Resting in Power: Oluwatoyin Salau and Robert L. Fuller – victims of the new American police state

George Orwell in his best-known title “1984”, describes a police state in turmoil, a populous constantly under surveillance and constantly under pressure from the totalitarian rule of the upper classes. The images of poverty and dystopian disfunctionalism that, upon a viewing today, are startlingly similar to the images we see broadcast out of America on a daily basis, reveal the world’s slow move towards the future we thought would never occur.

Oluwatoyin Salau has become another victim of this.

Murdered in cold blood, although neither police spokespeople, nor governors from the state she was found in, have provided any clarity on the death, even going so far as to ignore her disappearance on the 5^th June, motivations to investigate it deriving primarily from a petition from her family, calling for the Tallahassee Police to ‘do their jobs’.

While the police released a statement on Sunday (14^th June), said the investigation had been taken up by their ‘violent crimes department’ as part of a double homicide investigation, reports from other sources such as NewsOne have also attributed her murder to a spate of several other ‘suspicious deaths’ of young BLM activists. The most recent, the death of 20-year-old Robert Fuller, found hanging from a tree, led to many calling out the Florida and Tallahassee police departments for their inactivity to investigate these deaths and increased fears of a police cover-up of these deaths.

Search the hashtag #justiceforToyin and #justiceforRobertFuller, and its abundantly clear, like many people across the U.S., there is an understandable lack of trust of the police, their investigations, and the ‘professional’ approaches to their cases.

Oluwatoyin Salau was 19 years old. Robert Fuller, 20. Both people around the same age as me and many of the people I go to University with. Salau had been sexually assaulted, then disappeared without trace a day after tweeting about her experience. Robert Fuller was found hanging from a tree, with the Los Angeles police department report stating it was death by ‘likely suicide’ but didn’t have any CCTV available to investigate further. However, Twitter users were quick to point out the broad range of CCTV cameras around the area Fuller was found and could have easily used them to find and convict those responsible. And yet, they didn’t. like Fuller’s death, Salua’s disappearance was only investigated further after a GoFundMe account was set up asking for donations to help independently fund the investigation into her death.

While their deaths are unfortunately part of a greater number of disappearances and murders of other young BLM activists, all surrounded with doubt and suspicion, what is clear is that there may be something linking these deaths significantly bigger than many anticipate. A potentially wider conspiracy against the African American and BAME community in America that needs exposure.

This brings me back to my “1984” metaphor at the start of this article. The book describes a state ‘under constant surveillance’, with the citizens of the imagined state of Oceana spied on to manipulate and control the populous. Many people in the BLM protests have constantly been filming their encounters with police in order to catch any misconduct and discriminatory behaviour on camera.

While this is an effective way to record evidence against bad police officers, it doesn’t work properly unless these videos are post and circulated regularly. Before the riots, police officers wore cameras on their uniform which would subsequently livestream to larger server where the videos would be viewed by their local PD. We need to play them at their own game. There needs to be a greater infrastructure in place for people dealing with this violence to be able to wear and record their encounters on an even larger scale than social media and not at the behest of algorithms, a platform accessible to all protestors and litigation teams that could aid in quashing bogus arrest warrants and no-knock raids.

It may be impractical and a farcical idea at that, but unless a radical event changes the police’s approach to suppressing protests and BLM activist murder investigations, there is likely to be little or no change in the depressingly flawed status quo. We all have to stick together to protect those at the behest of systematic and historically perpetuated racial abuse. This isn’t just some social media trend, these are real people and real situations we have to confront for the state of ours and our children’s futures.