#Cop who beat up special needs student now in jail on rape charges: may face murder charges
5213 Dead, 346 since 1/20/09
new husband 24 times in 'self defense'
The officer who brutally beat special needs student Marshawn Pitts has
been identified as 38-year-old Christopher Lloyd, according to Chicago
Breaking News, which spoke to Lloyd's father.
The news agency reported that Lloyd is currently in jail after being
charged with the rape of a woman he knew and is facing a 20-year sentence
should he be convicted.
The Chicago Tribune-backed service adds: "A lawsuit filed by his ex-wife,
Nicole McKinney, last summer alleges he gunned down her new husband
Cornel McKinney in front of their children outside their home on the 6100
block of South Langley Avenue on Feb. 17, 2008."
An autopsy revealed Lloyd shot the man 24 times, the agency found. He was
not jailed at the time as Chicago police accepted his explanation that
the killing was in self-defense.
Lloyd also reportedly told his father that the boy he was filmed
assaulting had a history of behavioral problems and had cursed at him
when told to tuck in his shirt.
Image sample credit: CBS News.
http://rawstory.com/2009/10/camera-catches-cop-assault-of-15-year-old-
special-needs-student/
http://www.truthout.org/10080912
Brutalizing Kids: Painful Lessons in the Pedagogy of School Violence
Thursday 08 October 2009
by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
A Childs Shadow.
(Illustration: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t, Adapted From: ~Essence
of a Dream~ / flickr and jez page / flickr)
On May 20, 2009, Marshawn Pitts, a 15-year-old African-American boy,
who is also a special needs student, was walking down the corridor of the
Academy for Learning High School in Dolton, Illinois. A police officer in
the school noticed that the boy's shirt was not tucked in and started
shouting and swearing at him. Pitts claims that he immediately started to
tuck in his shirt, but it was too late. Within seconds, the police
officer pushed him into the lockers, repeatedly punched him and then
slammed him to the ground and pushed his face to the floor. The officer
then applied a face down, take-down hold to the child, a maneuver that
has resulted in over 20 deaths nationwide and is banned in eight states.
Pitts said he was terrified and was having a hard time breathing as a
result of the use of the forceful restraint. As a result of this
unprovoked attack by a police officer, who is supposed to protect kids in
school, the young man ended up with a broken nose and a bruised jaw. In
case the reader suspects I have confused the facts, the assault was
caught on school security cameras and ended up on Youtube (see below).
Indeed, a 15-year-old boy with an early childhood brain injury and a
learning disorder, attending a school for special needs children, was
tackled and sustained injury in the school by a police officer because of
a dress code violation. Pitts was not carrying a weapon. He did not
threaten anyone. He was not dealing drugs. In fact, he appears to have
given an entirely new meaning to what constitutes a clear and present
danger, warranting the use of force by the police - he simply did not
have his shirt tucked in, and for this he was beaten by a police officer
three times his size. Harmless acts of indiscretion are now elevated to
the status of a dangerous crime.
One could argue that this case is so bizarre and outrageous that the
only logical explanation is to call into question the cop's (not the
kid's) mental capacities. How could a reasonable adult trained as a
professional police official assault so viciously a young boy for no
apparent or legitimate reason? But that is too easy. The brutalizing
behavior exhibited by this unhinged police officer would be better
understood as symptomatic of a set of larger forces in American society
that are increasingly defining kids through a youth crime complex that
touches almost every aspect of their lives - extending from the streets
they walk on to the schools and community centers in which they spend
most of their time. This is not meant to suggest that school violence is
not a real problem. Schools have an obligation to create safe
environments for all of our children, environments that are welcoming
rather than threatening, conducive to real learning and attentive to the
problems students face. Administrators and teachers should connect to
student histories, be respectful of their experiences, encourage their
voices and protect their rights. At the same time, school safety must
take seriously the broader educational goal of educating students "to
participate in the complex and infinitely worthwhile labor of forming
citizens, men and women capable of furthering what's best about us and
forestalling what's worst."[1] The tragic death of 16-year-old Chicago
student, Derrion Albert, captured on video recently; the 34 school age
children that have been killed in Chicago this school year; the 290
wounded in 2008; and the fact that one recent study states that 61
percent of all school children are exposed to varying degrees of violence
speaks to the culture of violence that young people face everyday both in
and out of schools. This bears repeating: in and out of schools. School
violence cannot be disconnected from the larger violence that filters
through American society, nor can it be addressed by demonizing or
beating kids or, increasingly, militarizing their schools. Nor can it be
addressed by simply pumping money into cash-strapped schools simply to
promote standardized testing. The underlying economic, social and
political causes of violence are largely tied to a society in which young
people, especially poor, minority youth, simply do not matter any longer
and are considered disposable. Removed from the discourse of social
investment, if not the social contract itself, they are destined to be
unemployed, having been warehoused in schools often lacking the most
basic resources, and subject to a culture of violence from which they can
rarely escape and almost never transform on their own.
In a society in which young people are increasingly the victims of
adult abuse, maligned as dangerous and undeserving of investment, it is
not surprising, given how little money or time is spent on them, that
they are treated as a threat, and their behavior endlessly monitored,
controlled and subject to harsh disciplinary measures. Schools,
especially for poor kids, are largely viewed as either testing centers
where young people are simply bored into passivity or submission, or they
are modeled after prisons - subject to punishing zero-tolerance policies,
lock-downs, constant surveillance, humiliating security measures and
intimidated and sometimes assaulted by security and police who are often
armed and roam the corridors. In short, if you are a poor black, brown or
white kid, you are not considered a student or a productive citizen, but
a potential criminal. Schools now form partnerships with the police and
private security agencies. Teachers, once the heroes in this coming-of-
age narrative, are now a sideshow, most are deskilled, reduced to
technicians teaching for the high-stake testing machine and often forced
to share their responsibilities with armed security forces.
Administrators now confuse management with leadership and become the
pawns of corporate and punishing forces they can no longer control.
Instead of investing in disadvantaged youth, American society now
punishes them, and instead of preparing them for a productive life in the
larger society, too many young people are pushed and shoved into a
criminal justice system. They move from the schools directly to the
juvenile detention centers, if not adult prisons. And when money is
pumped into the schools, it is increasingly diverted away from addressing
real problems such as the need for more teachers, social workers, health
workers, teaching aids and safe avenues of protection for kids traveling
to and from school. Instead, the money is invested in metal detectors,
surveillance cameras, security guards, high security fences and armed
police with dogs.
While all youth are now suspect, poor, minority youth have become the
primary targets of modes of social regulation, crime control and
disposability - now, the major prisms that define many of the public
institutions and spheres that govern their lives. The model of policing
that governs all kinds of social behaviors and interactions also
constructs a narrow range of meaning through which young people define
themselves. This rhetoric and practice of policing, surveillance and
punishment has little to do with the project of youth as the social
investment of the future and a great deal to do with increasingly
powerful modes of disciplinary regulation, pacification and control -
elements comprising a "youth control complex," whose prominence in
American society points to a state of affairs in which democracy has lost
its claim while the claims of democracy go unheard.
Students being miseducated, mistreated, criminalized and arrested
through a form of penal pedagogy in locked down schools that resemble
prisons is a vicious and incredibly visible index of the degree to which
mainstream politicians and the American public have turned their backs on
young people in general and poor minority youth in particular. As schools
are reconfigured to resemble prisons, crime becomes the central metaphor
used to define the school environment while criminalizing the behavior of
young people becomes the most valued strategy in mediating the
relationship between educators and students. The consequences of these
policies for young people suggest not only an egregious abdication of
responsibility - as well as reason, judgment and restraint - on the part
of administrators, teachers and parents, but also a new role for schools
as they become more prison-like and more segregated as a consequence,
eagerly adapting to their role as an adjunct of the punishing state. One
wonders how many more kids have to be brutalized in their schools and
killed outside of schools before the American public wakes up and takes
seriously not only their responsibility to young people, but also their
commitment to a mode of politics and a future that is on the side of
young people rather than a vision shaped largely by the values of the
corporate state and the disciplinary apparatuses of the punishing
criminal justice system. What does this particular video of Marshawn
Pitts being brutalized by a police officer and the equally heart breaking
video of Derrion Albert being beaten to death by his peers tell us about
what kids are actually learning in schools? Far too often, dominant
media, school administrators, politicians, and others insist on the
pathology of privatized and collective violence that runs roughshod over
kids' lives in and out of schools. In the case of the police officer who
brutally beat Marshawn, the comforting solution is to privatize the
assault, an example of an individual pathology, the work of a "bad
apple." The beating of Derrion by other kids similarly speaks to an
alleged culture of depravity that has been defined for the last three
decades as Black, urban and dangerous. In both cases, the systemic
underlying neoliberal economic, institutional, educational and racist
underpinnings of such violence disappear into the logic of individual
pathology or into the always crowd-pleasing categorization of the culture
of blackness as pathological. Neither answer will do, at least not in an
aspiring democracy. Finally, what do these acts of violence against
children tell us about what kids are learning through the pedagogical
force of the larger culture? What do they tell us about a society that
refuses to recognize that the issue is not what is wrong with children,
but what is wrong with American society?
Note:
[1] Mark Slouka, "Dehumanized: When Math and Science Rule the
School," Harper's Magazine (September 2009), p. 34.
--
Slavery: The belief that people can be property
Corporatism: The belief that property can be people.