The violence began around 4 p.m. when officers began to chase Manuel Diaz for ?suspicious activity.? One eyewitness, Crystal Ventura, told the Orange County Register that the police shot Diaz first in the lower back, then in the back of the head as he fell to his knees. While Diaz was bleeding on the ground, the police handcuffed him and searched his pockets before sending him to the hospital, where he died three hours later.
?They searched his pockets, and there was a hole in his head, and I saw blood on his face,? Ventura said.
In a press conference on Sunday, Anaheim Police Chief John Welter said that Diaz was seen talking to two individuals in a car, which drove off as police approached. Diaz ran from the police, who pursued and killed him.
Welter confirmed that Diaz was unarmed. Two officers involved in the incident have been placed on paid administrative leave.
Diaz?s sister, Lupe Diaz, said that he was ?just hanging out with friends? before he was shot. Diaz?s mother told NBC News, ?He was shot first in the back. He was down. Then they shot him the second time. Then they shot him in the head.?
Within a few hours of the shooting, a crowd of neighbors and friends had formed demanding an explanation from the police. Yesenia Rojas, a woman who lived in the neighborhood and knew Diaz told the Register, ?We were all waiting for him to come and talk to the community and give us an explanation. Why kill this man??
Instead of an explanation, the police decided to disperse the crowd with rubber bullets. According to the Register, a police officer said they decided to fire on the crowd because it was ?getting too close to officers who were trying to detain a person suspected of being with a group that attempted to throw a bottle or rock at police.?
However, in video footage obtained by the local CBS News affiliate KCAL 9,(On Youtube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqzoKY1CyAg&feature=player_embedded ) police can clearly be seen shooting in the direction of women, children, and unarmed bystanders. In the course of clearing the crowd a police dog overturned a stroller to attack a seated, unarmed man.
CBS News reported: ?Said Susan Lopez, ?I had my baby with me. My baby! The dog scratched me and then grabbed me.? She added, ?They shot at me while I was holding a baby!? Another woman yelled, ?They just shot at us, they shot at a little kid, too.??
Welter defended the police actions, saying, ?Officers in this situation can?t retreat.? He claimed that the dog was released by accident.
Later that night, there were sporadic protests in the area of the police riot, including a brief road blockade with a burning dumpster. Clearly fearing the potential for broader unrest, like the riots in Los Angeles following the Rodney King beating, the police blanketed the area with officers. The police have not yet released information on whether arrests were made overnight.
Anaheim, like much of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, has a long history of police violence. Diaz is the fourth person to be shot and killed by Anaheim police since January. In comparison, there were only five total homicides reported in the first four months of this year. Police violence is endemic to the area. The neighboring city of Fullerton was where police beat homeless man Kelly Thomas to death a year ago. (See, ?Fullerton, California authorities attempt to cover up police murder of innocent homeless man?)
Angry over the brutality, protesters filled the Anaheim police station on Sunday, before Chief Welter was gave a press conference on the incident.
The level violence has created a tense situation. The city council announced its intention last month to have an independent investigator review all ?major police incidents,? like police shootings. However, there is no timeline for this investigation, and no reason to believe that it will be more effective than any other ?independent investigation.? It is intended to cover up, rather than reveal, the circumstances that led to the violence.
See Also: There Is No Justice in the Capitalist Courts! Sean Bell Verdict: Killer Cops Walk...Again! For Mass Labor Action Against Racist Cop Terror! http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/914/seanbell.html
The following statement was issued by the New York Labor Black League for Social Defense and Spartacist League on April 28, 2008 After police officers who shot and killed an unarmed Sean Bell in NYC.
Once again, the cops who committed a heinous crime?this time, the gunning down of 23-year-old Sean Bell in a firestorm of 50 bullets on his wedding day?have been found ?not guilty? on all counts. The grisly death march of the NYPD thus continues, from the 1999 cop killing of Amadou Diallo, cut down in a hail of 41 bullets in the lobby of his own home, and countless other victims of racist police terror to the present outrage. By the standards of bourgeois legality, the cops who killed Sean Bell were doing the job they are paid to do under racist capitalism. To add insult to injury, not only did State Supreme Court justice Arthur Cooperman last Friday acquit the cops on all charges, but in the course of the bench trial, it was the victims who were put on trial?Sean Bell posthumously and bullet-riddled Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield on the stand! Once again, the racist injustice system of this country recalls the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that black people ?had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.?
What should be happening now is massive labor-centered protests on the streets to unite the social power of the working class with the anger of the ghetto and barrio masses. New York City is a union town with a multiracial working class?black, white, Latino, Asian and immigrants from around the world. Transit workers, city and hospital workers have the social power to bring the financial capital of U.S. imperialism to a screeching halt. To unleash this tremendous social power requires a political struggle within the unions to build a class-struggle leadership by fighting to oust the pro-capitalist labor misleaders who subordinate the interests of working people to the capitalist parties, Democratic and Republican alike. As a spokesman for the Spartacist League put it in addressing a protest rally on the day of the acquittal of Sean Bell?s killers: ?The only way to fight these racist rulers and the gangs in blue is through a workers party that fights for a workers revolution.?
NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose cops are out in force to intimidate and repress, said of the court?s verdict: ?America is a nation of laws, and?we accept their authority.? Proving again that his talk of ?change? doesn?t mean a dime?s worth of difference, Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama intoned: ?We?re a nation of laws, so we respect the verdict that came down.? The miserable pawnbrokers of ghetto rage like Democrat Al Sharpton have likewise appealed for calm and promised to take it to the Justice Department along with making diversionary calls for civil disobedience. This is a calculated strategy to chill the justified anger and corral it into the dead end of electoral pressure politics, not least in this presidential election year. Against the timeworn schemes to ?reform? this racist capitalist system, including whitewash ?police accountability? commissions and hat-in-hand appeals to the Justice Department of Guant?namo Bay and Torture, Inc., it is necessary to understand that the state?the cops, the courts, the prison system?is an instrument of the rule of the capitalist class, of repression against the working class and all the oppressed. It cannot be reformed to meet our needs, it must be smashed and replaced by workers rule.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, former Black Panther, award-winning journalist and MOVE supporter, framed-up and facing execution or life imprisonment at the hands of the state, said of the Bell verdict: ?So 23-year-old Sean Bell joins Amadou Diallo and many, many others guilty of WWB: Walking While Black. And while millions of black and white Americans thrill at political illusions of post-racialism, Sean Bell?s case proves how deeply deadly race can still be.? Mumia?s case, too, shows that there is no justice in the capitalist courts: This innocent man and eloquent fighter for the rights of the oppressed should not have spent a day in prison. So Sean Bell?s killers walk while Mumia rots in prison. Free Mumia now!
The same racist capitalist rulers who bomb, starve and torture people from Afghanistan to Iraq unleash their racist cops ?at home? against striking workers, black people and immigrants. Black oppression in this country is the envelope for class exploitation; it took a Civil War to smash chattel slavery, and it will take a third American revolution to put a final end to centuries of black oppression that is the bedrock of this system. Only then will it be possible to eradicate the systematic segregation in jobs, housing, education and health care and build a workers state where those who labor rule. This Marxist perspective for revolutionary integrationism is counterposed both to liberal integrationists who promote illusions in justice under capitalism and to black nationalists who preach despairing acquiescence to segregation and discrimination with schemes of ?black capitalism.? Finish the Civil War?For black liberation through socialist revolution! As revolutionary, proletarian internationalists in the belly of the U.S. imperialist beast, we seek to forge a party on the model of Lenin and Trotsky?s Bolsheviks and fight for new October Revolutions, eliminating once and for all the class exploitation and racist oppression that the cops and courts ?serve and protect.? Sean Bell: We will not forget!
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