Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Abayomi Azikiwe, PANW Editor, Delivers Statement to Press TV: There is ‘Intense Police Violence’ Against African Americans: Journalist
Fri May 22, 2015 6:31PM

To listen to this statement just click on the website below:
http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2015/05/22/412365/US-police-brutality-Intense-police-violence-Obama

“African Americans cannot get justice from law enforcement authorities,” said Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire.

The recent shooting of two unarmed black men by a white police officer in the US state of Washington illustrates a pattern of “intense police violence” against African Americans in the United States, a journalist in Detroit says.

This shooting “is clearly another example of how African Americans cannot get justice from law enforcement authorities,” said Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire.

“The Obama administration repeatedly has played down or totally ignored these police killings, which have been on the rise over the last several years,” Azikiwe told Press TV on Friday.

A white police officer shot stepbrothers Andre Thompson and Bryson Chaplin on Thursday in Olympia, Washington, prompting protests in the city.

Police officers were called to a supermarket around 1 am following a report that Thompson, 24, and Chaplin, 21, were trying to shoplift beer.

Employees said the two suspects threw the beer back and fled when confronted by workers. Following a search, officer Ryan Donald came upon the stepbrothers who matched the descriptions of the suspects.

Shots were fired, authorities said, after the officer was assaulted with a skateboard. The shooting left Thompson in stable condition, while Chaplin was critically injured.

Both men, who live in Olympia, were expected to survive, police said. The officer was not injured.

After reports of the shooting, several protests took place in Olympia, a city of about 48,000 people where only 2 percent of the population is black, according to US Census data.

Around 400 protesters took to the streets on Thursday evening, marching to Olympia City Hall. Photos of the demonstration published by local media showed a racially mixed group, with many whites participating.

Large-scale protests have been held across the US after a series of high-profile deaths of unarmed African-American men by white police officers.

The recent unrest in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray was the most violent in the United States since the protests in Ferguson following the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a white police officer.

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