Stop racist police brutality

Mass anger towards the racist police state continues to be displayed following the deaths by police bullets of 23-year-old Sean Bell in New York and 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston in Atlanta.

Thousands rallied at New York Police Department headquarters on Dec. 6 in a militant and defiant rally that ended in a non-permitted march.

New York City Councilperson Charles Barron told attendees: “Every time they come into our community and disrespect our Black youth, disrespect our families, we are saying we have had enough. ... We need to let this system know that they need to fear us.” (allhiphop.com, Dec. 7)

On Dec. 9, two marches—one organized by the NAACP, another by the New Black Panther Party—were held in Jamaica, Queens, the area where the killing of Bell took place. A candlelight vigil was held on Dec. 11 in Harlem.

Yet the outrage about police terror hasn’t yet stopped cops across the country from “doing their

job”—criminalization and repression of the poor and people of color in the most brutal ways.

Rather than address the issue of racist profiling that led to Bell’s death, New York police have since engaged in more profiling in an attempt to cover their tracks. After a week of reports that said that only three men were in the car that cops riddled with 50 bullets—killing Bell and wounding Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman—police suddenly changed their story to state that there was a fourth man, and that this man may have had a gun.

What followed was a dragnet that rounded up Black men throughout southeast Queens. According to Juan González of the Daily News: “In the week after the tragic incident, Queens cops conducted raids and arrests of several of Bell’s friends, all on unrelated charges. They also detained for questioning several men who attended the bachelor party for Bell that night at the club. In each case, police grilled the men about Bell and the alleged fourth man.” (Dec. 12)

In a preliminary police department report obtained by the New York Times, witnesses, including Benefield and Guzman, made no mention of a fourth man. In addition, no mention is made of a police search for the “fourth man” immediately after the shooting. (Associated Press, Dec. 11)

In Los Angeles, civil rights groups are again calling for the installation of surveillance cameras in all police stations and patrol cars after an officer was caught on videotape applying a chokehold to a handcuffed 16-year-old Latino man inside a police station.

The officer—who was unaware that hidden cameras had been set up in the room—then uncuffed the teenager and challenged him to fight. The young man, who is suspected of being homeless, had been arrested on suspicion of a curfew violation. (Los Angeles Times, Dec. 8)

The use of a Taser on Houston Texans football star Fred Weary has exposed that in Houston, an alarming 63 percent of those shocked by police with high-voltage weapons over the last two years were Black. African-Americans make up 23 percent of the population in Houston, the fourth-largest city in the United States. (Los Angeles Times, Dec. 4)

The Washington, D.C.-based Police Complaint Center says that the number of police “misconduct” complaints it has received from across the country increased by 40 percent between 2005 and 2006. (Black Press of America, Dec. 11)

In “The Wretched of the Earth,” published in 1963, revolutionary author Frantz Fanon gives a description of the colonial world: “In the colonies it is the policemen and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression. ... The policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge.

“It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native.”

As the U.S. military machine attempts to re-colonize the people of Iraq, Sudan, and more, the police state acts as an occupying force within U.S. borders, with the same viciousness and tactics that the military uses abroad.

Two upcoming marches in New York against police brutality will target the group that the police state is set up to protect—the capitalist ruling class.

A demonstration called “Shopping for Justice” will be held on Saturday, Dec. 16. Participants will gather on 59th Street and Fifth Avenue at noon and march down ritzy Fifth Ave., home to some of New York’s most high-end boutiques and shops. The rally is being organized by Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, and a number of Black and Latin@ elected officials, church and labor leaders. For more information, call 212-603-3704.

Attending Saturday’s protest will be Abner Louima, survivor of severe physical and sexual torture at the hands of the NYPD in 1997, who will be traveling to New York from Florida for the event. Louima told the Daily News his message to the cops: “We are not target practice.” (Dec. 12)

The second rally in a series of protests against the police state, organized by the Black Men’s Movement and the December 12th Movement, will be held on Thursday, Dec. 21. This day of outrage plans to shut down Wall Street in defiance of the “police policy on Black people—‘shoot to kill’.” The march will assemble at noon at Liberty Street and Nassau Street (One Chase Manhattan Plaza). For more information, call 718-398-1766.