One month after Oakland police officer Miguel Masso killed 18-year-old Alan Blueford, another young African-American male has been killed by a cop in the Bay Area. On the evening of June 5, 15-year-old Derrick Gaines was shot to death by an as yet unnamed South San Francisco police officer.
At nine o’clock in the evening of June 5, Derrick and a friend were walking home from McDonald’s when a cop approached them next to a gas station. The officer would later claim that the boys looked “suspicious,” exactly the same “explanation” offered by the killers of both Alan Blueford and Trayvon Martin. Understandably frightened, the youth tried to run away. The officer ordered them to stop. The friend did so, but Gaines kept running. What is known is that the officer pursued Gaines and then shot and killed him.
The shooting officer claims that Gaines stopped, turned around and pulled a gun from his waistband. Even the police do not claim Gaines aimed the gun at the officer before he killed him. The police later provided a gun they claimed to have found at the scene. They acknowledge that tests prove the gun was never fired. They have refused to say whether the gun they claim to have found was loaded. Gaines’ companion later told Michael Red, Gaines’ stepfather, that the officer had no reason to fire.
Employees at the gas station where Gaines was killed said they were familiar with the young man because he was a regular customer who never caused trouble. Oliver Chin, the owner, was greatly saddened by Gaines’ death and closed down his gas pumps for a day to allow the family to set up a memorial at the site of his death. At the memorial site, several friends spoke of the ways in which all Black and Latino youth are treated as “suspicious” by the police.
Predictably, the South San Francisco police are subjecting their victim to a character assassination campaign—alleging that Gaines had had behavioral issues in school, was on probation and was therefore indeed “suspicious.” In response, Gaines’ mourning girlfriend, Elizabeth Avalos, said: “The media is saying he was a bad kid. Derrick wasn’t a bad kid. He was a family guy. He cared about his family.”
Gaines’ mother, Rachel Guido, has established weekly protests at the gas station demanding justice for her son. She wants her son’s killer to apologize to her face to face. She has retained John Burris, an Oakland attorney well known for handling police misconduct cases. Burris is also representing the family of Alan Blueford, who was shot and killed while trying to flee from cops who also accosted Blueford and his friend for no reason besides being Black in America. The cop who killed Blueford also claimed the victim pulled a gun.
The U.S. government repeatedly targets independent states for “regime change” on the pretext that the targeted governments do not respect human rights and oppress ethnic minorities. Meanwhile, the United States has the highest number of prisoners in the world, and stories of young African-Americans being killed by the police are reported by the corporate media weekly, if not daily, almost always with the implication that the victim deserved to die.
To turn the bloody tide of racist police killings in the United States requires not reforms, or appeals to this or that politician, but the rejection of the presiding system that promotes and reinforces racism in its prisons and on its streets.
