Hundreds rally for Breonna Taylor in Boston
Hundreds of people rallied Friday night in Roxbury to protest the lack of charges in the death of Breonna Taylor, renewing a call for police reform and racial equity that drove thousands to the streets earlier this summer.
“I’m enraged,” speaker Gabby Ballard told the crowd, which gathered as the sun went down in Nubian Square for a protest advertised with the title “Justice for Breonna Taylor.” “It makes me sick to see my sisters gunned down.”
Taylor, a Black EMT in Louisville, was shot to death by police conducting a raid on her apartment. Prosecutors ruled that the officers who shot her were justified in acting in self-defense after her boyfriend fired on them. One officer, who has been fired, was charged with wantonly opening fire outside her apartment and endangering neighbors.
Several of the speakers Friday night adopted a particularly leftist angle, with one calling for the “abolition of our (jail) and policing systems” and saying that voting for “enemy” Joe Biden is little different than voting for President Trump.
And Ballard, from the Party for Socialism and Liberation, called the police “pigs” and led the crowd in an enthusiastic chant of “no good cop in a racist system.”
Monica Cannon Grant, a controversial Boston organizer, told the diverse and young crowd, “We have an obligation not to just to show up today, eat our cheese sandwich and check off a box that you marched for the negro.”
Protests began nationally in late May after the death of George Floyd, a Black Minneapolis man whose killing by police was captured in horrifying video.
Since then, actual changes in law locally have come in fits and starts. The state House and Senate have each passed a version of a police reform bill that would put restrictions on use of force and create more oversight of officers, but differences between the bills — particularly the more radical House bill’s limits on civil liability for cops — have ground the proposals’ progress to a halt.
In the capital city, Mayor Martin Walsh appears to be on the verge of adopting a series of recommendations from a police reform task force he created; among the changes would be the creation of an independent office to oversee internal and external complaints against officers and the department. The recommendations are in the midst of a public review process now.
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/36lnF87
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