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2020 has been a lesson in the profound power of the people in struggle.
In August 2019, when the Aurora Police Department in Colorado killed Elijah McClain, they truly thought they could get away with it with no consequences. Aurora District Attorney Dave Young summarily declined to file any charges against the killer cops. APD didn’t even take them off the job. The city aided in blocking the McClain family from receiving any remittances. All of this despite the torture and killing of Elijah McClain at the hands of their own officers that was captured on camera.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation was part of a small core that fought with the McClain family for justice from day one, and this laid the groundwork for the movement that took shape this summer. But the reality is that without a mass movement, APD would have gotten away with it. Now, APD has had to learn that they don’t get to kill members of our community without consequence.
Kathryn Scott, special to Colorado Politics Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer Drew Romano, 25, from Boulder erupts in cheers inside the Bernie Sanders Colorado Headquarters as Sanders is reported to have won the Colorado Democratic primary. Voters take to the polls and ballots are counted during the Super Tuesday primary on March 3, 2020 in Denver, Colorado. Colorado shares a Super Tuesday primary with 14 other states and territories.
Kathryn Scott, Special to The Denver Gazette
Ernest Luning, The Denver Gazette
Kathryn Scott, Special to The Gazette
Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post Pool
It was the year superlatives fell short.
From a jam-packed January that opened in the midst of a presidential primary and plunged head-long into only the third impeachment trial in the nation s history, to February and its leap day, which couldn t explain why it felt like the month that would never end, until March arrived and time slowed to a glacial crawl â from the start, 2020 was all about jerking from one extreme to the next. Weâve had a pandemic with the flu in 1918; weâve had economic strife with the Great Recession and the Great Depression; weâve had civil unrest in the late 60s, early 70s. But we havenât had them all at the same time,â said Denver Police Chief Paul Pazen last summer, before the divisive election that also played out against that backdrop.
Buried in the charging documents in the George Floyd murder case is something called excited delirium. One of the junior officers mentioned it during Floyd s arrest.
We had never heard of excited delirium but discovered it is widely used by police and paramedics to describe a life-threatening syndrome among suspects exhibiting wild behavior and extreme strength, and that it is being used to justify injecting them with a powerful chemical restraint, ketamine. But in the medical world, we found deep skepticism over whether excited delirium is even a real condition and concern about an overreliance on ketamine and the use of excited delirium as a shield to protect police from charges of misconduct.