Could Ferguson happen in these parts?

At 27 years old, St Pete resident, Jason Mills said he has seen a change in law enforcement since he was a kid. He has been stopped by the police twenty-four times in the last year,

“All for the same reason; running a stop sign or failure to yield,” he said.

But only once was he ticketed. 

Mills, who spoke at the Uhuru house at a forum Sunday, is a poster child for the treatment by police African-American males across the country say they're constantly dealing with.

Sunday's discussion, held by the African People's Socialist Movement, better known as the Uhurus, posed the question, “Could Ferguson happen here? should Ferguson happen here?” at the group's Midtown headquarters.

Their answer? Maybe.

Led by Uhuru president Chimurenga Waller, the discussion panel included Omali Yeshitela, the founder of the Uhuru movement and chairman of the African People's Socialist Party, former St. Pete NAACP president Reverend Manuel Sykes, and Jeffery Copeland, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

St Pete Chief of Police Anthony Holloway had been invited but ultimately declined to attend, but St. Petersburg Police spokesman Mike Puetz said the chief said he wanted to hold a broader conversation, and has since formed an ad hoc committee consisting of elected officials, among others.

Those who spoke Sunday were skeptical of the future of race relations in St. Petersburg.

The Uhurus have some ideas of their own when it comes to policing Midtown, which they said is a breeding ground for racially-charged police interactions.

The group proposes a black community-controlled police department as the most democratic way to monitor the relationship between the community and the police. They don’t see the police review board and sensitivity training for officers as effective means, nor do they support the use of two-way police cameras, which they said an officer can simply turn on and off as they please. A community-controlled police would mean that “we have the power to hire, fire and monitor the police in our communities,” Yeshitela said. The police should have to live in the communities that they work in. Experience the same unemployment issues, bad housing, bad health care, and bad education, he said. He feels that the police and the community should not be afraid of one another.

SCLC director Copeland said he believes that if the community stands together, 95 percent of the violence will stop.

“No one can control a sensible and intelligent body of people," he said. "While we all might not look alike, we all bleed a like."

Yeshitela said the current narrative on police brutalizing the African American community is deja vu for his community; that the media creates a spectacle only around individual cases like Mike Brown and Eric Garner today, just like they did with TyRon Lewis in 1996. He said this serves to decontextualize each incident.

“They remove the historical relationship that black people have with this country," Yeshitela said, adding that this time around, countless demonstrations across the country are making it impossible to ignore. “The only reason this new narrative, this discussion is happening is because they can’t run away from it.”

Sykes said that the community needs more access to capital to invest in businesses and the opportunity for home ownership. He proposes they open a bank of their own, because he believes that the black churches bring more money into the city than anyone else.

“Funding is provided for other people’s hopes and dreams at the expense of ours," he said. "What is the point in bringing businesses here if you are going to displace the population? You bring the jobs in and then run the people away.”  

Penny Hess, chair of a solidarity group that works to raise in the white community to the Uhurus' mission, said when a black man is killed by police every 28 hours, it is good that people are finally waking up.

She said local police have become an occupying army.

“As a white community we don’t experience that," she said. "Here they just call it racism, giving the white community a completely different experience,” says Hess. 

The panel expressed the importance of youth involvement in activist causes and disobedience.

“Revolution is a function of the youth," Yeshitela said. "Young people by virtue are trapped with having to solve the problems of the future.

Ashley Green, St Pete resident and organizer for the Florida Public Services Union, agreed.

“We are searching for knowledge and wisdom for the empowerment to take control and build this movement," she said. "We are not just trying to build a plane while we are flying it.” 

This article appears in Dec 4-10, 2014.