MONDAY, JULY 31, 2022: Make TWO Calls for #Justice4Hadi – Fire & Charge Racist Oak Lawn Cops!
Take action to help us secure #Justice4Hadi by making two calls on Monday, August 1st, 2022.
1) Call Oak Lawn Police Department Chief Daniel Vittorio at 708-422-8292 and demand that he IMMEDIATELY FIRE the three officers who brutally beat 17-year-old minor Hadi Abuatelah last week and put him in the hospital.
Sample Script: Hello, my name is _____________ and I am calling to demand of Chief Vittorio that the three officers who brutally beat the minor Hadi Abuatelah be immediately fired from their positions. Our streets are not safe when officers who assault children are allowed to continue to work.
2) Call Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx at 312-603-1880 and ask that she NOT CHARGE Hadi, but instead file charges against the racist cops.
Sample Script: Hello, my name is __________ and I am calling to ask Kim Foxx to:
a) NOT file charges against Hadi Abuatelah, the 17-year-old beaten by Oak Lawn Police Department officers last week; and
b) immediately file charges instead against the three Oak Lawn police officers who brutally beat Hadi and put him in the hospital. It is her responsibility to make sure these officers are not allowed to continue to terrorize our communities.
The AAAN joins our community in expressing the deepest outrage at the savage beating of 17-year-old minor Hadi Abuatelah at the hands of three white Oak Lawn, Illinois, police officers. The video, which has gone viral and gained national attention, shows three fully grown men sitting on top of Hadi and mercilessly punching him repeatedly in the face and head. Hadi has suffered serious injury from the attack, and is currently in the hospital. We offer our deepest and most heartfelt prayers to the family for his full recovery.
The response from the Oak Lawn Police Department has been expectedly disgusting, with Chief of Police Daniel Vittorio not only defending the actions of the three racist officers, but also going so far as to say that they would have even been justified in using “deadly force” – essentially admitting that he would have had no problem with his officers killing Hadi!
Let us be very clear: there is NO excuse for any law enforcement officer to savagely beat any suspect under any circumstances. We will never forget the vicious murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, which occurred because police officers in this country think they can bully and brutalize Black and other suspects of color with impunity. But suspects who happen to be white – even mass murderers like in the cases of the recent Highland Park, Illinois, shootings and the Black church massacre in Charleston, SC, in 2015 – are arrested without a scratch.
Police have no right to be the judge, jury, and executioner of members of our communities, and the troubling statement from the Oak Lawn Chief proves deep bias and racism in his police department against Arabs, Muslims, and other people of color.
Arab and Muslim communities know all too well that systemic, structural, and institutional racism runs deep in the southwest suburbs – including Oak Lawn – and affects every level of government, especially police departments. The AAAN has recently published conclusive evidence of decades of harassment, surveillance, and terrorizing of Arabs and Muslims by southwest suburban law enforcement in a groundbreaking report on Suspicious Activity Reports, Fusion Centers, and racial profiling. Our Campaign to End Racial Profiling (CERP) has been launched specifically to challenge this racism and #EndRacialProfiling of our communities.
We are demanding #Justice4Hadi by calling for the IMMEDIATE FIRING AND CHARGING of the three officers involved (make the calls in the action alert at the very top of this statement on Monday, August 1st, 2022), and for an independent investigation into civil rights violations perpetrated by the Oak Lawn Police Department against the village’s Black, Latino, and Arab residents. Racist cops have no place in our communities and no place on our streets. None of our children are safe as long as these cops continue to commit crimes with impunity.
Nadiah Alyafai
Youth Organizer, Arab American Action Network
Sunday, July 31st, 2022
