Race and class claim another victim
Brooklyn cops kill Timothy Stansbury
By Deirdre Griswold
New York
Racism and class exploitation have come
together once again to rob another African American family of
their beloved young son.
A New York cop shot and killed Timothy Stansbury Jr., 19,
early in the morning of Jan. 24 as he opened the door to the
roof of his building in Brooklyn's Louis Armstrong housing
project. Stansbury was on his way to a birthday party with two
friends. He was used to crossing the roof to get to the
adjoining building because the front-door intercoms to let
people in seldom work, according to neighbors.
Officer Richard S. Neri Jr. shot the unarmed teenager in the
chest before Stansbury even got through the door, said
witnesses.
Neri and another cop had been patrolling the roof; Neri
admits to having his gun drawn before the shooting and says he
fired it because he was startled when the door opened,
according to an account in the Jan. 26 Newsday. The two police
officers are white.
Trying to quell the storm of community protest that
followed, Police Commis sioner Raymond W. Kelly the next day
admitted that the shooting was "apparently unjustified." He
announced that he would convene a panel to review the tactics
police use while patrolling apartment buildings' roofs and
staircases.
For City Councilmember Charles Barron of Brooklyn, that
wasn't nearly enough. "People should be indicted, convicted and
sent to jail," he said.
Barron compared this shooting to that of Amadou Diallo, an
immigrant worker from Guinea killed in a hail of police bullets
in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building in February
1999. The four plainclothes cops said they mistook his wallet
for a gun. After many protests and sit-ins, the city paid a
settlement of $3 million to Diallo's parents, but refused to
admit any wrongdoing. The police walked.
The day after Stansbury was gunned down, tenants of the
Louis Armstrong Houses marched to their local police precinct
carrying signs that read "Black does not equal criminal" and
"This is homeland terrorism."
"We want justice now!" they shouted.
Timothy Stansbury was described by his relatives as quiet
and a "good kid" who was working at McDonald's and had just
received his high school equivalency diploma. His goal was to
attend community college and start a family with his
sweetheart, Patrice Hyppolite, who had lost their baby to a
miscarriage just two weeks earlier. "His heart was broken when
we lost the baby," she told a reporter through her own
tears.
The very next day, another incident in Brooklyn confirmed
community charges that racial profiling causes police to treat
people of color very differently than whites. Kevin Tester, 38,
was arrested in Bensonhurst "without incident" after police
said he fired three shots in a subway station at officers
responding to a 911 call from a passenger who had seen a man
with a gun. Instead of drawing their own guns and blazing away,
the police took cover, called for backup and then talked
Tester, who is white, into giving up his gun.
But the police are merely enforcing a two-tiered society,
which still denies African Americans and other oppressed
peoples basic political, economic and social rights.
In the powerful United States Senate, there is not one Black
senator even though, according to the 2000 census, 37 million
African Americans live in this country. In the current race for
the Democratic presidential nomination, Black candidates Al
Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun, although well received by
audiences during the debates, have been trivialized or ignored
by the media pundits.
"The Black Population in the United States, 2002," a report
prepared by the U.S. Census Bureau, confirms what everyone
should know already: that African Americans are mainly hired
into lower-paying service jobs--like Stansbury's job at
McDonald's--and that the poverty rate among Black men and women
is about three times that of whites. And this after the gains
made by the civil-rights and affirmative-action struggles.
Timothy Stansbury lived in public housing because his family
couldn't afford New York's sky-high rents. Residents of the
"projects" have become accustomed to broken elevators and
intercoms, locked playgrounds and long waits for repairs. Many
of these older high-rise buildings are pressure cookers for the
social tensions caused by poverty and racism. So the police are
constantly being called in, and they go with an attitude.
What is being done about this? Many of the billionaires of
this country can trace their family fortunes back to the days
when cotton and other crops enriched the slave-owning class.
Are they heeding the call for reparations today and using their
influence in government so that every person can have a decent
place to live and these squalid buildings can be torn down?
Of course, that's not how capitalist politics works. In
fact, the New York Housing Authority reports that its budget,
which comes from federal as well as local funds, is being cut,
not just this year but for the indefinite future. It's because
the rich have demanded huge tax cuts, and because they want to
expand their empire around the world, requiring costly
wars.
But the city is doing something for a few well-off tenants.
Through the Department of Housing Preservation and Develop
ment, it is renovating a group of buildings in Harlem, near
Central Park, to create "Brownstone Lane Luxury Condo min
iums." These two- and three-bedroom homes, some priced as high
as $785,000, will have a concierge, underground parking garage,
fitness center, video intercom, high-speed internet access and
"a common landscaped garden."
Undoubtedly some African American professionals will get to
live there, but this renovation is part of a much larger
gentrification of south Harlem that is pushing out poorer
tenants while attracting well-off whites to an area of
Manhattan just a short subway ride away from midtown and Wall
Street jobs.
Oh yes, and another thing. The city has reserved 5 percent
of these condos for "uniformed police officers of the New York
City Police Department."
Like the officer who gunned down Timothy Stansbury on the
roof of his Brooklyn project building? n
Reprinted from the Feb. 5, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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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