Mrs. Brown-Dickerson couldn’t have imagined that the rise to public figure would cost her the life of her first-born.
—
It was just days before Christmas of 2014 and Mrs. Tanya Brown-Dickerson and her family and friends were not in the holiday spirit.
It was a cold Sunday evening when I met her for the first time on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Center City Philadelphia.
She had just attended her first anti-police violence protest, where she lifted up the story of her son, Mr. Brandon Tate-Brown, who, while unarmed and fleeing, was shot and killed by a rookie Philadelphia police officer on December 15th, 2014.
I marveled at her ability to engage in activism hours before she had to bury her eldest son, who was murdered at age 26. But even more, I was captivated by her plea to Jesus prior to her son’s killing and what could seem like Jesus’ cruel, yet timely response.
“Jesus, you need to put me in the position where people will hear me,” she remembers saying after Mr. Darren Wilson, who killed Mr. Michael Brown in Ferguson last year, was not indicted by a grand jury.
Mrs. Brown-Dickerson couldn’t have imagined that the rise to public figure would cost her the life of her first-born.
“I thank God anyhow,” she said.
The next time I saw Mrs. Brown-Dickerson was two days after Christmas in Center City Philadelphia where she, again, alluded to her Christian faith.
“I had to hit my knees and pray so that the heavy burden would be lifted from me and I wouldn’t concentrate on how he suffered,” she said, as her voice trembled in a mix of sadness and nervousness.
It was at this rally held in front of the MSB Building at 15th & JFK Blvd that the grieving mother began to turn her frustration into ideas for legislation.
“New laws needs to be enforced to stop officers from shooting to kill,” she said, before calling out Philadelphia Police Commissioner, Mr. Charles Ramsey, and shaming his department for not having dashboard cameras attached to any police cruisers in the City. “Commissioner Ramsey, I’m calling on you because Obama called on you and said you were the best. I’m calling you out to make it right.”
Commissioner Ramsey, who in the beginning of this year was appointed by President Barack Obama to co-chair a Task Force on 21st Century Policing, for more than a month after Mrs. Brown-Dickerson’s call for progress was silent on this issue and showed no effort towards transparency, even staunchly defending his officers.
Throughout the month of January, with no movement from the bureaucracy, Mrs. Brown-Dickerson and her supporters braved the elements to rally and protest, even organizing one action at the site where Mr. Tate-Brown was killed.
On the 11th of February, my news and event company, Techbook Online, organized a town hall meeting entitled “Philly After Ferguson.” Among the attendees were Deputy Philadelphia Police Commissioner, Mr. Kevin Bethel, who was a panelist, and Mrs. Tanya Brown-Dickerson, who was a featured speaker.
This event provided the first opportunity for Mrs. Brown-Dickerson, flesh-to-flesh, to confront the system.
Commissioner Bethel apologized that Mrs. Brown-Dickerson had to learn about her son’s death from the news media, and enumerated reforms currently being thought about or implemented at the department.
Nothing he said satisfied either Mrs. Brown-Dickerson or her many supporters, a small minority of whom interrupted the event with a demand to know “Who killed Brandon Tate-Brown?”
That event, which made the front page of the Philadelphia Daily News, renewed the media’s interest in the story of Mr. Tate-Brown and it finally caused some movement among City officials.
Roughly a week after “Philly After Ferguson,” Commissioner Ramsey invited Mrs. Brown-Dickerson to view the footage of the fatal shooting in a private meeting at Internal Affairs.
A week after Mr. Tate-Brown’s mother watched the last moments of his life, the head of the Philadelphia Police Advisory Commission, Mr. Kelvyn Anderson, who was also panelist at “Philly After Ferguson,” reviewed the footage, too.
And very soon after him, a handful of clergy and community leaders were invited to watch videos of the fatal officer-involved shooting.
This move by government caused more speculation, as Mrs. Brown-Dickerson alleged that Mr. Anderson and others didn’t see all the videos she saw, one in particular which clearly shows her son not reaching for a gun when he was shot by Mr. Nicholas Carrelli.
Mrs. Brown-Dickerson then demanded that all the videos be made public so that Philadelphians can determine what happened.
The City didn’t obliged and tensions worsened.
In the middle of March, less than a week before the Department of Justice was to unveil its analysis of our police department’s use of force policies and training, Mrs. Brown-Dickerson, along with her lawyer and supporters, held a press conference outside City Hall demanding transparency.
Later that evening, activists, including Mr. Asa Khalif, cousin to Mr. Tate-Brown, clashed with Philadelphia police officers at a town hall in the Lawncrest section of the City where the police commissioner and others were speaking.
That March 19th confrontation caught the eye of the worldwide media and helped to get Mr. Tate-Brown’s story out to a larger audience.
On the 23rd of March, Mr. Khalif, who attended the press conference to hear the summary of the DOJ’s report, titled “An Assessment of Deadly Force in the Philadelphia Police Department,” approached Commissioner Ramsey, and for a moment, they spoke.
Mr. Khalif confirmed that Commissioner Ramsey was standing his ground in not releasing the name of the shooting officer or the video footage of the incident, and Mr. Khalif pledged his continued agitation.
A little more than a month after Mr. Khalif and Commissioner Ramsey had words, Mrs. Brown-Dickerson, with Mr. Khalif looking on from the audience, joined me on a panel at #TransparencyNow, a police and criminal justice reform Mayor’s forum co-organized by Techbook Online.
Mrs. Brown-Dickerson and I, prior to the candidates standing up one by one and answering the panel’s questions, introduced “Brandon Law,” a proposed bill that would make public the names of officers who kill citizens, along with the ruling from the Firearms Review Board’s investigation.
Each mayoral candidate on April 29th was asked where they stood on this bill and they all supported it in one way or another, with Mr. Jim Kenney, the Democratic nominee for Mayor of Philadelphia, stating the bill had his support.
A day later I saw Mrs. Brown-Dickerson again; this time she was giving a fiery speech at the #PhillyIsBaltimore rally in Center City Philadelphia, where she repeated her demand that the videos of her son’s killing be made public.
“I want each and every last one of you to see the video I saw. I want you to see the 37 minutes I saw with my son being beaten, tased, dragged and falling face down on the street.”
On June 9th, the City of Philadelphia “dropboxed” five videos of the shooting – only one of them worked. And on June 11th, Commissioner Ramsey admitted that Mr. Tate-Brown wasn’t reaching for a gun when he was killed, and that a rush to feed the media led to the false narrative.
In response to this development, Mr. Brian Mildenberg, the lawyer representing Mr. Tate-Brown’s estate, Mrs. Brown-Dickerson and a host of her supporters staged a press conference on June 15th and demanded that the Philadelphia District Attorney, Mr. Seth Williams, reopen the criminal investigation into the shooting death of Mr. Tate-Brown.
“His conclusion that a crime did not occur was based on the false story that Brandon Tate-Brown was reaching into his vehicle for a gun, which has now been completely and utterly debunked,” said Mr. Mildenberg.
Additionally, Mr. Mildenberg presented Mrs. Brown-Dickerson with a “certificate of truth,” which stated the real facts of her son’s death.
A month and two days went by before I saw Mrs. Brown-Dickerson again. On Sunday, July 17th, she was among several speakers who presented at a vigil for Ms. Sandra Bland, a young woman who was unjustly arrested outside of Houston, Texas and died three days later in her cell of an apparent suicide.
Mrs. Brown-Dickerson talked about her son briefly, but focused more on developing new ways of approaching the system to get justice.
Less than a month later, on August 3rd, I spoke to Mrs. Brown-Dickerson over the phone while she vacationed in South Carolina. Mrs. Brown-Dickerson was preparing to come home because she had a press conference on Wednesday, August 5th, with civil rights leaders who in February had sided with the bureaucracy after watching the footage of the shooting.
Those leaders, realizing now that Mrs. Brown-Dickerson was correct when she asserted that they hadn’t seen all the footage of the shooting, have joined with the Tate-Brown family and their supporter to call for justice for Brandon Tate-Brown, which means taking the officer who killed Mr. Tate-Brown off the streets; expedient implementation of the DOJ’s recommendations from their report and the re-opening of the criminal investigation into the December 15th shooting that both sparked eight months of tireless activism and answered the prayers of a mother hoping to change the world.
*Tune into 900amWURD or 900amWURD.com every Friday evening during the 6 o’clock hour to hear me relive #TheWeekThatWas*
Thanks for reading. Until next time, I’m Flood the Drummer® & I’m Drumming for JUSTICE!™
—
Photo: Mrs. Tanya Brown-Dickerson speaks at an anti-police violence rally in Center City Philadelphia. /C. Norris – ©2015