OFFICER DOWN: #SayHerName: National Attention Drawn to Women Murdered By Cops

It has been said many times before that police are every bit as sexist and misogynist as they are racist. But while this is absolutely true, such a statement [unfortunately] also tends toward the idea that woman (Black women in particular) merely suffer sexual violence at the hands of cops... while men continue to be the ones shot, choked, and bludgeoned to death.

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/05/20/under-banner-black-women-and-girls-matter-wave-protests-sweep-country

But in fact, this is clearly not the case, as many women of Color (and women in general) are often murdered by cops. Their ages range from the 7 year old Aiyana Stanley-Jones (murdered by police gestapo thugs during a botched raid in May 2010), to the 93 year old Pearlie Golden (murdered by a TX cop in May 2014). And while there have been a few high-profile police murders of women which have made national and international headlines over the past several years, none seemed to have captured the level of attention as that of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, etc. And let's get something perfectly straight - MEN (mostly Black and Latino, if White, always desperately poor, homeless, and/or mentally ill) often face the prospect of grievous bodily harm, or death during police encounters. But WOMEN (mostly Black or Latino) face the prospect of rape, in addition to death. Even White females can at the very least, expect to be raped, sexually assaulted, molested in some way, or blackmailed into sex during a typical police encounter.

On Thursday May 22nd 2015, a campaign called #SayHerName sought to bring much needed attention to those many women murdered by cops, by launching simultaneous protests in more than a dozen U.S. cities. In San Francisco during a protest of hundreds, many women went topless as part of their demonstration. They shut down traffic in the city's financial district during rush hour. This tactic appears to have been borrowed from that of FEMEN, a radically leftist Feminist group most active in Russia and the Ukraine. However, demonstrations in SanFran were much more solemn, as they were in the rest of the country.

From left to right: Miriam Carey, Rekia Boyd, and Michelle Cusseaux.

From left to right: Kayla Moore, Shelly Frey, and Tanisha Anderson

What happened in Ferguson last summer blew wide open some unrelenting truths, as well as an urgency for dialog about the police-state and systemic racism in America... as well it should have. But that dialog has been disproportionately focused on Black men and boys, while Black women and girls murdered by police have largely been relegated to the fringes. If not completely over-looked. To an extent, this is understandable - as an absolutely cohesive terrorist organization, police regimes have been on a total rampage. So it is quite difficult to keep up with all of the Black and White, Arab and Latino, women and men, young and old, homeless and disabled who have been killed by police needlessly so. And very few of these cases even received the attention they deserve.

Still, there is no excuse for why women get over-looked to the extent that they often are. Every female police murder victim needs to be known by first and last name, every bit as much as their male counterparts. Regarding Tamir E. Rice - the 12 year old boy who was gunned down last November by a wretched cop within two seconds of showing up - that case is one of the more horrific examples of racist police murder there has been in recent years. But people should also be just as familiar with Aiyana Stanley-Jones - the 7 year old girl who murdered by a cop during a police fuck-up in May 2010. Her case is in some ways, even more horrifying than that of Rice. All the worst, since the pig who killed Jones has walked free. He remains an active cop to this day. Rice was in Cleveland, Jones was in Detroit - just two of many children murdered by police monsters over the years. Ans some of them happen to have been girls. Everyone should know this truth!

To view a list of 15 women of Color murdered by cops, visit the Huffington Post link HERE. For a list of ALL victims of police murder, visit the Killed By Police data base HERE.