May 6th: March against police terror! March for Marvin, Oleg, and all the victims!

Friday, May 6 · 7:00pm – 10:00pm

Sunken Garden Park

8th and Speer

Denver, Colorado

The police are at war with the people.
It’s time for the people to be at war with the police.

9 months ago, jail guards in the Van Cise-Simonet Detention Center in Denver, murdered a homeless street preacher, Marvin Booker. Videotape of his brutal murder exists, but has never been made public. The Denver District Attorney declined to file charges against the deputies responsible.

No one has faced any justice for Marvin’s murder.
…
On May 3rd, Denver will host city wide elections for a new mayor and new city council members. Though most of the mayoral candidates have promised a change in the local police forces, the results of this election will change nothing.

No matter who is elected, the police will still terrorize our communities.

High profile cases of police violence fill the headlines of local media. Officers beat, taze, and pepper spray residents of the Denver Metro Area with impunity. Though several tolkeinized terminations have recently taken place, these firings will ultimately not stop the police terror raging in our neighborhoods and streets. In Aurora, police execute Russian migrant youth merely for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In Denver, police raid homes and beat whole families.

This isn’t a case of a few bad apples. The whole orchard is diseased and rotten.

As the U.S. military occupies countries across the world to maintain control over a global economy that impoverishes billions, police forces across the United States occupy neighborhoods to maintain a social order that impoverishes millions in this country.

The poor and working class are beaten, murdered, imprisoned, evicted, raped, abused, and tortured in Iraq and Afghanistan by U.S. soldiers and in Denver by local police officers and other state agents.

We’ve marched three times in the last year, and our rage has become something that cannot be dismissed.

On May 6th, on a weekend that will see celebrations honoring the memories of struggles, revolutions, and people’s victories from centuries ago, we will fill the streets.

Whoever is elected on May 3rd, they will understand the power of the people they hope to control and govern after May 6th.

May 6th- Into the streets!
For Marvin Booker!
For Oleg Gidenko!
For all of us!

Suspect in attempted Littleton mall bombing is on the run

Earl Albert Moore was plagued by money problems when he fumbled two crimes and landed in federal prison for more than six years, according to court records, interviews and news accounts.

Moore, 65, is suspected of planting a crude explosive device inside a Jefferson County mall last week, and is now the subject of a nationwide manhunt.

The incident at Southwest Plaza occurred one week after Moore was released from federal prison in Georgia, and about four miles from the Denver apartment where he lived for several years before his 2005 arrest for bank robbery.

Authorities have searched all of Moore’s former addresses in Colorado and have spoken with distant relatives, but they have no confirmed sightings since Moore was seen at the mall last Wednesday, FBI Spokesman Dave Joly said today.

Denver County court records show the owners of The Pines apartments near Quincy Avenue and South Sheridan Boulevard filed in court to evict Moore and a female relative in October 2004 for failure to pay rent. Moore had lived in the apartment for about four years, according to public record searches.

Two banks also had filed civil actions against Moore, saying he owed them more than $10,000.

In March 2004, Moore was arrested for theft and possession of burglary tools after a Costco security guard saw him slitting open boxes and shoving merchandise in his coat.

According to police reports, when an officer arrived at the store on South Havana Street he found 24 computer storage discs worth $1,560 inside the lining of Moore’s coat.

Moore, who also was carrying a small knife, told the officer “I did it. I got caught,” according to the report.

That summer Moore agreed to a plea deal in which he would receive two years probation. But he failed to show up for his September 2004 sentencing.

A warrant was still out for his arrest when he walked into a bank in Crab Orchard, West Virginia, in March 2005 waved a gun, and fled with $2,546, according to court records.

Police arrested him about 10 minutes later, after Moore walked into a nearby convenience store and a clerk noticed red dye on his hands from the dye packs the bank had included with the money, according to a story from The Register-Herald in Beckley, West Virginia.

Moore had used makeup to paint on a fake beard, and crashed his getaway car into a snowbank about a half mile away from the bank. Police found the money in the trunk of his car.

A bank employee said this morning that Moore told officers at the time that he needed to rob the bank because his wife was dying from cancer, but it was unclear whether that story ever was confirmed.

Moore was sentenced to 18 years in federal prison, but his sentence was reduced to seven years after he assisted prosecutors with information on another case, according to court records. He spent most of that time at a medium-security prision in South Carolina.

He had a previous conviction for larceny in El Paso County in 1998. That case also involved a rental property, court records show.

In 2010, the Colorado Department of Revenue also filed a civil case against Moore, saying he owed the state $2,819.

They believe he returned to the area around 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, placed two propane tanks and a makeshift pipebomb in a hallway used mostly by mall employees, and then started a fire.

A mall employee noticed the fire and a security guard was able to extinguish it before firefighters arrived. No one was hurt.

Counterfeit bills on the rise in Greeley

Bogus bills — $100s, $50s and even $5 bills — are showing up in Greeley stores, and police are putting merchants on alert.

Last week, police arrested four Denver people for allegedly trying to pass phony $100 bills and even found two of the counterfeit bills hidden in an unusual place on one of the suspects.

The fours arrests: Serene Donlan, 26; Ebonee Bryant, 27; Helaman Lucero, 25, and Felicia Munoz, 24; were all Denver residents. Three of them are women, and Lucero was identified by police as a “transsexual — a man living as a woman.”

All four were booked into Weld County Jail on charges of forgery and theft.

According to court records, the four suspects were arrested by police after four stores in the Centerplace Shopping Center in west Greeley reported they were given counterfeit $100 bills.

The suspects were also accused of passing some of the counterfeit bills at the Outlet Stores in Loveland.

Bank robbed by duo wearing George Bush masks

COLORADO SPRINGS — Two men were said to be wearing George W. Bush Halloween masks — or maybe masks of his father — when they robbed a bank at gunpoint in north Colorado Springs on Wednesday morning, the Gazette reports.

The robbery occurred about 11:20 a.m., when the pair, armed with handguns, grabbed cash from at least one teller at American National Bank, 1095 W. Garden of the Gods Road, police told the newspaper.

Fire of unknown origin damages Cherry Creek condos

GLENDALE – Firefighters worked on a fire at the Cherry Creek Village Condos in the 5300 block of Cherry Creek Drive South.

The call came in just before 6 a.m. Denver Fire was the only agency that responded.

The fire started on the outside of the building and did spread onto the roof. According to DFD, the blaze never got into any units. The units near the fire were evacuated.

No word yet on the cause of the fire or how much the condos were damaged.

Cop injured as driver rear-ends patrol car and drives away

A Denver police officer was injured Tuesday night when his patrol car was rear-ended on Federal Boulevard.

Just before midnight, the officer was stopped on Federal Boulevard near West 23rd Avenue when a car hit the cruiser’s back left side, said Sonny Jackson, spokesman for the Denver Police Department.

The car then continued south in the northbound lanes of Federal Boulevard and at one point drove onto a sidewalk.

Police caught up to the car in the 1700 block of Grove Street, where they arrested the male driver, Jackson said.

The officer was taken to an area hospital with back pain.

The driver, whose name was not released, faces charges of felony eluding and hit-and-run and other traffic-related charges, Jackson said.

Meeting points and times for day of action in Denver

1PM: Students at Hinkley High School held an occupation / sit-in, then they walked out of school and about 100 students have taken to the streets. They are reporting that all of the students who walked out have been suspended.

Denver, CO, April 3, 2011 – College students, union members, organization leaders, community activists and others will join together on Monday, April 4, 2011, to commemorate the 43rd anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s march for sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, followed by his famous last “Promised Land” speech, and assassination on April 4th, 1968.

A Justice for Janitors (SEIU) march will begin at 17th and California streets at 11:30 and will conclude at Tivoli Square (SW corner of Tivoli between the King Center and the Plaza Building) in Denver for a “Teach-in”. An anti-capitalist radical workers’ bloc has been called for the march.

From 12:15 – 2:00pm, a panel of community leaders representing labor, immigration, education, civil rights, the inter-faith community, and other areas will speak about worker’s rights and social justice.

The Student Labor Action Project (SLAP) have coordinated a student “walk-out” to attend the events on campus, and to send a message of solidarity with workers.

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) will also hold a rally from 1:00-3:00 pm at 17th and Esplanade in City Park, near the MLK statue, to protest the Dex Corporation outsourcing American jobs.

An evening Rally and Candlelight Vigil to honor workers, organized by Colorado AFL-CIO, will begin at 5:30pm at City Park Band Shell, on the east side of Ferrell Lake (near E. 17th and Steele Street entrance). An anti-capitalist radical workers’ bloc has been called for the rally/vigil.

Meanwhile, similar events will be held in Colorado Springs and other cities.

Call for anti-capitalist contingent at April 4th Denver labor actions

The following is a statement issued by the Denver General Membership Branch of the IWW calling anti-capitalists to converge on the April 4th labor actions in Denver. There will be an anti-capitalist and radical worker’s bloc participating in the march beginning at 11:30am at 17th and California as well as a presence at the later rally and vigil.

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NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO COMPROMISE

SEIZE THE TIME!

The uprisings in Europe, then North Africa and the Mideast, and in the United States are not a coincidence. They are, at least in part, a common rebellion against a common enemy that threatens to make working people pay for its plunder and failures: the neo-liberal policies of unregulated capitalism, croney government, and phoney “banking”. We believe the best of what workers have spoken so far is not reforming a crippled and crippling capitalist system, but for the working class to step in as replacements for bundling bankers and bungling politicians.
WE HAVE A CHOICE TO MAKE: WE CAN LET OUR MOVEMENT BE CHANNELED TO WEAK REFORM AND ELECTORAL MEASURES OR WE CAN PUSH ONWARD NOT JUST FOR WORKERS’ RIGHTS IN THE OLD SYSTEM BUT FOR WORKERS’ POWER to control our own work, our wealth, our well being. Early in the last century the newpaper The Messenger, founded by A. Philip Randolph, called for mass strikes and workers’ control as “the antidote for capitalist poisons”.

Drive-through bank robbery in Denver

Denver police are looking for a man they said robbed a bank through the drive-through window.

Police responded at 11:34 a.m. Saturday to a US Bank branch at 4930 Colorado Blvd. after a man demanded money through the drive-through window. A representative for the Denver Police Department didn’t know whether the suspect was armed or how he was able to get the money.

Statistics were not immediately available, but police said robberies through drive-through windows are uncommon.

Aurora leaders hold counter-insurgency meeting

Take note of the ongoing operations by which our enemies intend to prevent an uprising in Aurora while the cops murder people left and right. These are the people who work together to keep peace in the streets while class society continues to rule: Cops, religious leaders, activists, volunteer cops called “peacekeepers.”

Below is from the Denver Post, slightly edited to reduce misinformation:

Aurora officials convened a meeting of volunteers, police and the U.S. Department of Justice office that helps prevent racial tensions in the wake of recent shootings in which four people have been killed by police and two others wounded by police bullets.

Barbara Shannon-Banister, chief of the city’s community-relations division, said her office has not heard reports of unrest from the community and that Monday’s meeting was standard procedure after a major incident such as an officer-involved shooting.

Among those in attendance were members of the city’s Key Community Response Team, a group of volunteers who meet regularly and respond in times of civil disorder, as well as the city’s human-relations commission and representatives of the local faith community.

Also participating was a representative of the Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service, which is described on its website as the department’s “peacekeeper” for community conflict and tension arising from differences of race, color and national origin.

Shannon-Banister said the representative is a regular attendee of such meetings and a member of the Key Community Response Team.

Aurora officers have killed four individuals since Feb 10, three of them in the past week. The first two murdered individuals were both Latino. Police and the coroner’s office have not released the identities of the two others killed in the most recent shootings.