Police declare ‘open season’ on Black community

The caught-on-videotape kicking and beating of three young Black men—Brian Hall, Dwayne Dyches and Pete Hopkins—by more than a dozen Philadelphia police officers May 5 has once again put “the City of Brotherly Love” in the national spotlight for police brutality.

An 11-minute video, filmed by a FOX29 helicopter, shows cops with guns drawn pulling the three men out of their car and then repeatedly kicking, stomping and hitting them with fists and clubs while the three are facedown on the roadway.

In another incident just one night earlier, Philadelphia police grabbed Anthony Pleasant off his bike and beat him so badly he ended up hospitalized with a fractured nose, swellings to his head and multiple body bruises. “It’s like open season on any Black person—period,” declared Pleasant’s aunt, Daveena Pratt.

Mayor Michael Nutter tried to excuse the cops’ brutality, saying they were “devastated” and “outraged” over the shooting death of police sergeant Stephen Liczbinski the weekend before. Nutter recently instituted a police “stop-and-frisk” policy that many fear will lead to more such incidents, especially given the department’s history of brutality and racism toward communities of color.

At a news conference, Eldridge Suggs, attorney for Dyches, suggested his client was targeted because of his strong resemblance to Eric Floyd, the man eventually captured and charged with Liczbinski’s shooting. The victims’ attorneys claim police concocted a story that the men were suspects in a shooting to cover up a case of mistaken identity.

According to city officials, this incident is an aberration, but the scenes caught on video are all too reminiscent of an incident prior to the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, when Thomas Jones was nearly lynched by at least 20 Philadelphia cops who beat him and shot him five times.

Since 2006, police have fatally shot 35 people in Philadelphia, more than in any similar period since 1980. Already in 2008 there have been three reported deadly shootings by police, including one of an unarmed bystander killed by a cop who fired 11 shots into a house where a number of people, including children, were celebrating New Year’s Eve.

Showing little concern for victims of police brutality, John McGrody, vice president of the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police, said that “innocent until proven guilty in a court of law” means nothing to him. (Philadelphia Daily News, May 8)

In the same issue of the Daily News, columnist Michael Smerconish, a former attorney for the FOP, openly advocated that police should shoot suspects to save the time and expense of jury trials! Smerconish has spent decades trying to get Black revolutionary journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal executed on frame-up charges.