OAKLAND, CA — In 2005, self-appointed Bushrod neighborhood vigilante Patrick McCullough shot his neighbor, 15-year-old high school student Melvin McHenry, in the back as young Melvin ran away from him.
McCullough was not charged or jailed for his crime but was instead praised as a hero by police, city officials, the media and white people who had been gentrifying the historically black Bushrod neighborhood.
Now McCullough is running for city council from North Oakland's district one on a platform of “law and order” which really means State violence targeting the African community.
McCullough is a black man who acts as a convenient front for all those intent on dealing with Oakland's deep social and economic problems with a military solution similar to Israel's genocidal assault on the Palestinian people of Gaza.
City of Oakland launching economic and military offensive against African community
Oakland just granted $7.7 million of tax payers' money for more police and has launched an aggressive recruitment drive for the Oakland Police Department (OPD) with base salaries of over $87,000 a year and up to $244,000 with overtime.
Within days of this police budget being allocated two people were killed by the OPD. A well-known and respected 71-year-old African artist named Casper Banjo was gunned down on March 14 by police.
Five days later, on Wednesday, March 19, Oakland police murdered a 15-year-old Mexican youth, Jose Luis Buenrostro Gonsalves Both murders took place in East Oakland. This is the murderous climate advocated by McCullough.
According to the New York Times, one in every five households in Oakland live on less than $15,000 and the poorest 20 percent live on $7,600 annually. Oakland is a city of deep disparities containing a crushing African poverty while the Bay Area has the highest rate of millionaires in the country.
California has the world's sixth largest economy and the third largest prison population. African people represent only seven percent of the population of California but 32 percent of the population of California's prisons, a growth industry that pumps billions of dollars into the state's economy.
In 1996, Gary Webb from the San Jose Mercury News exposed that the U.S. government was responsible for the massive influx of crack into Oakland. This came in the wake of the FBI’s COINTELPRO that destroyed the Black Power Movement of the ‘60s and assassinated Lil' Bobby Hutton of the Black Panther Party right here in Oakland.
Urban renewal and gentrification destroyed the economy of the African community where today it is estimated that half of young black people face unemployment.
Sometimes just to put food on the table, African people are forced into a government and corporate-controlled drug economy that studies show pay minimum wage for young street workers but make millions of dollars for banks and Wall Street.
In a city where white people are snapping up deals on houses and lofts at the expense of an impoverished African community, the question is, "Who is the real criminal?" The problem is poverty, oppression and public policies of police containment of the African community.
Way forward is economic development
For peace and unity in Oakland, we need genuine economic development to transform the conditions of the African and other impoverished communities. We need an end to police containment and State violence against African and Mexican people.
Petty bourgeois servants of white power like Patrick McCullough cannot be allowed to be raised up as leaders in our community by our enemies. In fact, such vicious agents of white power must be forced to pay a political price for their white-backed terror of the African community.
The Oakland branch of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) is calling for:
· an end to police containment, heavy-handed violent police targeting the African community that makes Oakland’s African community look like Iraq.
· economic development for the African community; an immediate infusion of millions of dollars of capital to uplift the entire African and other impoverished communities.
· an end to the criminalization and economic embargo of the impoverished African community intended to turn it on itself.
· an end to gentrification at the expense of the African community.
For more information or to join InPDUM, contact InPDUM Oakland at inpdum_oakland@yahoo.com or (510) 569-9620
