Taped to City Hall

Friends and family of José Santos Poot left this sign taped to Portland City Hall, along with some cut flowers and candles. 

The sign reads: José Santos Victor Mejía Poot was an indigenous man who spoke a dialect of Mayan. He boarded a Trimet bus in PDX & suffered a seizure when paying. He was 20 ¢ short. When he wouldn't move & stood silent, the bus driver flagged down a PPB [Portland Police Bureau] cop car. He was taken to jail and beaten. After release, cops found him outside crying & took him to a mental health hospital. With a history of being incapable of caring for patients. He was diagnosed with schitzophrenia because the doc thought he was speaking gibberish. He was speaking Mayan. Untreated and traumatized, he began attacking his room with a pencil. A nurse called the cops. Despite hospital policy, cops brought guns inside. Ofc. Jeffrey Bell, 25 years old, shot & killed Santos April 1, 2001.

Police [in the USA] manage inequality by keeping the dispossessed from the owners, the Black from the white, the homeless from the housed, the beggars from the employed. Reforms only make police polite managers of inequality. Abolition makes police and inequality obsolete--Derecka Purnell, Becoming Abolitionists.