A lynching in Shrewsbury
21st May 2018 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
You can call the senseless murder of 22-year-old Keeven Robinson at the hands of four Jefferson Parish narcotics detectives whatever you want. Nothing can change what it was: Domestic terrorism.
Psychological warfare. Genocide.
It was also a sobering reminder that there is much that has not changed since Black men, women and children were bought, sold and treated like cattle.
On Thursday, May 10, just three days before Mother’s Day, Kiwanda Robinson lost her only child to deadly force administered by four Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office plainclothes narcotics detectives.
The four detectives had reportedly identified Keeven Robinson as a drug suspect and were closing in on him at a gas station when things took a turn for the worse. After a brief chase and a struggle in a residence’s backyard, the detectives were able to handcuff Robinson. But moments later he was pronounced dead.
Initially, JPSO officials attributed Robinson’s death to asthma but two days later Jefferson Parish Coroner Dr. Gerry Cvitanovich classified the death as a homicide.
“Homicide by asphyxiation” to be exact.
Essentially, Robinson was choked or strangled to death by one or more of the narcotics detectives.
It remains difficult to fathom how four properly trained and able-bodied law enforcement officers were unable to apprehend, restrain and arrest a single suspect without ending his life. It defies logic, unless, of course, you consider the nation’s long, dark history of lynching Black men, women and children.
In these brutal, ritualistic murders, white mobs are given the power of life and death over Black people in order to maintain white supremacy and keep people of African descent “in their place.”
This practice in Jefferson Parish of marginalizing, vilifying and criminalizing Black people harkens all the way back to the good old days of former JP Sheriff Harry Lee, who made no apologies for stopping Black people for traveling through white neighborhoods or for Simply Being Black.
Fast forward to 2018 where racial justice and equality are still hard to come by in what one of my friends’ father once called “Jeffersonia.”
The JPSO is investigating the killing of Keeven Robinson and has asked the Louisiana State Police and the FBI’s Civil Rights Task Force to probe the officer-involved killing.
That might sound promising until one considers that LSP investigators don’t have a long history of holding local law enforcement agencies or officers accountable for officer-involved killings, particularly when the victims are unarmed or innocent Black civilians. The state’s top law enforcement agency backed up Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Office claims that Victor White III shot himself to death while sitting handcuffed in the back seat of a police car. LSP investigators apparently also saw nothing wrong with Baton Rouge police officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II’s interaction with Alton Sterling, who died after being shot six times at point-blank range by police on July 5, 2016.
DOJ officials also saw nothing wrong with the BRPD officers’ actions in the Sterling incident and refused to file federal charges after a 10-month investigation. Before they made that decision, they viewed body camera footage of Officer Salamoni pointing a gun at Sterling’s head the moment he arrived on the scene and cussing out Sterling as he lay bleeding to death in the hot July sun after being shot six times in the chest and back.
In addition to demanding that the four JPSO narcotics detectives responsible for Keeven Robinson’s death are arrested and charged with murder, we should continue to push for the JPSO to utilize body cameras and dashboard cameras to capture sheriff’s deputies’ interaction with the public and document cases of unconstitutional policing, abuse, excessive force and deadly force and share this information with the United Nations and groups like Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union in addition to traditional civil rights groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
During the recent dedication of a memorial for slain police officers on the North Shore, it was noted that at least 46 cops have been killed thus far in 2018.
Nobody wants to see honest, law-abiding cops gunned down because they wear a police uniform or because anger and frustration continue to build in marginalized and oppressed communities.
But we the people have also grown weary of seeing Black, Brown and poor men, women and children lose their lives unnecessarily because of frightened, angry, overzealous or trigger-happy cops who think they have a right to act as judge, jury and executioner.
Whether law enforcement officers like it or not, criminal suspects have constitutional rights, including the right to not be summarily slaughtered by a cop who is having a bad day and the right to live long enough to be tried for his or her offenses in a court of law.
There is still lots of work to do for those demanding justice for Keeven Robinson. The public calls for justice must continue and every effort must be made to contact local, statewide and federal elected officials and to let them know that Black and Brown people are tired of seeing our neighbors, friends and loved ones slaughtered like animals with few repercussions for law enforcement officers who only seem to be able to restrain themselves from using deadly force when the suspects are white.
It’s about staying woke, staying focused and staying committed to securing justice for Keeven Robinson.
Justice for Keeven Robinson, after all, is justice for all of us. All power to the people.
This article originally published in the May 21, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
