This is part of the documented casualty toll inflicted by the police against working people from 1990 to 2000 in Prince George's County, Maryland, which borders Washington, D.C.

Many protests have been organized by survivors of the attacks and by families and friends of the victims. But not one cop has been jailed. Police and government officials have declared every police shooting to have been justified.

A series of front-page articles in the Washington Post, which ran under the heading "A Blue Wall of Silence" from July 1 to 4, have called attention to the record of police violence in this county of 800,000 people, which, according to the 2000 census, is 63 percent Black and 7 percent Latino. Post reporters Craig Whitlock and David Fallis described 15 months of investigations, piecing together autopsy reports, unreleased FBI reports, and interviews with people shot by the police, their families and friends, and with lawyers, cops, government officials, and community activists.

The headlines of the four-part series give a picture of what they cover: "Officers Killed with Impunity," "Police Routinely Clear Their Own," "Mentally Ill People Shot," and "Deaths in Custody."

The Post reported it did its own survey of the 50 largest local police departments around the country to determine how many fatal police shootings occurred in each.  
 
Record number of fatal shootings
According to the Post study, the Prince George's County police were the worst in fatal shootings per cop and per arrest. Based on the number of shootings per resident, the five worst areas were Washington, Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans, and Prince George's County, Maryland. In a 1998 study, the Post had reported that cops in the U.S. capital shot and killed more people per resident than in any other large city. In fact, Washington's officers fire their weapons at more than double the rate of police in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or Miami.

The Post articles report that in Prince George's County, "Since 1990, almost 90 percent of the people killed or wounded by officers have been Black or Latino." This was done by a police force that is 53 percent white. But the killer cops are Black as well as white.

To the more than 300 workers at the Smithfield meatpacking plant here in Landover, Prince George's County--which most people call PG--the Washington Post articles and the extensive coverage on radio and television that followed were no surprise. In discussions at work, many reported their own experiences with the local cops.

A number of workers noticed that one of the Post articles included a photo of a former co-worker, Senee "Quita" Waiters, whose brother Dwayne was killed by PG cops in 1997. The photo of the Waiters family was in the third Post article, headlined "Families' Pleas for Help End in Gunfire."

According to the Post, since 1990 the PG cops killed six and wounded six more mentally or emotionally disturbed people. In seven of those cases the police had been called to help a suffering family member.

That is what happened to 21-year-old Dwayne Waiters, a college student. He suddenly started running in and out of the house and smashed a window. Quita said, "I didn't know what was wrong with him. I thought somebody slipped him a mickey."

Dwayne's father Robert sat on his chest, pinning his arms and legs to the floor while waiting for police to respond to the 911 call. Two cops burst into the apartment with guns drawn and pointed the guns at the father. "I kept saying, 'This is my son, this is my son!' But if I hadn't gotten up they would have shot me," Robert Waiters said.

Dwayne then ran into the kitchen, and the two cops followed and shot him 12 times, with four bullets in the back and half the shots from less than two feet away, leaving powder burns.

The cops wrote identical one-page statements describing the shooting, claiming Dwayne had reached for a knife so they had fired in self-defense.

But the only knife found, a butter knife on the kitchen counter, did not have Dwayne's fingerprints. And under cross-examination in a lawsuit filed by the Waiters family, both cops said they did not know if he had a knife.

The Post reported that one of the cops who killed Dwayne Waiters, Robert Hettenhouser, killed another unarmed man two years later. Altogether, he has killed three unarmed men and shot at two other people, but missed.

Charlene Reeves, who works in the packing room at the Smithfield plant, described how cops from Suitland, one of the towns in PG County, severely beat her son and one of his friends. After she protested the beating, a bullet was fired into her house. The bullet came from the kind of gun used by police.

Another worker described seeing a PG cop shoot a man to death for shoplifting a ham from a store. "The man was obviously hungry, there was no cause to kill him," the worker said.

Another worker, a Latin American immigrant, described how often he sees cops stopping Blacks and Latinos in the Langley Park area of PG County, where he and many other Latino co-workers live. "All that talk about how the United States is the home of human rights is lies," he said.

A number of workers at Smithfield knew about some of the other cases reported, including Archie Elliott and Prince Jones.

Elliott, a 24-year-old construction worker, was driving home through District Heights after work in June 1993. He was stopped by two cops who said he failed an alcohol test, and he was handcuffed behind his back and locked in a police car. He was wearing shorts and tennis shoes, with no shirt or socks. The cops then claimed they saw Elliott, still handcuffed behind his back, pull a gun from his shorts and aim at them. They fired 22 shots, hitting Archie Elliott 14 times and killing him, still handcuffed. The gun the cops claimed to find was unloaded and was never checked for fingerprints.

No charges were ever filed against the killer cops. A civil suit brought by the family was thrown out by the U.S. Court of Appeals and rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court.

But Archie Elliott's mother, Dorothy Elliott, a school teacher in PG County, has refused to go away. She has participated in numerous picket lines and protest meetings for eight years and has extended her solidarity to the families of other victims of the cops.

Wayne Cheney, one of the cops who killed Archie Elliott, killed another man, Michael Reed, stopped for drunk driving, less than two years later. The cops did not even claim that Reed was armed. Cheney had also shot and wounded another man in 1989. Cheney, who is Black, is still a PG cop.

Prince Jones, a student at Howard University, was killed on Sept. 1, 2000, by a PG cop out of uniform who was driving an unmarked car. The cop followed him for two hours through PG County, Washington, D.C., and into Fairfax County, Virginia, where the killing took place. The police have never claimed that Jones was a suspect in any crime. The cop shot 16 rounds into the back of Jones's car, hitting him in the back five times and killing him.  
 
Demonstrations protest killing
There were a number of demonstrations protesting this killing, including by other students at Howard. But the prosecutors in PG County, in Fairfax, Virginia, and the U.S. Justice Department have so far decided not to file charges against the cop, Carlton Jones, who is on the narcotics squad. The only action taken was an announcement by Prince George's state attorney Jack Johnson that he would no longer let Carlton Jones testify in court because he had admitted lying in a previous case.

Prince George's County was the topic of a National Public Radio "Talk of the Nation" program on Feb. 24, 2000. The program celebrated PG as a symbol of the rising Black middle class. The program host, Juan Williams--who was one of the authors of the civil rights movement documentary Eyes on the Prize--pointed out that the large majority of elected officials in the county are Black, including County Executive Wayne Curry, State Attorney Jack Johnson, U.S. congressman Albert Wynn, and School Superintendent Iris Metts.

On the newspaper's web site, washingtonpost.com, a July 5 feature was a "Live Online" discussion with Edythe Flemings Hall, president of the Prince George's chapter of the NAACP.

Hall argued, "All police officers are not the same. However, the bad ones make it hard for the lawful officers." Then she said, "With the exception of a few lone voices...most Prince Georgians have not demanded much in the way of reforms. We cannot expect others to do for us what we will not do for ourselves. Poor people need middle class people to speak up for them. However, middle class people are slow to action."

Hall has it wrong. The experience in protesting cop violence in Prince George's County and elsewhere is that it is primarily working people who have shown the guts to speak out.

Stu Singer works at Smithfield Packing in Landover, Maryland, and is a member of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 27.  
 
 
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