Police rampage preceded racist attack in Queens, N.Y.
By
LeiLani Dowell
New York
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.
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