Ada County prosecutor cancels Boise Black Lives Matter meeting over Instagram post
Black Lives Matter Boise and the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office exchanged messages on social media Friday after Prosecutor Jan Bennetts canceled a planned meeting over a BLMBoise Instagram post that showed vandalism at the Salt Lake County Prosecutor’s Office in Utah and had a caption that read, in part, “We will take action, if action is not taken.”
The Salt Lake office was vandalized two weeks ago, and an officer was injured, when protests occurred following news that the killing of Bernardo Palacios-Carbajal by two police officers was deemed justified. The BLMBoise post showed a photo of the office and signs covered in red paint.
“We agreed to meet in good faith because as members of the community and in our roles as representatives thereof, we want to hear the views and voices of community members. However, we cannot allow our professional decisions to be the result of bullying or intimidation,” the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office said on its Facebook post. “Therefore, we are canceling the meeting today.”
Bennetts’ office indicated that the post shows “extensive vandalism and violence at the Salt Lake County prosecutor’s office, and which appears to threaten the same here if an unidentified list of demands is not met.”
BLMBoise took to Twitter and called for the resignation of Bennetts. The meeting had been on the books since June. A BLMBoise spokesperson told the Statesman that the group was not notified about its cancellation until seeing the Facebook post.
The Instagram post was purposefully chosen to symbolize a call to action and collaboration across Black Lives Matter chapters within the region, the group said: “What we hope to be accomplished is that the narrative be about Black lives, not about property. Painting, we would suggest, is the least violent if you could even refer to it as that. ... Civil disobedience is effective. We don’t encourage or incite violence, but a dialogue, and if we are not being heard, then we will resort to measures of civil disobedience.”
On social media the group said that “civil disobedience is not violence. Painting over structures of oppression is not violence. Prioritizing property over human life is violence.”
