Editorial
April 2000

Police lynchings law of the land

The current exhibit in New York City of horrifying photos of lynchings in America has drawn unexpectedly large numbers of parents bringing their children to learn of the hideous past of this country. Yet the shocking acquittal of the four New York policemen who murdered Amadou Diallo in the Bronx last year has become proof that Black people can still be lynched in the U.S. with impunity.

That this is not an aberration but proof of the current lynch-law mentality that prevails today in New York City was revealed five days after that acquittal, by the police murder of another unarmed Black youth, Malcolm Ferguson, two blocks from Diallo's doorstep. And no more than two weeks later, by the police murder of yet another unarmed young Black man, Patrick Dorismond.

Who were these three unarmed Black men killed by Mayor Giuliani's plainclothes police in 13 months? AMADOU DIALLO was 22 years old, a street peddler by trade, who was standing in his own doorway when a team of four burly special unit "crime fighters" descended on him and, as he was reaching for his wallet, unleashed 41 bullets at him, 19 of which struck his slight body.

MALCOLM FERGUSON was 23, lived in the South Bronx and had been one of the outraged crowd that had demonstrated in front of Amadou Diallo's doorway on learning of the acquittal, shouting "murderers" at the police. Five days later, he had allegedly "run" when another plainclothes "crime team" pushed two of his friends against a wall to frisk them, was chased, and shot once in the head as he grappled with his pursuer.

PATRICK DORISMOND, the son of Haitian immigrants, was 26, worked as a security guard at a bar and was hailing a cab in the street after his shift when an undercover cop, trying to engage him in a sting operation, asked to buy drugs and was rebuffed. Within moments, Dorismond was shot dead.

True to form, Mayor Giuliani demonized each viciously: Amadou Diallo brought on the fusillade of 41 bullets by "acting suspiciously." Malcolm Ferguson invited the bullet in his head by running away from the plainclothes cops when they wanted to frisk him. To prove Patrick Dorismond had a "criminal record" which contained "relevant facts the people have a right to know," Giuliani released it. The public record turned out to consist of two minor disorderly conduct violations. Especially outrageous was Giuliani's release of an arrest report from 1987, despite the fact that Dorismond was then a juvenile and the case file had been sealed by the court.

Dorismond's funeral procession was transformed into a spontaneous march for justice when thousands poured out for the funeral and marched up Flatbush Avenue, many singing impromptu Haitian songs.

RULE OF FEAR

Aggressive street policing in New York began shortly after Giuliani's election in 1993. Thousands have been subjected over the years since then to demeaning stop and frisk tactics for no other reason than the color of their skin. The pattern which the New York special crimes units called "We own the night" and the Black community knows as an "occupying army" has been instituted just as aggressively in other large cities. In both Philadelphia and Los Angeles it has led to a practice of brutality and corruption in the name of "fighting crime" which has now reached such proportions that investigation could no longer be avoided. (See "Rampart scandal," page l.)

Chicago just wrote the most recent "case history" of the rampant police- killings when Arthur Hutchinson, a 40-year-old homeless man, was shot dead with a bullet in his chest for panhandling near a Chicago transit station. The preliminary investigation by police determined that the officer acted "appropriately." The threatening "shiny object" in the dead man's hand turned out to be a dinner fork. Last summer a cell phone was mistaken by an officer in the hand of LaTanya Haggerty for which she was shot dead after exiting a car that had been chased for a traffic violation.

FIGHTING INJUSTICE

"Racial profiling" surely is involved in the fact that Black men are jailed at 12 times the rate of white men, and that no less than one-third of Black men in their 20s are now under the control of what they rightly call the "criminal (IN)justice system." Moreover what demands the deepest probing is the fact that the same week Amadou Diallo's killers were acquitted and set free, the number of people in U.S. prisons and jails surpassed two million.

While none of the presidential contenders show any concern for the depth of the crises confronting this country, Black America especially, Amadou Diallo's murder and the outrage at the acquittal of his murderers has energized the many movements that have been demanding a very different kind of future. Opposition to police abuse has taken many forms.

The movement is not only national but multiethnic and crisscrosses with those working out solidarity with prisoners throughout the land, the effort to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the struggle against the death penalty. In Illinois, a growing anti-death penalty movement forced a Republican governor who favors the death penalty to declare a moratorium on executions after 13 wrongly convicted men on Death Row had to be released.

The need to uproot such a dehumanized society as we live in has become clearer with each outrage. One Black prisoner wrote N&L to ask if the moratorium "really matters in a country where the death penalty can be carried out arbitrarily, capriciously, and with no real fear of reprisals, right in the community?" He added, "We lost our claim to a civilized existence the first time a fortress was thrown up, a dungeon added and the first prisoner was placed in that dark hole in chains." The discussions about the need for a total uprooting that we have received from prisoners and that you have read in the pages of NEWS & LETTERS, show the development of the most revolutionary force of all-the MIND of the oppressed. As we put it in our MARXIST-HUMANIST PERSPECTIVES FOR 1999-2000: "The challenge is to develop just such an active relationship between philosophy and revolution in all the emerging struggles. One of the most vibrant is the movement against police abuse...The intermerging of these movements brings out the need to wage the struggle on the level of changing the whole of society, and shows the todayness of the category of Black Masses as Vanguard of the American revolution."