The International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement-Boston unapologetically demands the immediate withdrawal of the U.S. police in African communities.
Community groups in Boston are calling for accountability and an investigation into the brutal murder of 32-year-old African Shacoby Kenny, who died on December 8, 2025, at the hands of several correctional officers while in the custody of the South Bay House of Correction, a jail in Suffolk County, Massachusetts. These cops, by extension, are enforcers of colonialism.
Kenny took his last breath at approximately 8:40 p.m. after the correctional officers beat him until he was unconscious, according to other inmates. These cops didn’t call for medical help or administer CPR once he was unconscious and unresponsive. They instead just let him die.
To this day, the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office has refused to release video footage of Kenny’s murder, citing words too familiar with the African communities—that the case is under investigation. This is a well-known tactic within the oppressed community used by police to obscure and delay justice.
As community groups in Boston are demanding police accountability surrounding Kenny’s murder, we join and support this struggle as a just and noble cause to save African lives against colonial oppression. The International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement-Boston (InPDUM Boston) is also unapologetically demanding the immediate withdrawal of the U.S. police from our oppressed communities.
A statement released by the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office claimed that Kenny suddenly began to show “erratic behavior.” However, the details recounted by inmates who witnessed the murder conflict with those of the cops who killed him; what is undisputed is that they killed him.
It is a well-documented fact that since Africans were first kidnapped at gunpoint in Africa and brought to this country to build its economic backbone, this system has consistently and repeatedly employed various instruments of brutality evolving from whip cracking and lynching, to the raping of our women, children and men, and disproportionately incarcerating our people under illegitimate colonial laws.
Africans have been gunned down in cold blood for doing nothing—sometimes for standing on the “wrong side of the street” or reaching for identification that was demanded. There are countless cases where, regardless of what we were doing, when the colonial State murders us, we get described as having “erratic behavior”-just like the description of the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office. These killings are not isolated incidents. They are part of a continuous structure of domination rooted in settler colonialism.
Whether patrolling the communities where we live or working in correctional facilities where they house us, the colonial State’s police forces have perfected the act of planting false evidence, crafting misleading narratives and falsifying official reports to justify the violence unleashed against African people.
These cops are the frontline troops functioning as the violent enforcers for the State and are protected by the laws. The State not only creates the law, but it routinely violates the law when it needs to in order to serve its purpose of maintaining the status quo through either committing violence or threatening violence.
In other words, the primary responsibility of colonial law enforcement is not to protect African lives but rather to terrorize, demoralize and suppress them. This ensures that African people remain disorganized and unable to build independent, self-determining communities.
InPDUM’s political stance is grounded in historical material analysis based on reality, recognizing that the United States is a settler colonial power and will do anything to maintain its dominance.
In the Dred Scott decision of 1857, led by chief justice Roger Taney, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that Africans were not citizens and had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
This ruling did not merely exist in the past; it is a codified worldview that continues to shape policing, incarceration and the legal system in the U.S. today.
While some legal scholars and political advocates call for police reform, independent investigations, or reliance on the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as some kind of protection against brutal colonial violence, history shows that these measures have failed Africans in practice. Though the amendment claims to protect detainees from punishment without due process, its application has consistently excluded African lives.
Look at the long-standing pattern of law enforcement killing of Africans, documented by news outlets within the past few years:
Eric Garner – New York City (2014)
Eric Garner died after NYPD cop Daniel Pantaleo placed him in a prohibited chokehold while arresting him for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes. Garner was recorded saying “I can’t breathe” eleven times as officers held him down. A grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo.
Freddie Gray – Baltimore, Maryland (2015)
Freddie Gray suffered a fatal spinal cord injury while being transported in a police van after his arrest. The autopsy showed that he died because the cops abruptly stopped the van they had him restrained in without putting a seatbelt on him. They ignored requests for medical help. Gray fell into a coma and died days later. Although six cops were charged, none were convicted.
Sandra Bland – Waller County, Texas (2015)
Sandra Bland was arrested during a traffic stop. Three days later, she was found dead, hanged in her jail cell. The State ruled her death a suicide, and even after the cop perjured himself when he lied and said he was in danger during the stop, the charge of perjury was dropped in exchange for a promise that he’d retire. Meanwhile, so many questions remain about her death.
Elijah McClain (Aurora, Colorado, 2019)
Elijah McClain was a 23-year-old who was killed when he was choked out by cops and injected with 500mg of ketamine, despite doing nothing but minding his own business.
George Floyd (Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2020)
George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, died when Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes during an arrest for allegedly using a counterfeit bill. Despite Floyd repeatedly saying that he could not breathe and bystanders urging the officers to stop, Chauvin continued to apply the restraint even after Floyd became unresponsive.
None of these cases resulted in a meaningful outcome. And these are just a few examples.
Consequently, InPDUM and the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) are not calling for police reform or discussing qualified immunity, which allows individuals to sue law enforcement officers for crimes committed against them. Instead, we are unequivocally demanding the immediate withdrawal of U.S. police from our oppressed and exploited communities, to be replaced by African liberation forces. We understand that U.S. prisons are often used as illegitimate tools for torturing, murdering and holding African captives.
Our Call to Action: We demand the immediate withdrawal of U.S. police from African communities!
