www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, February - March 2007Protests continue against police murderNew York--The police murder of Sean Bell on Nov. 25 has been followed by two months of demonstrations by the African American community against police racism and abuse. Bell, an unarmed Black man, was leaving his bachelor party at a strip club in a “rough neighborhood” in Queens on the night before he was to be married. He was killed and his two friends wounded in a hail of 50 bullets fired by four undercover cops, who gave no warning and had no reason. On Jan. 1, Bell’s family began a 50-day, 24-hour daily vigil across from the police station in the Jamaica section of Queens, where the four cops are stationed. "There is a need for people of all backgrounds and all persuasions to participate in the vigil in shifts, day and night,” says the call for participants and supplies. A demonstration of perhaps 5,000 was held Dec. 16: a march down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan at the height of Christmas shopping. Smaller protests took place near police headquarters and on Wall Street, and many more have been held in Queens. At a Dec. 6 protest rally to "Resist Fascism and the Rise of the American Police State," the close to 2,000 in attendance were nearly all Black except for a few left groups, including News and Letters. While the nationalist sponsoring group led chants of “Black Power” and “No Justice, No Peace,” there were also signs demanding the abolition of the racist death penalty, to free Mumia, and, from the Audre Lorde Project (named for the Black lesbian poet and activist): “Stop racial profiling and gender policing.” City-wide, the reaction to Bell’s murder has been less than the massive outpouring after the police murder of Amadou Diallo in 1999. In both cases, the murdered man did not have a weapon and was doing nothing wrong when he was cut down by insanely large numbers of bullets by gun-happy cops. Demonstrations endorsed by Bell’s family have been fairly low-key calls for justice (indictment of the cops) and have specifically rejected “the rhetoric of violence or revenge or disrespect for the NYPD...[or] individuals or organizations trying to use the tragedy of Sean Bell's death for outside agendas," according to Brooklyn activist Kevin Powell. Black nationalist groups have staged demonstrations without the family, but although their rhetoric is stronger, they have called for little or nothing more than firing the police chief and jailing the cops involved, and some called for the boycott of white-owned businesses. The demonstrations, other than the Dec. 16 one, have been much smaller than the many thousands who turned out every day for weeks on end in 1999. We can’t say whether the milder reaction results from the influence of the Rev. Al Sharpton, who appears with the family and could have made a secret deal with the mayor, or whether African Americans are less incensed because Mayor Bloomberg condemned this killing instead of defending the cops as Giuliani did with Diallo, or whether people are just discouraged about the possibility of changing the nature of the police force within current society. No one was taken in by the first statement the police made after the killing: that it couldn’t be racist because one of the cops was African American. This led to interesting discussions about the constant factors in police killings: the victims are usually Black or Latino young men, and the police often shoot without provocation in Black neighborhoods. It’s clear to everyone that such killings are not solely the result of racist individuals, but of the entire policing culture in this racist society. --Protesters, N&L Committee |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
