Statement on Joe Frasure Jr.
Joe Frasure Jr. was fatally shot by police around 1:00 am Monday morning, January 30th, in Wyoming, OH while cleaning out his recently deceased grandmother’s apartment. The police responded to a call reporting a suspected burglary at his grandmother’s building.
The Hamilton County Prosecutor’s office released body cam footage of the interaction on Friday, February 3rd. We heard the same justifications and excuses for police violence that we consistently hear when the police murder citizens:
We heard about how armed officers of the state were acting in self defense.
We heard about the victim’s previous criminal record.
We heard about how he wasn’t actually supposed to be in the building at night.
We heard that only if he had listened to the officer’s demands, they would not have had to use deadly force.
Frasure Jr. died on Tuesday, January 31st. The Hamilton county coroner’s report listed Frasure's cause of death as a “police-involved shooting”, which intentionally obfuscates the simple fact that Frasure was shot, and killed, by police officers.
We cannot grow apathetic to the seemingly endless strings of murder perpetrated by police departments in this country, in particular impacting Black individuals and communities.
Cincinnati designates an overly bloated share of the budget to police, despite repeated calls for defunding and reallocation to other public services. Cincinnati police have aggressively ramped up their public campaign of vilifying children while stoking public paranoia around gun crime - because, while these are ineffectual methods bolstered by weightless metrics, both are easier to manipulate favorably instead of actually addressing a core driver of crime: poverty. Cincinnati still has a ridiculous rate of childhood poverty with 45.6% of children in grades 1-4 living in poverty.
As we’ve stated before, the policing system in this country is working as designed. Impoverished people, workers, Black and brown communities, and those of us who seek to dismantle a broken system are all subject to the violence of a state that will stop at nothing to violently enforce the subjugation of the vast majority of its citizens.
The police officers involved are on paid leave and will not face charges or additional investigation regarding the killing. Meanwhile Joe Frasure’s father, Joe Frasure Sr., who was with his son that night and ran from the police, is still under investigation regarding his conduct.
Consider Alex S. Vitale’s words in The End of Policing:“We are told that the police are the bringers of justice. They are here to help maintain social order so that no one should be subjected to abuse. The neutral enforcement of the law sets us all free. This understanding of policing, however, is largely mythical. American police function, despite whatever good intentions they have, as a tool for managing deeply entrenched inequalities in a way that systematically produces injustices for the poor, socially marginal, and nonwhite.”
The police are not here to protect the working class and our communities; the police are here to protect property and the status quo of racial capitalism. Violence and displays of unjustifiable force are the mechanism by which the capitalist state continues to oppress and exploit the entirety of the working class, Black communities, Indigenous communities, and other communities of color.
Justice for Joe Frasier Jr.!
Justice for his family!
Dismantle the police!