On September 12, two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies were shot by an unidentified gunman as they sat in their patrol car at Willowbrook Transit Center in Compton, California.
Joining the chorus of politicians who have condemned the shooting, Compton mayor Aja Brown deplored the attack, saying, “We do not tolerate nor promote violence.”
Brown’s position is an about face from her August 2020 statements in which she had condemned the terrorist activities by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD).
Brown recalled the abuse she endured from Compton deputies in 2019, stating, “They terrorize the community, and then they cover their tracks. It is unacceptable. We will not take this. I’m calling for attorney general Javier Becerra to stand up for the black and brown people of Compton.”
Los Angeles County sheriff Alex Villanueva and other county officials have blamed the shooting of the deputies on anti-police sentiment amongst politicians and activists. Villanueva and reactionary Negro pundit Candace Owens actually blamed basketball player LeBron James, claiming he was “fanning the flames of hatred” against police.
Villanueva has actively attempted to bait the African community into informing on the shooter by offering a reward of $300,000 for information leading to the arrest of the shooter in addition to the hundreds of thousands of dollars being offered by private entities.
Villanueva ordered, for some reason, that LeBron James match the reward money as a sign of good faith. After voicing his support for Breonna Taylor and police terror against African women, LeBron responded “no comment” to Villanueva’s ridiculous and cynical demand.
The Compton City Council has also offered $10,000 for information leading to the arrest of the shooter.
African working class refuses to take the bait
Despite the capitulation of the Negro political misleadership class to Villanueva, the African and Latino working class communities of Compton and other surrounding communities of South Los Angeles have refused to take the bait.
The cops were transported to the St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, California, a community directly east of Compton, where they were said to be in critical condition.
Community members gathered outside of the hospital in support of the people abused and killed by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, not the deputies who had been shot. Some protestors blocked entry to the hospital. Others reportedly said things like, “I hope they die.”
This shooting came two weeks after the August 31 murder of 29-year-old African bicyclist Dijon Kizzee in the South Los Angeles community of Westmont, about four miles west of Compton.
Deputies stalked Kizzee and pulled him over claiming that there was a bicycle violation without stating what the violation was. In fact, Kizzee was the victim of a pretext stop.
Pretext stops are similar to “stop and frisk” policies and the terrorism that led to the shootings of Tyrone Thomas in Cincinnati, Eric Garner in New York, Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and many other Africans.
In pretext stops, cops make up an excuse to stop and detain African motorists, cyclists and pedestrians in order to raise the number of Africans prosecuted. It is a method of counterinsurgency that turns every street corner into a military checkpoint.
Kizzee got off of his bicycle and fled. Once the cops caught up with him, Kizzee rightfully defended himself. Cops say that, in the process of defending himself, a pistol fell out of Kizzee’s jacket.
Reminiscent of the recent murder of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, deputies unloaded their clips on Kizzee. They shot him at least 15 times in the back and chest and then handcuffed his corpse as he laid on the ground.
From South Los Angeles to Antelope Valley in North Los Angeles County, the African working class community rose up in resistance and demanded justice for Kizzee. The African community forced this issue into the news.
Just miles from the epicenters of the Watts Rebellion of 1965 and the Rodney King Rebellion of 1992, Kizzee’s murder underscores a long history of African dehumanization from police agencies in Southern California.
White nationalist gangs operate inside the L.A. Sheriff’s Department
A study by Loyola Law School in Los Angeles has chronicled the existence of at least 17 gangs within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department that date back 50 years. These white nationalist gangs do not admit black people or women and have violent initiation processes, requiring beatings and murder.
Deputy Art Gonzalez, a whistleblower from the LASD Compton station, has shed light on the depth of these cop gangs. The Compton station’s gang is called the Executioners. Members receive a tattoo featuring a skeleton wearing a stahlhelm “Nazi helmet” holding an AK-47 with flames protruding in the background.
According to an ABC 7 news report, Gonzalez suggests that 40 percent of the deputies in the Compton LASD station are members or prospects of the Executioners. Gonzalez blew the whistle by calling a supposedly confidential internal affairs hotline after he witnessed an Executioner assaulting another deputy. Within two days, the call was intercepted by Compton Executioners and Gonzalez was publicly labeled “a rat.”
Compton Executioners have a long list of body bags
In 2000, the Compton City Council disbanded the Compton Police Department and signed a contract with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department with an annual excess of $12 million. In 2020, that contract nears $25 million.
The stated purpose for the contract was to reduce Compton’s murder rate. In fact, it was the military wing of a gentrification scheme in Compton that drove out the African working class and raised the median home value above $400,000.
In 2003, Compton deputies fired 81 bullets executing DeAndre Brunston on 126th Street, just blocks away from the Willowbrook Station. They claimed that he was holding a gun; Brunston was in fact holding a flip-flop sandal.
In 2016, Compton deputies Samel Aldama and Mizrain Orrego savagely beat African man Sheldon Lockett. Later that year, Aldama and Orrego executed Dontae Taylor. During the civil suit, Aldama and Orrego were exposed as members of the Executioners.
It has been exposed that the deputy that chased and killed Andres Guardardo, an 18-year-old Central American man, on June 18 murdered him as an initiation into the Executioners.
Just as in Ferguson, the white nationalist sheriff gangs act as tax collectors. A study from the Loyola School of Law shows that Compton deputies ramped up their arrests and citations for minor infractions by 300 percent in 2017.
Police are the gangs
San Diegan rapper Complex, in the song “SDPDK”, said, “look out for the boys in blue, not the Crips but the cops, them n****s that carry glocks and run n*****s off the block.”
It is possible that Kizzee’s murderers were affiliated with one of these white nationalist sheriff mini gangs, but in the end it doesn’t matter because, as Complex noted, the police are the gangs.
The origins of policing in the U.S. are in roving bands of armed white slave patrols. The organization of official police departments in the 19th century, coincided with the growth of “free” black communities in the U.S. North.
As evidenced in the 1919 Chicago riot specifically, and the overall pact between police agencies and the Ku Klux Klan more generally, the police in the U.S., with or without the presence of subsets of cliques and gangs within their ranks, are white nationalist organizations.
No move has been made by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to expose the members of these white nationalist gangs. In early 2020, former Los Angeles County s heriff Lee Baca was sentenced to three years in prison for covering up abuse of inmates in the LA County jail system that he controlled.
Links between the Aryan Brotherhood and prison guards in the California prison system have also been exposed.
In response to a YouTube video report on the Compton Executioners, an African woman noted in her comment, “So they showed the face of the whistle blower but blurred out the faces of the gang photo. We see your priorities.”
Compton needs Black Community Control of the Police
African residents of Compton and surrounding African communities in South Los Angeles and Long Beach have expressed indifference to the reports regarding the shootings of cops.
Africans have suffered endless terror from the occupation of their communities by domestic military forces known as the police and sheriff’s deputies. The African working class has risen in resistance to this.
For real power to be built in the African community of Compton and South Los Angeles, Africans must demand complete Black Community Control of the Police, not just defunding the police.
The replacement of the Compton Police Department with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department was a reform that was part of a larger scale of reforms in Southern California police agencies, following the Ramparts Scandal of the late 1990s. The Ramparts Scandal revealed large scale drug dealing and murder-for-hire operating out of the Los Angeles Police Department and other agencies.
This reform has only led to more terror for the African community. Calls to merely defund the police do the same thing. Defunding the police is merely an austerity move that would preserve the violent and parasitic relationship the police have with the African community.
Black Community Control of the Police demands the “democratic right of the African community to hire, fire, train, discipline and control anyone who operates as a security force within our communities.”
The demand for Black Community Control of the Police recognizes the police as an occupying military force in the African community and demands their withdrawal. Black Community Control of the Police calls for reparations to the families of Africans murdered and to the African community overall, not just settlements.
Without real power in the hands of the African community, these settlements amount to little more than hunting fees.
Black Community Control of the Police places the security of the African community into the hands of the African working class. This is the way forward.
Demand Black Community Control of the Police!
Build the Uhuru Movement in Los Angeles!
Reparations to the African Community!
