NEW YORK CITY
Cops execute mentally ill person
By John
Catalinotto
New York
The state has added summary execution to its usual
horrendous treatment of mentally ill people, along with
imprisonment and neglect.
"State" in this context means the repressive structures of
capitalist society: the courts, the prisons and the police. In
the United States, the state is now the main single entity
dealing with the mentally ill.
According to a July Justice Department report, 16 percent of
all prisoners, or about 283,000 people, are mentally ill.
Another 547,000 mentally ill people are in the parole
system.
As a prisoner who wrote to Workers World pointed out,
mentally ill prisoners often wind up in chains and/or in
solitary confinement. Why? Incorrect dosage of medication for
the prisoner leads to bizarre behavior, which the authorities
then punish as "insubordination" with the usual tortures. Just
like in the Middle Ages.
Even when it doesn't torture, the state neglects. An article
in the Sept. 13 New York Times followed the progress of one of
the 15,000 mentally ill people released from New York's jails
during a year. This African American man, whose wife and twin
sons died in a 1979 auto accident, was released from Rikers
Island and deposited in Queens with two subway tokens, no
medication, no appointments for medical care, no Medicaid
card.
He also has no one to help him through the grueling
procedure of applying for new social benefits in "Giuliani
time"--that is, when most city social-service departments have
been instructed to put up obstacles instead of help overcome
them. His case is typical.
Capital punishment--without trial
And then there are the cops.
On Aug. 30 people in Borough Park in Brooklyn called on the
police to deal with Gideon Busch, who was acting bizarre and
who people in the community saw as threatening.
In many communities of people of color in New York, there is
great reluctance to ask police assistance. You never know who
they will shoot.
The people also know that the cops themselves often see
things that aren't really there when they confront Black or
Latino or Asian youths. Or at least that's what the cops say
later.
The cops who fired 41 shots to kill Guinean immigrant Amadou
Diallo last winter said he made a threatening move toward his
beeper, which to their eyes resembled an automatic weapon. In
another case, in Brooklyn, a cop shot a young Black man
carrying a "pistol" that turned out to be a candy bar.
But up until Aug. 30, the predominantly white Borough Park
community, a mostly Hasidic Jewish community, had had no big
clashes with the police. Those who called expected the cops to
use only the minimum force necessary to subdue Busch.
But they underestimated the vicious prejudice against the
mentally ill. Six cops surrounded Busch. Four of them fired.
They hit him with 12 shots. He died.
According to the police, the six cops with mace, clubs and
pepper spray could not safely subdue Busch without killing
him.
The cops say he was menacing them with an 11-inch-long
"claw" hammer. This means it was your regular household hammer,
but they must have thought "claw" sounded more menacing. More
dangerous than a candy bar or a beeper perhaps, but still not a
pistol or a knife.
The Hasidic community was outraged by what they saw as a
betrayal. Hundreds gathered in the streets and protested.
Reactionary politicians like City Councilmember Noach Dear did
their best to stay friendly with the cops. Some even booed
Black anti-police-brutality activist the Rev. Al Sharpton, who
had come to show solidarity against another case of police
injustice.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir
stuck by their cops' quick execution of the mentally ill Gideon
Busch, just as they back up every racist shooting before it's
even investigated.
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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