NEW YORK
Protests keep Diallo's name alive and mayor on
defensive
By Vanessa Lewis
New York
Almost a month after the police killing of a young immigrant
worker from West Africa, protesters here remain militant and
unforgiving of the fact that the four officers have yet to be
charged with any crime.
On Feb. 4 Amadou Diallo, a 22-year-old worker from Guinea,
was standing in the doorway of his Bronx apartment building
when four white plainclothed cops shot and killed him. The
Police Department admits they fired 41 bullets at the unarmed
youth from 9-millimeter semi-automatic guns, striking Diallo 19
times.
Broad and fearless
demonstrations
Many protests have taken place since the shooting. In one on
Feb. 27, community members led by attorney Alton Maddox drove a
40-car motorcade past the home of one of the officers.
Within days of the shooting, 4,000 to 5,000 people
demonstrated just doors from Diallo's home and again at City
Hall.
On Feb. 21, hundreds of people from the Black, Latin, Asian
and white communities marched in both Brooklyn and the Bronx.
The Bronx marchers took the streets with little resistance from
police.
The next day, 1,000 protesters rallied at and later
surrounded City Hall, which was surrounded by concrete barriers
and a chain-link fence. City Hall was "under siege," said the
Rev. Calvin Butts from the stage. The crowd chanted, "Arrest
Giuliani and the four cops!"
Activists from the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans
communities and AIDS activists stopped rush-hour traffic by
lying down in the street in a planned act of civil
disobedience. Butts and other leaders of the demonstration led
chants from the stage of "Let them go! Arrest the four
cops!"
Protesters stayed for hours in the freezing cold.
More demonstrations are planned for March 8, International
Working Women's Day; March 9 and March 10. All are targeting
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and City Hall.
According to organizers, the demonstrations, which have been
getting more and more militant, are not going to stop any time
soon.
Attorneys for the police officers said that all the
demonstrating has created an atmosphere of "intimidation" at
the Bronx courthouse during grand jury hearings on the
case.
Even cops and media
denounce Giuliani
When news of the killing first broke, Mayor Giuliani
immediately reaffirmed his faith in the Police Department,
refusing to denounce the shooting. He pushed for the use of
hollow-point bullets that explode and kill upon impact,
claiming that would make such multiple shootings
unnecessary.
This only poured gasoline on the fire already raging in the
city. Now many in the capitalist establishment are worried.
Even former New York Police Commissioner William J. Bratton
warned of the community outrage in an opinion piece in the Feb.
28 New York Times. He accused Giuliani of closing the door to
an "open" police department. He cited the policy of routinely
withholding information from the state comptroller, the public
advocate, the press and, of course, the public. This was
essentially a bomb that is now blowing up in the mayor's face,
he wrote.
"If you don't want your Police Department to appear as an
occupying army, you shouldn't run the city from a fort," said
Bratton.
At his lowest point in opinion polls since 1995, Giuliani is
feeling the pressure.
A New York Times editorial on Diallo the same day warned
Giuliani that he "can't afford to misunderstand the fear
aroused" by the police. But the Times found "encouraging signs"
that the mayor is "listening" to the storm of criticism.
Giuliani has tried to tone down his usually abrasive manner,
hoping to cool the rage of oppressed communities and reassure
his own constituency and his political backers.
People remember the near-murder of Haitian immigrant Abner
Louima in a police station in the summer of 1997. At the time,
Giuliani criticized a task force report that recommended some
mild reforms, saying it made "very little sense." Now,
according to the Times, he has dug up the Louima report in an
attempt to implement reforms like "sensitivity training." He
told new police graduates that they must act as "civil-rights
workers."
But all this sweet talk doesn't translate into meeting the
people's demands for justice and community control over the
police.
The continued demonstrations show that, no matter how you
cut it, no one is buying the last-minute attempts by the police
department and Giuliani to save face.
Even the New Yorker magazine isn't. On its March 8 cover
there is a cartoon about the shooting by Pulitzer Prize-winning
cartoonist Art Spiegelman.
It shows a uniformed police officer at a carnival shooting
gallery. He is firing at targets shaped like a man with a
briefcase and cell phone, a child with an ice-cream cone, and
an elderly woman with a cane. All bear red-and-white bull's
eyes on their chests.
A red sign on the front of the booth reads: "41 shots 19
cents." The Patrolmen's Benevolent Association is suing the
magazine.
Facts in the case continue to seep out slowly. An African
American weekly, the Amsterdam News, reported that retired NYPD
detective Graham Weatherspoon, a 20-year veteran of the force
turned community activist, has uncovered a 42nd bullet.
42 shots heard around the world
Weatherspoon, conducting an independent investigation, found
the 9-mm bullet but decided to wait to retrieve it until
receiving permission from the landlord. When he returned the
next morning, the bullet and the board containing the slab
where it lay were gone.
Diallo's slaying--along with the mayor's history of deceit,
racism and repression--is the straw that broke the camel's back
in the struggle against racist police brutality waged by
oppressed communities here and across the country.
On Feb. 25 Black, Asian, Latino and Jewish civil-rights
advocates, including Jesse Jackson, called for President Bill
Clinton to meet them and answer the demands for justice by
concerned communities.
Clinton is responsible for expanding the powers of the
state. Not only has he further inflated the Pentagon budget,
but the crime bill he signed in 1996 added 100,000 police to
the streets nationwide. Now under pressure, Clinton will be
sending Attorney General Janet Reno to meet with the
coalition.
In response to a nationwide epidemic of racist police
brutality, outraged communities have been demonstrating from
Riverside, Calif., to Pittsburgh and New York.
In New Jersey, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman was forced to
fire the state's top cop, State Police Superintendent Col. Carl
Williams, when outraged Black community leaders demanded he
step down after comments associating minority communities with
drug trafficking. Two weeks earlier she had stood firmly behind
him.
It is just a matter of time before Clinton feels the
pressure, too. People are angry and, what's more, they are
taking their anger to the streets.
Diallo's slaying has become the 41--or 42--shots heard
around the world. The international outrage over the
22-year-old unarmed African immigrant's racist, senseless death
has not and will not die out, unlike all too many other victims
of police brutality.
With the killing of Diallo and countless other recent
victims of police violence, the inflamed battle to save the
life of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the tens of thousands of people in
the streets screaming enough is enough, the anti-racist
struggle is at a new peak. And its potential is limitless.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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