Protesters: ‘Enough is enough’
People take to streets to oppose continued police killings of Blacks
Hundreds of people demonstrated outside the Roxbury police precinct on Saturday to protest the latest fatal police shooting of an unarmed Black person.
Daunte Wright had not yet reached his 21st birthday when he was killed during a traffic stop last Sunday in Brooklyn Center, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis, where former Officer Derek Chauvin is on trial for the killing of another unarmed black man, George Floyd.
Although the killings happened nearly 1,500 miles from Boston, they touched a deep nerve of sadness and outrage, both here and across the nation.
“We are so sick and tired of hearing prayers for families,” said Carla Sheffield, whose son, Burrell Ramsey, 26, was shot and killed by Boston Police on Aug. 21, 2012. The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office afterward said that Ramsey had refused orders from Officer Matthew Pieroway to drop the gun they said he was carrying and pointed it at Pieroway’s head. But Sheffield said her son had his hands up when he was shot to death.
“I will not shut up,” she told the crowd, a mix of whites and people of color holding signs that read “Jail killer cops now” and “Not an accident. It’s murder. Justice for Daunte Wright.”
“Enough is enough,” Sheffield said. “… Every day, another mother is going through what I went through eight years ago … How do I tell my grandchildren police are your friend?”
Kim Potter, the officer who claimed she was believed she was using her Taser when she shot Wright, resigned from the Brooklyn Center Police force and is accused of second-degree manslaughter, a charge reserved for cases in which a person “consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another,” rather than murder.
“The whole country has been watching the trial of Derek Chauvin, and in the middle of this trial, police murder another black man,” said demonstrator Joe Tache, 25, of Roxbury. “It’s a slap in the face to the people of Minneapolis. We’re not going to stop fighting for justice until we get it.”
Protests last year began after Floyd’s death and continued near daily for months.
“A lot of people thought the protests (that followed Floyd’s killing) were going to go away,” Tache said. “We’re going to be out on the streets all summer until we win a new society that’s free of racism. We’ll be out here as long as it takes.”