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Police rampage preceded racist attack in Queens, N.Y.

Published Jul 10, 2005 7:56 PM

The racist attack on three Black men in the Howard Beach section of Queens in New York has garnered national attention. On the night of June 29, a group of white men viciously attacked three Black men and chased them through the streets of the neighborhood. When 22-year-old Glenn Moore tripped on a lawn, the assailants beat him with a metal bat, causing injuries that sent him to the hospital in serious condition.

The events of June 29 are strikingly reminiscent of an attack that occurred mere blocks away in 1986, when a Black man, running for his life from a mob of white men, was hit and killed by a car.

Knowing history well, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is running for reelection this year, was quick to respond to the incident, denouncing hate crimes and going on the record to say that “racist attacks will not be tolerated.” In the sixties, racist atrocities in the south—the bombing in Birmingham, the killing of the civil rights workers in Mississippi—
coupled with troop demoralization led many youth of color to question why they should fight in Vietnam when the real enemy is at home.

The rising revolutionary consciousness among the Black masses and the soldiers was a big factor in the U.S. defeat.

The last thing the ruling class wants now, when they can’t recruit adequate numbers of ranks to the military to carry out their goal of world empire, is a social upheaval.

The media has latched on to the idea that the victims were in the neighborhood to steal a car, somehow justifying the hate crime. Although the picture most often shown in the papers of Glenn Moore has him in military fatigues, discussion about his participation in the military is noticeably absent from the press.

Meanwhile, what has received little attention in the bourgeois media in the past few weeks has been the racist profiling that occurred over three days in another section of Queens. Police in the 105th Precinct of Cambria Heights went on a rampage of racist profiling from June 14-16, arresting 181 Black men on misdemeanor charges and so-called “quality-of’-life” violations. They made 93 arrests on the first day alone.

The dragnet was in response to an incident in which a cop allegedly got shot in the leg by his own gun while trying to arrest a man for smoking marijuana. The officer had described his assailant as a Black man in his early 20s, with a medium build and a medium complexion. Despite this, many of those arrested fit only two aspects of this characterization: they were Black and male.

Although all the alleged charges were minor, the Queens district attorney’s office reports that every one arrested was handcuffed, taken to central booking, fingerprinted and spent 24 hours or more in the court system. In addition, several of those arrested report that they were grabbed by police with guns drawn, some thrown to the ground, and taken to jail without any explanation.

In a city that saw Black male unemployment rates of almost 50 percent in 2004, these men—many of whom are youth—will now have an arrest record whenever they go to apply for a job.

While Bloomberg may have pledged that the city “would not tolerate” racial attacks in response to the Howard Beach case, he has been silent about the situation in Cambria Heights, short of decrying the “dangers” that police officers face.

In respect to the Howard Beach incident, two of the three assailants who were caught are being held without bail on charges of first-degree assault as a hate crime and first-degree robbery. But the third, Frank Agostini, has not been charged. Agostini is the son of a detective in the Brooklyn robbery squad.