When I read the article in the Houston Chronicle, it made me think that not only is John Whitmire using HPD to round up Hispanics, but that he is now using Trump’s methods to intimidate people from speaking out in the City Council chamber.
Alondra Andrade, a Houston resident, says she’s spoken before City Council many times before Tuesday, often about police department policies. She’d never received a call before she signed up to speak out against non-safety related traffic stops, she said.
“(A woman) said she was calling from HPD, she saw that I’d signed up to testify, and was wondering if I would be willing to chat,” Andrade said.
The caller asked Andrade for more context on what she would speak about and, after learning it was about non-safety traffic stops, tried explaining why officers needed to conduct traffic stops, Andrade said.
“It sounds like she was trying to convince me they were doing a good job,” Andrade said. “…Then she got annoyed when I didn’t want to sit and argue with her.”
In addition to Andrade’s planned commentary about traffic stops, other residents signed up to speak in favor of canceling the city’s contract with the surveillance camera company, Flock, and to criticize the department’s work with ICE. Some said they also received calls from the police department.
Why would John Whitmire not want people to come and tell their stories to the council and the public, since the sessions are televised and reporters from various media outlets are usually there?
The first thing that came to mind was the;
It was about non-safety traffic stops, tried explaining why officers needed to conduct traffic stops, Andrade said.
So why is HPD stopping people if there is no traffic violation? Because they are rounding up “Illegals” for the Trump Gestapo. That would make those police officers complicit in the terror that Trump’s storm troopers are using not just against people here illegally, but also against legal residents and citizens.
When I Googled “terrorizing citizens,” two countries came up on the first page of results: the United States and Iran.
This country is going backwards. The treatment of its residents and citizens is a recipe for the citizens to fight back, and if they keep doing what they are doing, the violence will increase. We should not be surprised if that comes to pass. Our residents and citizens are well-armed. Those of us who were here to witness the sixties know how it can get.
Most Americans are aware of the urban rebellions of the 1960s that exploded in places like Harlem, Newark, Watts, and Detroit. Such uprisings are widely assumed to have peaked in the days and weeks following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968. In America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s, Elizabeth Hinton ’13GSAS corrects this misconception. A professor of history and African-American studies at Yale, Hinton not only documents the rebellions that continued to proliferate with astonishing frequency and bloodshed between 1968 and 1972 — often in smaller cities that flew beneath the radar of the national media — but also reveals how fundamental this forgotten “crucible period of rebellion” was in defining “freedom struggles, state repression, and violence in Black urban America down into our own time.”
Hinton persuasively argues that these rebellions — 1,949 of them in three and a half years, resulting in forty thousand arrests, twenty thousand injuries, and at least 220 deaths — were nearly always precipitated by an unwarranted act of police overreach against Black people who were simply pursuing their everyday lives or committing minor infractions (violating a park curfew, for instance). Victims’ responses would ..
This time, it may be the Brown people who may riot if the police and Trump Storm Troopers continue on the path they are on.
