Lead article
July 1999

Movement against police brutality grows

Kevin Michaels

The first weekend of June was an unseasonably warm one in Chicago and two terrible events which took place during it may anticipate a long, hot summer to come. Two young Black Chicagoans were fatally shot by police officers in circumstances so questionable that they provoked a new layer of response from a population wearily familiar with heavy-handed policing.

These killings and their impact on the organized expressions of resistance to both incidents of violence committed by the police and the everyday host of indignities inflicted upon youth and minorities make Chicago an important point of departure for examining the national movement, and its potential to both broaden and deepen. At a time when dramatic accounts of the aftermath of ethnic chauvinist violence committed by a paramilitary police force in Kosova are making headlines, this examination is of the greatest importance.

On June 4, Chicago police pulled over a car in which LaTanya Haggerty, 26, was a passenger. She was shot after dropping a cell phone as she attempted to get out of the car with her hands raised. Police were pursuing the car because they had spotted it double-parked, despite having received an order from a dispatcher to break off the chase. Haggerty's death, following the shooting deaths of Tyisha Miller in Riverside, Cal. and Margaret Mitchell, a homeless woman in Los Angeles, makes it clear that Black women, not just Black men, are seriously at risk for becoming victims of police murder.

Not long after the Haggerty shooting, in the early hours of June 5, Robert Russ, 22, was shot after a brief pursuit. Russ may have been attempting to drive to a stretch of road which would have provided some witnesses to the traffic pullover the police were attempting to make. The sense of shock and outrage that immediately emerged from the Black community and those hostile to police abuse was met by a stony silence on the part of the Chicago Police Department, an historically racist and fiercely unaccountable institution.

That Black police officers were involved in each event may show that any insight and sensitivity they have into conditions in the Black community are circumscribed by the authoritarianism of the department. Indeed the only solution to the problem Chicago Police Superintendent Terry Hillard has offered is to install video cameras in patrol cars for the purpose of recording traffic stops. The idea of addressing the issues of racism and rampant corruption in a force so savage that for years torture was employed as a routine method of coercing confessions, has not been put on the table. Ten men sit on Death Row in Illinois who suffered torture at the hands of Jon Burge, a former Chicago police commander.

These two killings have provided impetus to an already energetic local movement against a broad range of police abuses and distortions in the criminal justice system. At least three organizations of family members of people who have suffered at the hands of police and racist courts are in existence in Chicago. They have been holding frequent planning meetings as well as conducting regular protests at the doors of the mayor's office inside City Hall.

Members of these organizations were among the 500 who marched on police headquarters on June 17 to air their grievances at a Chicago Police Board meeting. As they gathered for this important march, a number of UPS trucks passed by with their drivers honking and displaying supportive signs. One Black woman carried a photograph of a young man killed by police. She told NEWS & LETTERS, "I'm not related to the person in this picture, but I'm here because I've seen a lot of brutality in my neighborhood. Too much. It's got to stop."

These local movements encompass the diversity of Chicago. Black, Latina, and white mothers, the clergy, residents of public housing and youth have all been active.

NATIONWIDE MOVEMENT

The growing number of those active in Chicago against police brutality are in step with a nationwide phenomenon. The recent and brutal police murders of Tyisha Miller in Riverside, Cal. and Amadou Diallo in New York City have generated large and diverse movements. The movement in New York, initiated by the Black community, attracted significant layers of other people opposed to Rudolph Giuliani's authoritarian administration.

Gays and lesbians, white high school students, Chinese immigrants, artists and street vendors all turned out for the daily demonstrations and civil disobedience in Police Plaza. Many protesters carried signs which drew connections between events in New York and state-sponsored ethnic chauvinist violence against Albanians in Kosova.

The massive April 15 march to New York's Federal Building, in which at least 10,000 or more participated, seems to have marked the high point of the development of this organized opposition. The march was followed soon after by the guilty plea of officer Justin Volpe, the chief offender in the Abner Louima brutality trial, and this symbolic flinching on the part of a vulnerable section of the police apparatus has succeeded in demobilizing those who envisioned achieving a solution to New York's brutality problem within existing social and political boundaries-be it federal intervention or pruning of problem officers. With the trial of Amadou Diallo's killers still ahead of us, it remains to be seen whether New York's organized movement will achieve for the end of the decade what the spontaneous rebellion in Los Angeles did for its beginning.

Other, less prominent cases have resulted in mobilizations as well, like an incident in which a young Black man was beaten as police tried to break up an end-of-school party in a neighborhood called East Haven in Memphis, Tenn. Residents there are protesting the harassment they are experiencing as police try to intimidate those who witnessed the event into keeping quiet.

Taken together with the movements of people supporting women prisoners in California, solidarizing with political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal and opposing the racist death penalty, the anti-police brutality forces represent a significant development.

NATIONAL BACKDROP OF RETROGRESSION

The capricious use of deadly force by police departments is only one element of the backdrop of retrogression against which these new movements are emerging. A metastasizing prison system in which inmates are warehoused with ever-decreasing access to law libraries, recreation facilities and medical care is another. A criminal justice system in which poor and working-class people are placed at a severe disadvantage because of the material limitations of the public defender system is another.

Still another is the totalitarian drive to strike those convicted of felonies from the rolls of eligible voters. As a result of this effort, 1.4 million Black men are temporarily or permanently disenfranchised and nearly one in three Black male residents of Alabama and Florida have been made permanently ineligible (Economist April 3, 1999).

The startlingly violent event at Columbine High School provided the ruling class with an opportunity to further a reactionary agenda which has been on the ascent since the 1994 mid-term election. Desperate to avoid even the remotest acknowledgement of the racist and sexist undertones of the massacre, the House passed on June 17 a Juvenile Justice Bill which stiffens mandatory penalties for convicted youth and hands the power to charge juveniles as adults to prosecutors.

In addition, an amendment to the bill was passed which blatantly violates the separation of church and state provisions of the very Constitution to which so many impeachment hacks appealed during the proceedings. The pro-states' rights amendment decrees that states shall decide the legality of displaying the Ten Commandments in public facilities, including schools.

This amendment, sponsored by Republican Robert Aderholt of Alabama, typifies the allied efforts of the Bible Belt and northern suburban conservatives that were so prominent in the impeachment imbroglio. Both Henry Hyde and the newly confirmed Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert are from suburban northern Illinois.

Hyde and Hastert, along with Illinois Senator Peter Fitzgerald, are representative of the national prominence of the Right in a state in which the credibility of the entire criminal justice system has come into question through prominent cases of police and prosecutorial misconduct. Names like Anthony Porter and Rolondo Cruz, both wrongly convicted and sentenced to, and eventually narrowly rescued from, Death Row, stand as indictments of the system which shaped and sustains these figures.

ENDING POLICE BRUTALITY

The June 17 march on Chicago's police headquarters was made up of a number of the forces which, working in concert, can become a real challenge to the currents of police brutality and judicial misconduct which seem so overwhelmingly powerful. The women, youth, Blacks and Latinos who marched together up State Street represent greater numbers of people like them who have in recent years shown increasing opposition to the police and courts of capitalist America.

If movements across this country can rise to the challenges like the ones which confront New York, namely, how to further develop when the forces of the establishment seem to have taken one step back, or the very different one which confronts Riverside, Cal., in which the establishment has refused to indict the killer cops, then they can mount a real ongoing opposition.

Furthermore, if elements of the labor movement opposed to racism and police brutality, like the UPS drivers who displayed their support of the Chicago marchers, coalesce with this growing movement, then the potential for events to get out of the hands of the rulers is great.

All who look forward to such a development should be active in the movements which currently exist, as well as think through the barriers which confront them. Such a movement in thought may prove to be an important element in bringing about a real end to police brutality, both here at home and abroad.

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