Living in the Wake of a Cop Killer

Living in the Wake of a Cop Killer
By Crudo

About the same time that I was dropping off fellow members of the DAAA Collective in Ceres, (a town right next to Modesto), after finishing Food Not Bombs, Andy Raya armed himself and headed to downtown Ceres. As I drove back into Modesto with Dead Prez bumping loud, Raya walked into a gas station after firing into the air and told the man at the counter to call the police. When the police arrived he very carefully shot one dead, and wounded the other. As he ran, he was reported to tell people that they were not in danger, they were civilians. He also reportedly asked people if they voted for Bush in the last election. He then was later shot by police, as he ran at them when his gun ran out of bullets.

Besides the fact that Raya went to the university at Santa Cruz and was Latino, we have some things in common. We both like rap music, the Zapatistas, and were against the US war in Iraq, and President Bush. Raya was reported to have friends in both gangs that are popular within Latino youths, people of which I knew and talked to while I was in high school. Why Raya decided to basically commit “suicide by cop”, I don’t know. If the police were people he knew that had the ability to kill him, and they were in fact not important it is hard to say. Did Raya make the connection between the occupation of Iraq by military force and the occupation of everyday American streets by police, and therefore targeted them, I also don’t know. All I know is that the current actions of the Modesto and Ceres Police Department are only further justifying his actions to a whole generation of kids.

The day after Raya died, tags in Ceres could be seen to read, “RIP Andy, Fuck the Pigs, 187 on Pigs”. In Modesto, a local high school was reported to be vandalized with slogans in support of Raya’s actions. The police called this graffiti a “hate crime”. As police sweeps and harassment of youth were stepped up, tags could be seen to read, “14 and 13 Against the Pigs”, meaning that the local gangs were uniting against the police. Reports in the news media began to come in that the local gangs were putting aside their differences and were now going to focus all their energy into fighting the police.

The day after the shooting, the government sent in a special media person to help out the police department spin the story. With the buzz going around that Raya was a Marine, and that the police attack had been politically motivated, attention had to be turned from his Army background. Luckily, Raya was from a working class Latino neighborhood, and was brown; it was easy. After taking his possessions, it was made out in the Modesto local media that Raya was in fact a gang member. The evidence? He listened to angry rap music. He had a book by a former gang member about his prison days. He was shown in a picture next to gang tags, flashing a gang sign. There was also a tape of Raya breaking into the local high school, smoking weed, and tearing up an American flag to read “Fuck Bush”. All this was made out to make Raya look like a gang member, despite all his family and friends stating other wise. The evidence might have pointed to Raya being a “wannabe”, or someone who hung out with people in gangs, but none of it pointed to his direct involvement in a active gang. Even if Raya was in a gang pre-Army, why would this have anything to do with the actual shooting? When Raya broke into the school, he didn’t write, “Fuck 13”, he wrote fuck Bush. As he ran from the police, he didn’t ask people if they were in gangs, he asked them if they voted for Bush. Clearly his actions were political.

Most of the white people in the area were in shock, some of them just went into denial. Many letters poured into the papers stating that Raya was not a Marine, because Marines don’t kill police officers. Apparently now if you do something bad and you are a Marine, you are therefore stripped of your title. The police responded quickly, and showed off their brand shinny new automatic shotguns and rifles to the local newspaper cameras. The next day that entered a party of young drunk adults and points guns in faces kids and broke the door down, and they had all the power in the world to do it.

The local police had created a full circle, and mini-9/11. When the plains crashed into the trade center, our leaders told us it was because the terrorists hated our freedom, and those that drew connections to what our government was doing in Palestine and Iraq were made out to be sympathizers. At the moment when people were going to link the war at home with the war over seas with Andy’s case however, the media and police were able to spin the story to make it appear that it wasn’t about the war, it was about gangs. Raya was a gang member. You could tell because he was brown and listened to rap music. Oh silly us thinking it was about the war, okay, back to work. It was clear, and a lot of people are continuing to buy it. The police with a new sense of purpose and mandate began heading into the Ceres and Modesto Latino communities for the purpose of finding “Raya’s friends”, and stopping the “gang menace”.

A college student in the local area said this: “In the past weeks, I've seen many police officers drive down my street. One would think they are around this area to ensure our safety. However, what I have seen, and what I have been told, is a completely different story.

My older brother was seen talking to one of Andy's friends who is under scrutiny. My brother was followed by a sheriff's deputy from my home almost all the way to his home in Oakdale. I doubt that was a coincidence.

After Andy's funeral, the same friend was pulled over at gunpoint and his car was confiscated by Ceres police. They found nothing in the car, yet they took it anyway. A week later, the same friend's worried mother came to me and said that her son and other friends of Andy's had been harassed by some of the members of the Ceres police.

Apparently, they pointed guns at them and made many unnecessary comments about the people living in my neighborhood.

Is this legal?

This behavior angers me because I come from this neighborhood and I am not a drug dealer, gang member or low-life. The people in my neighborhood have been harassed, violated and put under scrutiny -- all for what? Is it because Andy's dead and the police need someone else to blame to restore peace in our community?”

While news of the harassment made the local news section in the back, the local Latino media made it front page news. The DAAA Collective certainly felt the strong tensions last week, as we tabled with an outreach flyer talking about the Raya case. Relatives and friends of Raya came by and read the flyer, and many of them were so happy for the good press that some of them were on the verge of tears. A former City Council member walking by the table was not as impressed, and although didn’t read the flyer, made off with most of them and ripped them up before calling the police. (The police upon arriving just told the man to go home, although HE had broken the law).

The sweeps and harassment of youth and people in Ceres continues, and the local ACLU group has recently taken action, as talked about in this Modesto Bee article:

“During a weeklong crackdown in late January, authorities reported, officers made 83 arrests; searched 270 houses, vehicles and people; stopped 160 vehicles; detained 135 people for questioning; and took down personal information on 391 people.

Since the sweep, civil rights attorneys said, they have received dozens of complaints that police were overly aggressive, brandished weapons unnecessarily and, in some cases, entered homes illegally.

The attorneys are with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, California Rural Legal Assistance and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.

Thursday, all three groups reported that they had sent letters to the Sheriff's Department, and the Modesto and Ceres police departments, asking for records that outline policies and procedures, and training materials regarding house searches, vehicle stops, display and use of police weapons, and documentation of gang members.

"Innocent people (were) being targeted and swept up in the law enforcement operations," the news release states.

The civil rights lawyers claim that authorities targeted Ceres' El Campo neighborhood, where Andres Raya once lived. Raya was the 19-year-old Marine who gunned down Sgt. Howard Stevenson and wounded Officer Sam Ryno the night of Jan. 9. Officers tracked down Raya, and he died in an exchange of gunfire.

Attorney Jack Daniel of California Rural Legal Assistance in Fresno said the CRLA received several complaints from residents of El Campo and other areas. The complainants said police repeatedly questioned and searched young men, sometimes at gunpoint, and entered some homes of noncriminals without search warrants.

The civil rights lawyers also allege that police are targeting Latinos, which reflects a larger pattern of discrimination against Latinos countywide.

"However legitimate law enforcement activity might be, it must not be used as a cover for wholesale targeting of the Latino community," Robert Rubin, legal director for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, said in the news release.

Rubin's group has a lawsuit pending against Stanislaus County and Modesto, in which 16 Latino residents say racial discrimination is why their southwest Modesto neighborhood lacks basic services such as streetlights, sidewalks, storm drainage and parks.”

While it is understandable for the police to investigate the actions of Raya, and look for leads that might lead them to further understand what happened, searching for “gangs” is simply a side issue. The police have made it clear, that they will exploit the current situation and community sympathy by coming down hard on the Latino community at large. Actions must be taken to organize as a community, and not to allow this kind of harassment to happen to our friends, brothers and sisters, and communities.

For further updates on the DAAA Collective’s actions against police harassment in Modesto and Ceres, please visit: http://www.modanarcho.tk