When city officials began forcibly displacing unhoused Milwaukeeans who had pitched their tents and shelters in what would become the “hard zone” of the Republican National Convention last week, many activists and advocates predicted that this action would result in tragedy. Now a man is dead. He was known by some in the community as “Jehovah”, by others as “Jah”. Some reports name him as Samuel Sharpe. He had a pit bull, Isis, whom he adored. He was courteous and thankful to those who provided aid and solidarity. His life was ended by the bullet of a Columbus Police Department Officer. That officer was sent out to patrol a city that was not their own, a city where they didn’t know the people they were supposed to “protect and serve”. These police were imported to our city for the sake of soothing the jangled nerves of exurban delegates who have never seen an American city they didn’t love to slander as a crime-infested hellhole. Jehovah died mere yards away from one homeless resource center, blocks away from several others. Fr. Mike Bertram, a Capuchin friar who works with the homeless at St. Ben’s Community Meal downtown and the House of Peace on Walnut Street, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel he’d offered to help mediate between police and the unhoused who had been cruelly forced to relocate for the convention. “It’s really sad, it’s really tragic,” he said. “I hope that we can make some more communication with law enforcement to say … we’re here, we’re willing to help in any way that we can, to deescalate a situation, or to simply invite someone (to stay here).”
Fr. Bertram’s offer apparently went unheeded, but that shouldn’t be surprising. The police brought in like an occupying power for this convention were not here to protect people like Jehovah. To the contrary, they were and are here explicitly to brutalize and erase people like him to provide comforting optics for the reactionary jamboree squatting in Fiserv Forum. Having received their marching orders, they made a desert of everywhere between Clybourn and McKinley, between the river and 43, and called it peace.
Some details of the incident are not yet clear. Initial reports suggest that the altercation began when a fight broke out between people recently displaced to King Park by the raids that broke up encampments downtown. Police claim that Jehovah was holding a knife, which in the parlance of exculpatory police statements is all the evidence they need to “deescalate” a situation with a 9mm hollow-point. What is clear is that in a few days, all the well-fed and well-watered delegates will get back on their planes from Mitchell and fly home to Boca Raton, FL and Katy, TX. They will go back to accusing anyone to the left of Mitt Romney of being a violent anarchist bent on destroying the United States of America. They will wave the bloody shirt (or bloody earlobe, rather) of the recent assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump. They will not remember Jehovah’s name, if they bother to learn it in the first place, which is doubtful.
When our city’s leadership figures offer their post-RNC press conferences where they preen and tout the “economic revitalization” that the RNC brought to our city (although those chickens should not yet be counted), remember that the price was paid not only in the headaches and inconveniences of having our downtown rented out to some of the most venal right-wing hobgoblins this republic has to offer. It was paid for by the life of a human being who died violently in his own city, struck down by the gun of a stranger.
