On Organizing and Mobilizing

On June 24, 2020, an hour before I was to participate on a Zoom panel titled "Organizing and Mobilizing" for a community organization, I sat before my screen and watched a video released by the Tucson police department regarding the in-custody death of Carlos Adrian Ingram-Lopez.

This video recorded on police body cameras showed an incident that occurred on April 21, 2020, a month before George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, and was just being made public by the Tucson police department in the midst of public outrage and protest against police brutality. The footage depicted Carlos Adrian Ingram-Lopez walking about naked in a garage, screaming and laughing, and seemingly experiencing a euphoric episode. As the police approach him, Carlos complies with the officer's orders and lays on his stomach, then they try to handcuff him, and he begins to struggle. The images of the struggle are excruciating to watch, he screams, his body tries to push off the weight of the police officer, he says he can't breathe. It is evident that excessive force is being used. Eventually, the officers place him in a prone position and cover his head with a spit guard. Over the course of twelve minutes, Carlos keeps asking the police for water, keeps asking for his "nana" (grandmother), keeps saying that he can't breathe, then it all stops. There is an audible silence. At that point, the police officers turned him on his side, conduct CPR and request medical assistance.

I felt chills up my arms, my heart started racing, and my eyes filled with tears. I watched as the police officers restrained Carlos. As I watched the video, my mind produced visual memories of other images of violence on bodies of people of color in the previous months (Breonna Taylor and Daniel Prude in March, George Floyd in May, and Rayshard Brooks and Andres Guardado in June). All of the videos depicted the police performing extreme aggression, using intimidation tactics, barking orders at human beings, and acting as if their very lives were on the line—they were ready to kill.

After I watched the video I sat in silence, listlessly. I searched the web for any and all news stories related to this video—apparently the Tucson chief of police was willing to resign over the incident, as according to an article in the Washington Post "the administrative investigation reviewed footage from the officers' body cameras, identifying numerous policy violations."¹ The police chief felt responsible; in fact, most of the articles included the chief's resignation as part of their headline. All of the articles lamented the level of state power used on this Brown body, but also made sure to mention that "the autopsy report said the cause of death was a combination of physical restraint and cardiac arrest involving cocaine intoxication."² There it was, yes, there had been wrongdoing, but his death apparently was also his fault—he had cocaine in his system. The articles mentioned this man's grandmother and how she had called the police in the hopes that they could intervene and help her grandson calm down. I thought about Carlos's grandmother, about how she must have felt after having reached out to police thinking that it would provide her grandson safety and instead, the police brought him death.

When I finished watching the video and looked away from the screen, I realized how since 2012 I had been cataloguing memories of the spectacularized violence of Black and Brown bodies on behalf of the state, from Trevor Martin and Black Lives Matter marches, to Standing Rock, to the killings and use of force on migrants on the U.S./Mexico border. I recalled the 2015 Time magazine cover "America, 1968 2015: What has changed, what hasn't,"³ then I looked at the clock, it was time for me to join the panel.

I felt frustrated and overwhelmed, I wondered how I was supposed show up, be present, and participate on a panel on mobilizing and organizing when for eight years it seemed as if...