Tucked away between discussions about whether Sen. Ted Cruz, co-architect of the government shutdown, is a tea party rock star and whether Kanye West’s onstage “white Jesus” escapade was ridiculous or not was the 18th annual National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality – NYC on Tuesday, Oct. 22. Joyce Kilmer Park in the Bronx was the gathering place, with teach-ins, workshops and rallies.
Organizing the event was the October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation.
Working with the Stolen Lives Project, which documents cases of killings by law enforcement agents nationwide, the grassroots group has been mobilizing since 1996 for a National Day of Protest in an attempt to expose “the epidemic of police brutality.”
Meanwhile, in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commmissioner Ray Kelly are still trying to battle the Community Safety Act from taking effect.
According to a new Quinnipiac poll, a majority of people said that keeping crime rates down is more important than reforming the controversial NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy.
But Black and Latino men who make up 90 percent of all those stopped-and-frisked may see the situation differently.
“Stop-and-frisk in NYC has not led to any major crime busts. It has only increased the number of African-American and Latinos in the criminal justice system and fed the prison- industrial complex,” said Salim Adofo, national vice chairperson of training and organizing for the National Black United Front.
“The fact that [stop-and-frisk and other types of discriminatory policing] even remain the subject of debate in our city in 2013 is an indication of how far we remain from a ‘post-racial society,’ if such an environment is even truly possible,” said Djibril Toure, a member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.
“Racial profiling in America is still alive and well. It is the modern-day version of the ‘Black Codes,’ and ‘Jim Crow,’ and an extension of the Dred Scott decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that a Black person has no rights that a white person is bound to respect. We saw this most recently with the Trayvon Martin case and a not guilty verdict of George Zimmerman,” said Adofo. “The National Black United Front’s position is that we must have independent civilian review boards with the power to subpoena. Racial profiling will be very difficult to eradicate in America, because it’s embedded into media, the educational and economic structure of this country. However, it still must be challenged,” Adofo said to the AmNews.
It a national phenomoenon.
“The call for the 18th National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation is to bring forward the united, powerful, visual coalition of families victimized by police terrorism and to reach into all parts of our community,” said Cephus “Uncle Bobby” Johnson, the uncle of California police victim Oscar Grant. “May our unity bring the change that our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren so rightfully deserve: freedom, justice, equality, humanity, respect and a right to take BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit] and a right to walk to 7-Eleven for Skittles and ice tea without being executed.”
So on Oct. 22, the coalition urged those acknowledging police brutality to “wear black, fight back!” as part of an ongoing mission to highlight the national pandemic of racial profiling and police brutality.
“Racial profiling disproportionately targets people of color for investigation and enforcement, alienating communities from law enforcement, hindering community policing efforts and causing law enforcement to lose credibility and trust among the people they are sworn to protect and serve,” said the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Traveling across the U.S. as national vice chairperson of the National Black United Front, I have witnessed various forms of racial profiling,” says Adofo. “For example, in Washington, D.C., there are teams of police known as ‘jump-out squads,’ and in NYC, there is the ‘operation stop-and-frisk.’ Both of these police elements target African-American and Latino communities with no apparent reason other than to harass and intimidate.”
This summer, Bloomberg said, “We disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.”
With 685,724 people stopped in 2011 and 533,042 last year—90 percent of whom were Black or Latino, and with only a 10 percent arrest rate—Bloomberg determined that it is the 9 percent of stopped whites who are being targeted, while the number of people of color who are stopped should be higher.
“His remarks are assinine and just plain ignorant,” said Brooklyn City Council Member Charles Barron. “Studies show that more whites are caught with guns than Blacks.”
This past summer, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin ruled that the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk practices violated the Constitution. At around the same time, the City Council passed the Community Safety Act (two bills: Intro 1079, the NYPD Oversight Act, and Intro 1080, the End NYPD Discriminatory Profiling Bill). The City Council agreed that there must be an independent monitor of the NYPD and an end to the NYPD discriminatory profiling.
The October 22nd Coalition states that constant monitoring of the nation’s police departments is crucial. To prove this, the Coalition refers to several cases: “In Bakersfield, Calif., 33-year-old David Silva was hog-tied and savagely beaten to death by law enforcement officers, who had found him passed out on a street. The vicious killing of 30-year-old Melissa Williams and 40-year-old Timothy Russell, shot down in a hail of 137 bullets by Cleveland police, has been described as a modern-day lynching. As of yet, the 13 officers are still on the job.
“In an assisted living home in Chicago, 95-year-old John Wrana was killed by police after being tasered and shot with a bean bag round.
“Witnesses say that Miami Beach police high-fived each other after tasering to death 18-year-old graffiti artist Israel Hernandez-Llach.
“Police around the country continue to kill young Black men with impunity, such as 25-year-old Cary Ball Jr., killed in a hail of 25 bullets by St. Louis, Mo., police, and 16-year-old Kimani Gray, shot seven times by NYPD, three times in the back.
“In Dallas, Texas, the last time a killer cop was indicted was in 1973. Dallas police have killed 250 since, with 68 Black men killed since 2001. Over and over, we hear the justifications for police brutality and killing. The reason Miami-Dade police gave for restraining and choking 14-year-old Tremaine McMillian, that he gave ‘dehumanizing stares,’ shows just how much law enforcement expects impunity.”
The Coalition’s list continues: “From the Bronx judge’s overturning of indictments against the cop who killed the unarmed Black teenager Ramarley Graham, to the mistrial declared in the killing of 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones by Detroit police. The soft touch that Florida police gave to Trayvon Martin’s killer and the acquittal of racist vigilante George Zimmerman epitomizes the racism inherent in the justice system, as the trial was conducted and covered in the media as though Martin was the one on trial. As a Guardian columnist has written, the verdict of the Zimmerman trial declares ‘open season on Black boys.’”
The Coalition also includes “the rise in reports of sexual harassment of and assaults against women” in its list of injustices.
“In addition, a recent U.S. Department of Justice report revealed that hundreds of teens have been sexually assaulted or raped in juvenile detention institutions across the nation,” the Coalition says. “Scores of political prisoners continue to languish in state and federal prisons, many aged and infirmed. At least four are terminally ill: Maumin Khabir, Mondo we Langa, [Herman Wallace, who recently passed away] and people’s attorney Lynne Stewart. Their conditions demand our immediate concern, as the federal and state prison systems refuse to grant any of them compassionate releases. We cannot allow the denial of their immediate release nor the continued incarceration of any of our freedom fighters.”
The film “Fruitvale Station,” which was released earlier this year, brought to the masses the tragic story of the 2009 police killing of Oscar Grant.
The Coaliton praises the Community Safety Act, the Floyd v. City of New York victory and the Committee for Professional Policing in Minneapolis. “Efforts by activists and civil rights organizations have also resulted in calls from the U.N. Human Rights Committee that challenge police violence and impunity. These efforts contribute to the needed societal discourse about the racist reality of stop-and-frisk policies, police brutality, repression and the criminalization of Black and Latino peoples, breaking the silence and strengthening the resolve of many to take independent political action to end these daily horrors for so many people.”
According to the Coalition, participation in the National Day of Protest proves that resistance to unjust law enforcement is increasing, as evidenced by the recent prison hunger strike that “spread throughout California [and] had up to 30,000 prisoners participating. Families of people killed by police are standing strong… Tens of thousands rose and continue to rise up in powerful ways for Trayvon Martin and against racist killings by wannabe cops, cover-ups by real cops and injustice by the justice system.
“Muslim, Arab and South Asian communities are speaking out against unwarranted governmental surveillance and criminalization. People in even the most conservative areas are finding strength in organizing together, such as the growing movement in Dallas, Texas, and the uprisings in Anaheim, Calif. Videos exposing police brutality and misconduct appear every day from all over the nation, made by organized cop watchers as well as everyday people who are fearlessly recording even as police try to intimidate them.”
The October 22nd Coalition asks those concerned to log on to www.october22.org.