Green Party of St. Louis Calls for Independent Investigation of Police Complicity with Property Damage
September 19, 2017 – St. Louis, Missouri. We know that several windows were broken in the Central West End on the night of Friday, September 15, the day that Judge Timothy Wilson announced his “not guilty” verdict in St. Louis cop Jason Stockley's 2011 murder of Anthony Lamar Smith. We know that several more windows were smashed in the Delmar Loop of University City on the night of Saturday, September 16 and in downtown St. Louis the night of Sunday, September 17.
However, we also know that …
1. In the 1960s, the US secret police agency, the CIA, introduced massive amounts of drugs into black community in an intentional effort to destroy the arising movement for black self-determination;
2. Throughout the Viet Nam war, and ever since, police departments across the country have sent agent provocateurs into crowds to incite individuals to act violently in order to justify police attacks.
3. Police agents infiltrate organizations and suggest violent behavior.
4. Individual police often keep a “throw-away” gun in their car to plant it on victims they kill.
5. Individual police, local police departments and federal agencies justify these actions to themselves and others with a belief that “If the person or group didn't commit this crime, they did something else and we have to get them.”
Given this history of criminal police behavior we must ask if property damage which occurred in the aftermath of the Stockley acquittal was instigated by the police themselves. Did they intend to divert attention from Stockley's atrocity by instigating hostility against demonstrators?
Did the City of St. Louis Police Department do this?
Did they pay provocateurs to smash the first windows and then arrest those who copied them?
Or, did the St. Louis Police County Department carry it out?
Or, was it coordinated by a federal secret police agency in cooperation with others?
It is undeniable that actions by Donald Trump before and during his “election” are designed to generate hatred against Muslims, Latinos, blacks and whites who oppose bigotry. Trump has targeted Muslims for denial of human rights. He has targeted Hispanics to be walled off, deported and placed in concentration camps in the Arizona desert. He has encouraged his supporters to physically assault demonstrators at rallies and given cops the green light of viciousness. He holds black people in particular contempt as he wags indifference to murder by a Nazi/KKK supporter and lauds the statues of slavemasters.
There is sufficient evidence to investigate whether it was police themselves, prodded by the renewed climate of hate, who instigated destructive activity in the St. Louis area on September 15, 16 and 17, 2017.
Therefore, the Green Party of St. Louis requests that St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson immediately insist that the Board of Aldermen make the Civilian Oversight Board an autonomous body in St. Louis government and grant it subpoena power so that it can require testimony from local, state and national police organizations in an independent investigation of police response to the Stockley verdict. Further, we ask that all St. Louis police be required to live in the City. If Mayor Krewson refuses to do so, or if she does not respond to the request, then her behavior would be consistent with an attempt to cover up police violence.
