The little girl killed by police in detroit [View All]

...This was not an accident as the police, state and local officials and the media claim. Before the raid, neighbors and relatives warned the police there were small children inside the eastside home on Lillibridge where Aiyana was murdered. They ignored these warnings and launched a military-style raid on the home, using stun grenades and heavy weapons. The whole thing was being filmed at the time for a crime television reality show...

...In the eyes of the rich and powerful, workers and young people are dispensable. DTE executives order utility shutoffs to hundreds of thousands of Detroit area households in the area, knowing full well what the tragic consequences will be. In the same fashion, Mayor Bing, a multimillionaire, says there is “no money” for schools and city services. He plans to shut down whole neighborhoods deemed too poor to maintain....

In the days since Aiyana’s murder, city officials and the media have defended the police department’s law-and-order methods...Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley went so far as to try to implicate ordinary Detroiters in the young girl’s death. Supposedly they are to blame for this tragedy and others like it because of their tendency towards “harboring criminals” in their homes and neighborhoods, refusing to cooperate with the police... She denounced those “demanding justice” for Aiyana, claiming they were “looking for someone to blame” instead of themselves.

This is utter hypocrisy. The source of crime is not evil children but the horrendous social conditions that plague the city and leave the vast majority of youth without any decent prospect for a future. The political establishment has no answer to these problems. The real unemployment rate in Detroit has hit the Depression-era level of 50 percent. Young people in the city are growing up in homes without heat and electricity, forced to live in dilapidated houses or homeless shelters. The school system has been systematically dismantled by budget cuts and teacher layoffs. Far from improving the situation, every measure taken by Mayor Bing and the corporate interests that stand behind has worsened the situation....The political establishment has no answers to Detroit’s social crisis except more police, more prisons and more brutality. At the same time, the real criminals — the corporate bosses and Wall Street speculators who have looted society — get away scot-free and are rewarded with trillions in public assets...


http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/may2010/caus-m19.shtml