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On
Nov. 25, police murdered 23-year-old Sean Bell just hours before he was
to be married. His friends, Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman, were
wounded as five cops pumped 50 bullets into Bell's car as they left a
bachelor party. The police claimed they had thought Guzman had a gun, yet
no gun was ever found.
The surviving victims and other witnesses
testified that the plainclothes cops had never identified themselves, and
Guzman and Benefield said they had thought they were about to become the
victims of a carjacking. In an effort to get away, the men's car hit an
officer and an unmarked police minivan, which became the excuse for the
fusillade.
The shooting has been under investigation
by Queens District Attorney Richard Brown. But he has shown no rush to indict
any of the cops, who are on paid leave. Sean Bell's parents are demanding
Brown be replaced by a special prosecutor.
Several protests have been held since the
shooting. About 1200 attended Bell's funeral, including parents of
previous victims of police violence, among them the mother of Amadou
Diallo, who was shot 41 times by police who claimed they thought the
wallet he was reaching for was a gun. Abner Louima, who was sodomized and
tortured by the NYPD in 1997, also attended.
On Saturday, Dec. 16, tens of thousands
marched silently in protest down New York's prime shopping blocks on
Fifth Avenue. Once again, protesters were joined by Louima and other
victims (or their surviving relatives) of police brutality. Also
participating were Rep. Charles Rangel, City Comptroller William
Thompson, and other politicians; singer Harry Belafonte; United
Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten; and NAACP members. SEIU
1199 provided many of the marshals.
Said Sharpton, "We're not coming to
buy toys. We're coming to shop for justice." Bell's fiancée (his
common-law widow) announced that the day of the march was the birthday of
their four-year old daughter, but "instead of shopping with Daddy,
we're shopping for justice."
The media had predictable quotes from
shoppers who said they felt "inconvenienced," but others
were supportive. Said a retired New Jersey transit worker,
"Something has to be done with police brutality all over the
U.S." A visiting Pennsylvanian said: "It's very
peaceful—they're doing the American thing."
Demands made by the coalition were
similar to those raised after every such atrocity, including tighter
monitoring of the Police Department and strengthened civilian review;
independent special prosecutors; immediate testing of cops after shootings
for substance abuse; adherence to a law requiring reporting numbers of
stop-and-frisk incidents by race and gender; and training cops in racial
and cultural sensitivity.
The media—and some Black
"leaders"—are claiming that Mayor Mike Bloomberg's response is
supposedly different from the pro-cop statements of his predecessor, Rudy
Giuliani, following similar incidents. Bloomberg urged there be an
investigation and said, "It seemed to me excessive force was
used." He also met with the Bell family—something Giuliani
steadfastly had refused to do after cop shootings.
What's more, The New York Times claims
community reaction to the shooting has been moderated by Bloomberg's ties
to a supposedly bigger and more assertive Black middle class and the
politicians it has elected. But in this regard Bloomberg's behavior is
just a reprise of that of David Dinkins, who used similar rhetoric (and
as little substance) to convince Black "leaders" that he was
different from his openly pro-cop predecessor Ed Koch.
This is the context in which to judge
why, in the words of a Times headline, "Some Black Leaders See a
Mayor They Can Stand By." Bloomberg, says The Times, "has been
able to cool tempers by tapping into an abundant reservoir of black
political supporters, many from the area where the chaotic event
occurred. That support is a product of Mr. Bloomberg's careful
cultivation of middle-class black neighborhoods of Queens.…
“Many of those community leaders are
standing with Mr. Bloomberg before the cameras and advising him behind
closed doors.”
The newspaper described "an
extraordinary private meeting [between Bloomberg and Black leaders] at
City Hall," at which City Council member Charles Barron called for
the resignation of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and accused Queens
leaders of being out of touch with the intensity of racial profiling in
their own communities, upsetting many of those present."
But the "leaders" from Queens
who "have frequently shied away from the more aggressive,
confrontational racial politics practiced in parts of Brooklyn,"
dominated the meeting. And at a post-meeting press conference, even
Sharpton distanced himself from Barron's call for Kelly's resignation.
Sharpton and other Black leaders
surrounded Bloomberg as he called Kelly "the best police
commissioner the city has ever had."
After Bell's murder, cops busted into
numerous Black homes searching for an alleged "fourth man" who
police claimed had a gun but ran away when the shooting began.
LaToya Smith told the Daily News she was
lying in bed with her seven-year-old son when cops with guns drawn broke
down her door at 6 a.m. The police herded everyone in the house into the
living room and took LaToya and three others into custody.
Cops demanded information about the
"fourth man," and said to her, "If you don't tell us what
we want to hear you can get five years." Several other people faced
the same treatment in similar raids.
These raids combined with D.A. Brown's
foot-dragging are putting the Queens Black leadership on the spot. Said
Bishop Erskine Williams, "At some point they're going to say, 'Rev,
what side are you on?' On a scale of 1 to 10, the distrust was a 7. Now
it's a 10-and-a-half."
Despite media claims of decreased police
brutality in recent years, the Black and Latino communities have detected
no drop in racial profiling—and the sometimes resulting assault or even
murder by police. In the wake of the shooting, activists recounted a long
list of similar victims—almost all Black and Latino—shot many times
amidst claims of having weapons that were never found.
In this there is one genuine link to the
"war on terror": the standard practice by the U.S. military in
Iraq of shooting innocents later claimed to have been driving their car
in a threatening way and/or allegedly reaching for a weapon.
The Times Op-Ed columnist Bob Herbert
reminded readers of a very similar 2000 case, in which Black occupants of
a car in Manhattan ran into unmarked police cars as they tried to flee
what they thought was a carjacking. Before being released from jail
without charges, one arrestee said "a lot of the officers told me
that if this had been the Bronx or Harlem I'd have been dead.''
In addition to Bell's funeral and the
Dec. 16 march, several smaller protests have been held, some organized by
more radical groups like the December 12th Movement and the New Black
Panther Party.
Organizers of a Dec. 21 Wall Street rally
of 1000 linked Wall Street's wealth to the historic oppression of Black
people.
This link was never more appropriate,
coming days after Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs had announced billions
in bonuses for its partners. Meanwhile, the Black community continues to
suffer from disproportionate rates of unemployment and decreased funding
for education, health care, and housing.
And the same week, the media reported
that the U.S. had reached yet another record high number for its prison
population—as always, disproportionately Black. According to the
Washington Post, the prison numbers are "about eight times as many as
in 1975 and the most per capita in the Western world."
The press is making its usual efforts on
behalf of the cops, from propagating dubious psychological theories about
"sympathy" or "contagious" shooting to explain the
large number of bullets used, to reporting on sealed juvenile criminal
records.
What's worse, the centuries-old racism
facing Blacks occurs in a political atmosphere in which the "war
against terror" has become a pretext for denial of the most routine
civil liberties and rights to all communities of color—including to
immigrant workers organizing against their bosses (see related story in
this issue on the round-up of immigrants at Swift).
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