Want to do a Crime a Get Away With It?
Be the Son of a City Attorney
By Young Rebel

  
Can any of us really look ourselves in the mirror and say that we have justice in San Jose? Can any of us look at the crooked police officers, judges and district attorney and say we applaud the way our “public servants” are conducting themselves? If not, then why don't we start looking at each other and doing something about it? Until then, miscarriages of justice like January 5th, 2008 will persist, without anyone to resist. I am referring to the arrest of 20-year-old Grafton B. Doyle, son of City Attorney Robert Doyle who was arrested for charges that many people of color with less political connections have been locked up for life for. Despite the fact that this guy allegedly attempted to beat up these officers, at his arraignment he was only charged with grant theft and resisting arrest.

Where is the outrage over this obvious favoritism? With Black History Month on the horizon, and all of this talk of equality in the air, this makes one question if these politicians who are so quick to invoke Martin Luther King Jr. actually look at cases like this. Well, if this was a young Chicano man who was waiting in the car, rather than being a white son of a the City Attorney was attempting to rob a man and fight police officers, he would get a life sentence.

Think I'm playing? Ask Joshua Rivera who has his life in the system's hand because the government has went back (more blatantly at least) to the plantation and reinstated slave codes, other wise known as gang injunctions to be unmercifully imposed on the dark-skinned and poor. Even though Joshua has no criminal history, never actually committed a crime, he is facing a life sentence due to being labeled as a gang member. Meanwhile, the most ruthless gang of all is glorified as protectors of the very same community they are attempting to cleanse of its “thugs”   and drug dealers. Like that Doyle guy, right? I mean, these are his guys, his comrades. Some punk “thug” tries to rob a guy who already offered to lend him money, as the San Jose Mercury News reports,   and then has the audacity to resist officers , with force! I mean, those who have ever heard the names Cau Bich Tran, Rudy Cardenas, Gary King Jr. and Steve Salinas know, police have and will kill for less. Seems like a slam dunk except for the fact that instead of a long stint in prison, the younger Doyle will realistically get a year or two tops, if anything at all. Why? They'll probably plead him out, have him take an anger management class, pay a fine and give him probation. They'll have a press conference, in which he talks about how he is changing his life around. Meanwhile, we'll be fighting to keep one of our innocent loved ones out of these concentration camps called prisons. Where high concentrations of different shaded brown folks are put in enemy camps, to be looked over condescendingly, fed nothing that the people who house them there would eat and trapped in a condensed slave cabin with bars to make our license plates and wither away.

Are we going to follow this traditional American story or create a new tale in which these bars around us are destroyed and the contradictions exposed.
  
Stay Resilient, Stay Resistant, Stay Young and Rebel!
 

A frican C ommunity T ogether = N ew O rganized W orld