\u201cPeople don\u2019t realize that this is happening in Boston,\u201d Douglas says. \u201cTerrence Coleman, 31-years-old. They say he grabbed a knife. They didn\u2019t have to shoot him. They knew they were called for a mental situation. \u2026 You have a right to go to court and be judged by a jury of your peers, not shot. He got shot in the head. That\u2019s execution style.\u201d<\/p>\n Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activisms (and our great festivals) by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n Douglas\u2019s \u201cRose Memorial Service”<\/a> was developed as part of a residency at Emerson College, working with the Boston school\u2019s Public Art Think Tank. It\u2019s a continuation of his \u201cStreet Sign Memorial\u201d project, in which he\u2019s designed, had manufactured and installed public signs to honor people who\u2019ve died\u2014for an uncle who passed away from a heart problem; for Coleman; for Odin Lloyd, who was murdered in 2013 by New England Patriots football player Aaron Hernandez. Douglas posted one in Florida for a graffiti writer who died in 2014 from injuries sustained when Miami Beach Police hit him with an unmarked cruiser.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt like that could have been me,\u201d says Douglas, who\u2019s best known as a street artist and graffiti painter around Boston. \u201cI started getting annoyed. Every day there\u2019s video footage of someone getting killed by police. I just don\u2019t get it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen the Parkland shooting happened, I got kind of pissed,\u201d Douglas says. A school shooting gets national attention, but, to him, police killings of citizens seem overlooked. \u201cWhy aren\u2019t people talking about this? It\u2019s an epidemic.\u201d<\/p>\n He decided, \u201cI\u2019m going to do my own public service announcement.\u201d<\/p>\n In collaboration with Emerson students, Douglas placed tags around the school, in halls and elevators, memorializing black people killed by police. On Friday, they took the project to the streets.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s just crazy. It\u2019s just so warped,\u201d Douglas says. \u201cThe guy who shot up [the high school in] Parkland, he got taken in in handcuffs. The guy from the [Boston] marathon bombing, he got taken in in handcuffs.\u201d<\/p>\n Originally, Douglas planned to memorialize 400 people killed by police in the past five years. But as he collected reports from the news media, he kept finding more dead.<\/p>\n \u201cWe discovered just looking at the information, a lot of it\u2019s incorrect. The police, they don\u2019t record. There\u2019s no real database,\u201d Douglas says. More than 1,000 black people have been killed by police in the past five years, he says. \u201cIt\u2019s a public service announcement to try to get people to do something about it.\u201d<\/p>\n Previously:<\/strong> Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activisms (and our great festivals) by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Friday afternoon, in the rain, Cedric Douglas and two collaborators stood out on Boylston Street, along the Boston Common, and handed out roses to passers-by. Attached to each stem was a black tag printed with the name and a photo portrait of \u201cone of more than 1,000 black people\u201d killed by police in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7096,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106,100,105,112],"tags":[37,346,347,276,87,348],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7097"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7097"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7135,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7097\/revisions\/7135"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Cedric](\"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/picCedricDouglasRoseMemorial180427_0605w-1024x637.jpg\")
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\n\u2022 \u2018I Called For Help And They Killed Him\u2019: Mass Action Against Police Brutality March.<\/a>
\n\u2022 \u2018My Son\u2019: A Killing by Police Protested at Boston Police Headquarters.<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Cedric](\"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/picCedricDouglasRoseMemorial180427HannahBaileyw-742x1024.jpg\")
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