Saheed Vassell (c. 1984-2018) was an unarmed Black man killed by New York police on April 4th 2018, the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination. What police thought was a gun turned out to be – a shower head with a piece of pipe.
As with Tamir Rice and John Crawford, police received reports of someone with a gun – but did not wait to determine what was going on. Instead “within two seconds” of jumping out of their unmarked car the police gunned him down in a hail of bullets:
BANG
BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG
They did not even waste time telling him to put his hands up, drop his weapon, or anything like that – like he was a wild dog.
One bullet broke a window, the rest broke his body. He was dead by the time they got him to the hospital.
Mental illness: Vassell was mentally ill but was considered harmless. As one neighbour put it:
“It’s visible. You could see it. Listen. Ray Charles could see that man was crazy.”
He talked to himself. He picked up junk from the street and played with it. He had bipolar disorder which had not been treated in years.
Even one of the calls to the police noted, “He looks like he is crazy.”
He and his mental illness were well known to neighbours, shopkeepers, and even the police – but apparently not to the White gentrifiers and the anti-terrorism police who seemed to have set events into motion.
At 4.40pm the police were receiving reports like this:
“He looks like he is crazy but he’s pointing something at people that looks like a gun”
and:
“I don’t know what if it is if it’s a gun. It’s silver”
and:
“an African American guy. He has on a brown jacket. … He’s pointing a thing in people’s faces”
and (last but not least):
“black guy [I] see holding a gun”
Five minutes later a crack anti-terrorism force was there to save the day. They apparently did not know him or the neighbhourhood. All they seemed to know was “black guy” and “gun”.
By the rules of police engagement, once they placed themselves in front of him, they could claim they had to make a Split Second Decision to gun him down – because they “feared for their lives”.
The police claim they did not know he might be “crazy”.
In my younger days I used to walk down the street pulling my gun on people just for laughs. I was not afraid of the police because, like what the police said Vassell did, I could always take “a two-handed shooting stance” and shoot my way out against the largest police force in the land.
Poor judgement: The mistake that Vassell made, aside from arming himself with a shower head, is that he forgot to gun down eight people at a Bible study in cold blood. Oh yeah, and have pink undertones to his skin.
– Abagond, 2018.
See also:
- Tamir Rice
- John Crawford
- Dylann Roof
- NYPD
- Deborah Danner – also mentally ill, also killed by the NYPD
- killer cops
- Phantom Negro Weapons
- Unarmed Black people killed in 2018
- gentrification
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You can tell someone is mentally ill even if they are not on meds. Especially if they are not being treated. I’m surprised they don’t have teams especially set up to deal with the mentally ill. Gentrification probably caused this to a degree. These white people move into areas because they like the ‘diversity’ and vibe and pricing. However, they want the accoutrements of the suburbs such as good policing. They have no concept of community and if they profess to, it’s only superficial.
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In most instances, I usually do not comment on the shooting of black men because there is usually enough blame to go around on both sides, especially out in the public. Moreover, we as black people or those of any of the black racial group should be well conscious of the demonic behaviour of Esau by now. (e.g., cops, politicians or just the random types)
We know that Esau will do what they do best and there nothing we can do about it. Why? “That which is crooked cannot be made straight.” (Ecclesiastes 1:5)
So, my question is: Where were the relatives of Saheed? I’m quite certain that family members were aware of his mental condition. Therefore, by them knowing of his personal plight of being bipolar, to a certain extent, they contributed to his untimely death as far as I’m concerned. They did so by not seeming to care whether or not he received assistance or not or even care of his whereabouts at all time.
Personally, I place blame at the feet of his family members. Furthermore, if in fact Saheed was so out of control, they should’ve had him placed on a hold at a mental institution.
Now, Saheed is dead and everyone wants to throw their arms in the air; shout obscenities and cry buckets of tears. Instead, the points of culpability should in fact be pointed at his relatives first and foremost and then law enforcement secondarily.
They, the family that is, certainly contributed to his death by not ensuring that he was provided the services I’m sure he was undoubtedly qualified for, perhaps even free of charge. RIP Saheed.
Selah!
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According to the New York Times, Vassell had been hospitalized more than once for mental illness and emotional disturbances.
All too often, family members who call 911 for help with mentally ill relatives see them killed by the police: https://www.google.com/amp/www.nydailynews.com/amp/new-york/families-mentally-ill-fear-calling-police-turn-deadly-article-1.3917552
This could have easily been my cousin, except he is mentally disabled instead of mentally ill. Playing with a found object like that is exactly something he would do. He is supposed to be constantly supervised, but he’s managed to slip away from both family members and trained medical personnel.
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https://www.npr.org/2017/11/30/567477160/how-the-loss-of-u-s-psychiatric-hospitals-led-to-a-mental-health-crisis
This is a systemic problem.
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@Solitaire said: “This is a systemic problem.”
You are correct! But these psychiatric, political and law enforcement systems or structures of oppression are all are established, governed and ran by whom? Isn’t Esau at the helm of this quickly sinking ship? You better brace yourself, … huh!
Imagine this for a moment: A crooked person at the helm of the cruiseliner, out in the middle of the ocean.
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@Solitaire…Thanks for that very informative piece and I totally agree with you that this is a systemic problem versus a supervision problem. I also think this is another important factor a lot of folk don’t want to admit: https://www.salon.com/2018/04/06/the-community-knew-the-man-the-cops-who-pulled-their-triggers-did-not/
I’ve seen for myself how gentrification has all but destroyed the Black community in downtown Charleston and it breaks my heart. Places where we lived in community, — where everybody knew everybody else and most importantly, where everybody’s Mama and Daddy knew everybody else’s Mama and Daddy have been totally usurped by the gentrifiers, calling the police with complaints of noise when the Black kids are outside playing or when Black folk are on their porches hangin’ out. That, is the new reality for the Black families who remain. Based on all I’ve read, EVERYBODY in that neighborhood knew Saheed and KNEW he suffered from a mental illness — everybody but the 911 callers describing “an African American guy” or “black guy.” SMDH
When I heard about the Mother Emmanuel murders on the news, I was on my way to a Black Live Matter meeting downtown. My young friend, Muhiyidin D’Baha (who was killed in New Orleans in February) called me and said we were going to meet down at the church instead. When I got there, reporters were crawling all over the place. An NPR reporter stopped me, shoving his mike in my face and asked this stupid shit, “What do you think about the violence that happened in the church today?” I said, “This isn’t the first time. This community’s been experiencing violence from white people for at least 40 years” and walked away.
Because you see, the neighborhood where the church sits, used to be a predominantly Black neighborhood. It no longer is. Today, thanks to gentrification, it’s a far cry from the “community” it used to be when I grew up. Mother Emmanuel’s really the only true reminder of what that community looked like.
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@ Deb
I’ve seen for myself how gentrification has all but destroyed the Black community in downtown Charleston and it breaks my heart. Places where we lived in community…
That destruction was planned out as early as the late 1960s. In usual think tank speak, the process was termed spatial deconcentration. The group that alledgedly uncovered written evidence of the plan was called the Grassroots Unity Conference. One rising star in that organization was named Yulanda (or Yolanda?) Ward.
Ms. Ward, a native of Houston, TX, was an undergraduate student at Howard University in the late 1970s. Ward and her fellow activists published an article about spacial deconcentration or the planned dispersal of Black people from the inner cities of the USA. According to Ward’s article, this destruction of concentrated, low income Black communities was done to remove the threat of Black political power, cohesion and rebellion.
Two detailed articles that discuss the priorities and process of spacial deconcentration are:
http://metropolisnewspaper.com/spatial-deconcentration/
https://libcom.org/library/spatial-deconcentration-d-c
Yulanda Ward was murdered shortly after the publication of the article in Washington, DC. The libcom.org article begins with some particulars of her death:
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A long and detailed libcom.org article also seeks to debunk some of the assertions of Ward’s former comrades:
http://libcom.org/library/notes-frank-morales-disinfoguy
Worth a read.
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@ Deb
By chance, I recently ran across an article about gentrification in Seattle. The article described the life of one extended Black family from the late 1940s to the present. Inye Wokoma, a filmmaker, photographer and visual artist described Seattle’s major Black neighborhood, the Central District during his childhood:
https://crosscut.com/2018/04/epic-battle-against-gentrification
The destruction of Black communities has broken a lot of hearts nationwide.
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egads! I misspelled spatial deconcentration twice in the comment above. Sorry.
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@Afrofem…Thanx for all the data. I’m not gonna lie to you, I’ve bookmarked them all to read later on tonight!!😊 Given your “The destruction of Black communities has broken a lot of hearts nationwide.” I already know the last one about Seattle is gonna hurt like crazy! Until I do and have some coherent thoughts to share, let me leave you with Mr. James Baldwin’s thoughts:
(https://youtu.be/T8Abhj17kYU)
Talk to you soon, Sis!
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@ Deb
Thanks for the Baldwin video. Good to hear him in his own words.
Take your time. The articles are long form. There are gaps of information and “contested facts” in the articles about Ms. Ward.
The Seattle process has been painful to watch over the past twenty years. Seeing and understanding the methods used to push Black people out of the city core. Coercive police violence…the devastation of cohesive communities… the alienation and anger of the youth (and their parents).
The collaboration of certain Negro Compradors in city government and the business/academic/media sectors was almost more than a spirit could bear sometimes.
Now many moderate and middle income White families are being pushed out of their neighborhoods by rampant development. In the midst of their yelping and griping, I think “where were you when Black folk in the CD (Central District) were being manhandled out of the city?” Oh, that’s right, you were standing on the sidelines applauding.
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I’m reading a lot of chatter regarding how gentrification kills and may have even played a role in the death of Saheed. However, I do believe that gentrification is in fact an intentionally mislabelled tool to infringe and prey upon financially strapped neighbourhoods for ulterior motives.
But still, it is clear that gentrification does not kill, per say. Gentrification is simply a tool to disguise the hidden reasons as to why so-called elitarians rush to grab a foothold within a geographical location under the false pretense or “process of renovating and improving a house or district so that it conforms to middle-class taste.” – https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gentrification (yeah, ..right)
Gentrification, this tool of the so-called elites, certainly disrupts the usual norm of communities; it uproots families/people that have lived in a particular area for decades upon decades and in some instances, from generation to generation. Furthermore, it also deterritorialize the social, political and familial cohesiveness and/or alliances of communities that took decades to form.
To me, for someone to say that gentrification kills is a bad meme that is certainly overrated. Not to mention the obvious disconnectedness. Moreover, that’s not including the lack of presenting empirical data that would necessarily lend credence to or support their claim of gentrification being a killer.
Interestingly enough, no one has either proven or even bothered to explain how gentrification disavows parents; a brother; a sister or even relatives of supervising a loved one who unfortunately has some type of mental issues. I’m still waiting.
At this point, it seems to be more of a blaming mechanism, which is to say: Here lie the boundaries of gentrification, supervision of mentally challenged individuals by loved ones or relative is not necessary. Personally, I believe that for someone to hold this type of belief is sheer folly! Gentrification does not in the least sense transfer supervision responsibilities from the parents or relatives to someone else. How does this work??
And, for those who believe that Saheed was suffering due to some type of internal flaw, I present the words of Dr. Amos Wilson:
“The idea of personality as relatively isolated and unreflective of its social-interactive history and environment, as merely motivated by purely internal motives, is an illusion. Moreover, such a concept is a dangerous myth and a psychological conspiracy perpetuated by the ruling groups in society to escape their responsibility for producing and perpetuating negative social forces which produce anti-social individuals and groups.” (Dr. Amos Wilson)
http://www.academia.edu/3046815/Amos_Wilson_Toward_a_Liberation_Psychology
For those who believe that pharmaceutical companies and psychiatric institution truly have the interest of mentally deficient people at the center of their heart, I present this:
“In Creating Mental Illness, medical sociologist Allan Horwitz proposes a definition of mental illness, which he argues is close to the official definition used by the American Psychiatric Association in recent editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Horwitz argues that while psychiatry has moved toward an explicitly neurophysiological understanding of mental illness, it has retained the overly broad definition of mental disorder. He suggests that this serves the interests both of the profession and the interests of the powerful pharmaceutical industry. His conclusion is that psychiatry should narrow its classification of mental disorders to those conditions that are clearly harmful internal dysfunctions, and that as a society we should pay more attention to the social conditions that cause people distress.”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/169060/summary
And for those who think that the configuration of social conditions does not play a part in the production of psychological stress, I present this:
“Social Causes of Psychological Distress” is a scientific look at community patterns of well-being and distress. . . . “Social Causes of Psychological Distress” is about research that takes a different approach—research that explicitly and objectively measures feelings such as fear, anxiety, frustration, anger, guilt, despair, depression, demoralization, joy, fulfillment, and hope, and that maps the relationship of these feelings to social conditions and positions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232582334_Social_causes_of_psychological_distress_Social_institutions_and_social_change
Now, let us return back to what Solitaire previously stated: “This is a systemic problem.” Again, you are correct to a certain extent. However, what we really have here and more to the point, we are actually witnessing the unbridled rise of demonic spirits perpetrated by and through the tentacles of Esau! (Psychiatry, government, politics, law enforcement, etc.)
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@afrofem very interesting indeed
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@afrofem
WOW! There’s a lot to read there and it’s quite a rabbit hole to go down once I google for more… but it puts a label on the underlying motive for so many policy decisions.
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@Afrofem…Damn! Damn! Damn, Sister-Woman!!!
You’ve been able to both enrage AND make me cry with these damned links!!!
As I think of my hometown, Charleston, SC and several other places I’ve lived (Monterey County, CA; Anne Arundel County, MD; PG County, MD; Key West, FL, Bexar County, TX) — my lived experiences have kept repeating themselves and I didn’t know there was ACTUAL DOCUMENTATION to support my, according to white folk — “conspiracy theories.” Today, I liken what I knew to Bill Maher’s (yeah, he’s a d*ckhead, but the segment title works for me here), ” I Don’t Know it For a Fact, but I Just Know It’s True” segment.
Family, please read Arofem’s links — they will help you understand at a cellular level, who we are in America. But more importantly — who they are, and who they continue to be. Just look around “from whence you came” and honestly answer whether or not you see your lived experiences in the frame.
This, from one of the links, sews it up for me:
“The exposure of the Mobility Program’s real intentions will hopefully change the direction of the government. If not, then the worse can be assumed for the future of the U.S. because no righteous people on the face of the earth would or should permit the existence of such policy, even if its dismemberment means inevitable confrontation or conflagration.” (emphasis mine)
My question Family, is — are you “righteous people?”
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@ Deb
There has been a definite national playbook. To me, this is part of an institutional White backlash to the tumult of the 1960s. The Powers That Be were caught unawares then and have instituted measures to both punish and prevent “troublesome Negroes” from ever upsetting their applecart again.
They are pretty close to the finish line now in many cities. All that is left is mop up operations in the form of police
settler colonialviolence against neighborhood holdouts like Saheed Vassell.A generation ago, Mr. Vassell would likely have lived in a solid Black community where his family, his history and his “condition” were well known to his neighbors. The men in the neighborhood would have talked to him and extracted the shower fixture from him without violence. To the gentrifiers, Mr. Vassell was just another Indian Off The Reservation…and they called The Calvary to take care of him.
Like the Black filmmaker in the previous comment described the Black neighborhood of his youth: “…There’s a sense of home that extends out beyond the four walls of whatever your home address is. It extends out into the community.”
That ‘sense of home’ was severely lacking in Saheed Vassell’s case and led to his needless murder.
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And a killer terrorist of black people in church gets Burger King, go figure.
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So they took the Waffle House shooter, who is White, alive. No hail of bullet required.
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Sure did!
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White fear of black bodies that’s what happens in America. Gentrified whites who didn’t know the young brother and his mental health issues were frightened and called the cops. Calling the cops on black folks in America equals death for black folks in America.
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Also taken alive: that man who ran over and killed ten people in Toronto, Canada. He had a gun.
I knew he was White because a) the BBC was not calling it terrorism and b) he was taken alive.
#WhiteMassKillerLivesMatter
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@ Abagond
Will you be doing a post on James Shaw Jr.?
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It’s not just the police,
just as it’s not just the gun.
Someone pulled the trigger;
someone called the police on a n****r.
They did it to John Crawford.
They did it to Tamir Rice.
They did it to Chris Lollie for fn sitting.
They did it to Charles Kinsey.
They did it to Trayvon Martin.
They did it to men waiting for a Starbucks meeting.
White people’s imaginations are deadly.
Because they have a shared delusion.
Shared experience is truth; the sky is blue.
Personally unique experience is hallucination.
But shared delusion is also truth to those believing.
Seeing is believing but believing is also seeing.
Our menacing countenance is their truth.
Accept it.
They have the social power to make their truth our reality.
Understand it.
It is OK to be discomfited by these conditions.
Surrender to it.
Yet clarity dispels confusion even when it triggers grief.
Embrace it.
It is not your obligation to appease their phobias through respectabilty politics.
Acknowledge it.
Yet we may act prudently in self-interest as we would with any dangerous, scared creature.
Prepare for it.
Life is a challenge for all creatures and everything has natural enemies.
Realize it.
Yet it is still possible to survive and thrive.
Believe it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2633407/
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Going back and reading the thread and seeing the comments from Deb/Afrofem it’s striking how much gentrification resembles colonization.
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@ Origin
That is exactly what gentrification is: colonization. The media uses the same words and imagery: White gentrifiers are seen as pioneers who open up new frontiers. The police/cavalry engage in pacification and clearance of the existing population. The Black or Brown natives are dispersed* to new population centers (reservations). Any stragglers in the neighborhood are treated with suspicion and harsh sanctions.
With the Native Americans, the colonizers favored concentrating them into open air prisons. With this iteration of colonization, dispersal or deconcentration is the preferred method of control.
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@Afrofem
I’m sure one exists (and I’m about to go searching for it), but you should seriously consider writing a book on the evolution of colonization. I’d buy it for sure!
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@ Open Minded Observer
I don’t know. A properly researched book about colonization would take years. I’m sure there are individuals who are far better qualified to write about that subject than me.
Come to think of it, Abagond has written numerous posts about various facets of colonization from the Doctrine of Discovery to gentrification. Could an e-book be far behind?
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