012 presidential elections whose candidates are on the streets actively engaging in the growing fight-back movement against the racist criminal justice system and all of its agents.
A social movement based in the most oppressed sectors of our society is the only way we can win rights and protections for African Americans that cannot be taken away. The Lindsay / Osorio 2012 Presidential Campaign fights to build a movement for socialism—a movement that can go toe-to-toe with this system that relies on racist terror, the police and extralegal armed groups to oppress and divide us.
