Victims tell of police terror

Against a background of epidemic police brutality across the country, the Philadelphia Chapter of the National Action Network convened a Community Public Hearing on Sunday, June 7, to examine the conduct of Philadelphia police and the Office of the District Attorney.

This hearing was historic in many ways. It took place at the African-American History Museum. For the first time, the stories of victims of Philadelphia’s rampant police brutality were video recorded for presentation to the federal government.

For more than seven hours, individuals and even entire families gave accounts of their experiences at the hands of police that frequently turned deadly. The picture that emerged was one of systematic violation of human and civil rights by Philadelphia police, particularly in five police districts with a heavy concentration of Black residents.

Two days earlier, NAN chief counsel Vivienne A. Crawford and other members of the organization had traveled to Washington with 23 complaints from Philadelphians about the police and the district attorney’s office. They hand delivered them to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

Crawford and Paula Peoples, chairperson of Philadelphia NAN, facilitated the hearing in Philadelphia before a panel of Black jurists who took turns questioning the testifiers. Panelists included activist attorney Michael Coard; professor and journalist Linn Washington, Jr.; former Newark, N.J., police officer and author Sam Clark, himself a victim of police brutality while on the force; and Marc Parsons, a former City Hall law enforcement officer.

The stories presented a picture of police acting with impunity to unleash terror against residents of Philadelphia’s Black communities. They also portrayed a situation getting worse, in light of the growing economic crisis, despite previous efforts to rein in the police.

Melanie Hurly from the Parkside area described carloads of white police officers driving through her predominantly Black neighborhood harassing residents to the point where she and others had taken to carrying video cameras to document the assaults.

Hurly described a recent incident: police with no cause broke up a gathering of neighborhood youth for a rapping contest. Residents who had been videoing the youth then recorded the police attack, only to have police grab and smash their cameras.

‘Police do whatever they want’

Last Jan. 11, undercover police in the Germantown area shot Timothy Jerome Goode, a grandnephew of former Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Goode, twice in the back. Both bullets pierced his heart, killing him. Several of his family members spoke at the hearing.

While the police claim Goode was selling drugs and pointed a weapon back at them as he ran, no weapon was found and the autopsy report does not support the police charge. The bullet entry wounds were in the middle of Goode’s back, not his side. The family interviewed witnesses who said the plainclothes police never identified themselves as officers.

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Rules on Deadly Force state that, “police officers shall not discharge their firearms to subdue a fleeing individual who presents no threat of imminent death or serious physical injury to themselves or another person present.”

However, Timothy Goode Sr., the victim’s father, pointed out, “The police do whatever they want. I have had numerous incidents with the police myself. Eight months ago, I went around a police car, which then followed me eight blocks. The officer pulled me over, searched my car with no warrant and put me in his car.”

There has been no response to the Goode family’s efforts to get a hearing with the police Internal Affairs Division about their son’s death.

Family members tell of attacks

Darias Chavis from West Philadelphia, along with three of his stepchildren and a neighbor, described a brutal attack on two young women, Nadia Bent and Naja Garetson, by cops from the 19^th Police Precinct on June 3.

Garetson got a call from her cousin, Bent, that police were chasing her brother. She drove to the neighborhood, near 63rd and City Line Ave., to see what was going on. She found police cars surrounding the area and over a dozen, mainly white officers combing the grounds, sorting through trash and shrubs.

Garetson described approaching a Black officer to ask if her brother had been locked up; he then pushed her back against the curb. When she tried to step away, police pulled out metal sticks and began beating her. She had been carrying a dog as well as her cell phone, which she attempted to hand off to a neighbor, only to have police pick her up by her arms and bounce her head against their car before pushing her inside.

When Nadia Bent walked over, police began hitting her as well, beating her in the ribs. They then cuffed her, claiming she was “resisting arrest.” Bent had lost her shoes in the scuffle and asked police to get them. She testified, “The officer responded ‘F*** you and your f***in shoes. What were you doing – fighting each other? That’s all you Black girls do.’”

Garetson noted, “I’ve never had any trouble. I actually wanted to be a cop, but not now. This ain’t right!”

Tracy Battle reported that police stole her car from in front of her house with no warrant or property receipt because they claimed her son had been driving it and was involved in an accident. Twenty-three days later, after tests disproved the police claim, Battle, whose husband has cancer, still had no car. The child hit by the car was a police officer’s son.

Karen Mack described police breaking down her son’s door at his home in Southwest Philadelphia without a warrant, only to learn they had the wrong house. “My son thought someone was breaking into his house. If my son had gotten to his ‘protection,’ they would have killed him,” Mack concluded.

Senior Harold Sheppard, who grew up in Philadelphia and remembered being harassed by police as a child, described his encounters with police brutality as “part of the rights of passage—the experience an African-American male will go through from toddler age on.“

Sheppard said that recently he was the passenger in a friend’s pick-up truck when police drove by and nearly cut them off. Sheppard stared at the officers. Later, after his friend dropped him off for a doctor’s visit, police followed him into the waiting room, dragged him out and arrested him. The case was dismissed when no officer came to court.

Local anti-racist activists Ernest Ford and Theresa Shoatz, who is the daughter of political prisoner Russell Shoats, both told of their own encounters at the hands of Philadelphia police. Ford, a Haitian immigrant, was brutally beaten while participating in an anti-police brutality rally in West Philadelphia in 2005.

On April 24, Shoatz had taken former Angola 3 prisoner Robert Hillary King to the airport and was driving home with Mumia Abu-Jamal supporter Pam Africa in her car. Police followed them and pulled them over. The police claimed Shoatz was missing her registration tag. However, she kept it in her car to avoid the common problem that these small stickers are frequently stolen.

The police impounded her car, rather than allowing Shoatz to produce the tag, or simply giving her a citation, which they routinely do. “You’ve heard of ‘driving while Black,’ but this was a case of ‘driving with Pam Africa,’” Shoatz said.

Left to bleed to death

The family of Daniel Giddings described events which lead up to his death at the hands of Philadelphia police after an altercation in September 2008 in which police officer Patrick McDonald was also killed. Several times prior to this incident, family members reported police coming to their house looking for Giddings.

Police physically and verbally assaulted his mother, brother and other family members during these visits, according to their testimony. During one visit, police said they were going to kill Giddings when they caught him.

In September, when family members arrived at the scene where Giddings had been shot, they heard he was still alive but injured. For several hours, police would not allow ambulances to attend to Giddings. They reportedly let him bleed to death at the scene.

When Giddings was first arrested 11 years ago, his mother paid $1,500 against a $13,500 bond for her son. Giddings failed to appear at his hearing because he was hospitalized from a gunshot wound. He was subsequently convicted and jailed. Now Giddings’ mother is being asked to pay the remaining $11,500 in bail money.

Giddings’ sister, Latanya Baskerville, gave one of the most poignant statements of the hearing. “The media has tried to make my brother out as a monster, but we don’t know for sure that he killed this cop. Bullets were flying everywhere. We have only to go on what the police and the news says.

“What we do know is that the people in blue killed my brother. What do you want from the Black community? The police are targeting my children right now. It’s no wonder our young Black men are starting to shoot first,” Baskerville concluded.