Los Angeles is different. In any other city when a black person dies in the hands of police, there are protests online and offline. Thousands of voices rising. Hundreds of thousands, sometimes.
Dijon Kizzee died shot 15+ times by police after being caught riding his bicycle on the wrong side of the street in late August this year in south LA. He was 29.
Other than my dude Bobby at the basketball court the next morning, I haven’t heard a soul talk about it. Not a text message, not a neighbor, a friend or nothing. We are completely and absolutely numb about black death over here. Some people protested. Probably low double digits in front of tanks and officers in gear.
But then I visit the homepage of the biggest news website in France. Sometimes I do to know what’s up there:
I’m not surprised that it makes the French headlines (which says that the sheriff is being scrutinized, which is not really the case, at all). It’s the right amount of macabre voyeurism. But you have to understand how WILD it feels like to me when we locally don’t even acknowledge this man’s right to live. Same story as Ezell Ford. And many more.
We’re traumatized to no end. We have to survive first. We know the police’s budget is completely obscene and dwarfs anything else. This year, city councils and citizens fought to get that budget shaved and it barely went down. Police departments in LA still have a budget of almost $2 billion. Annually. Yeah. And our libraries are scraping funds to serve communities around. We’re beyond shame. We’re in a police state.
We’re traumatized. As I type this, I’m reading about Breonna Taylor not receiving justice. Despite months of demanding it and millions of messages.
There are no words.