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Now
"YOU DON'T need to wonder why our blood
boils," Bishop Lester Williams told those who gathered at
the Community Church of Christ in Jamaica, Queens to mourn the
death of Sean Bell. "We are tired of being victims, and
we are tired of being profiled."
Sean was supposed to marry
his high school sweetheart, Nicole Paultre, in that church. Instead,
he was murdered hours before the wedding, gunned down in a car
with two of his friends in a hail of bullets fired by undercover
police officers.
Some 1,200 people came to mourn
Sean's death-more than the church could hold. So roughly half
remained outside, even as it began to rain, sometimes somber
and silent, sometimes welling up with chants denouncing the police.
"This is a national problem," mourner Sharon Epperson
told us, "It's racial profiling. We need to get these
legalized murderers off the street."
Sean Bell's murder is one of
the most outrageous police killings since Amadou Diallo was shot
41 times by police who claim they thought the wallet he was taking
out of his pocket looked like a gun.
Like Diallo, Bell and his two
friends, Trent Benefield and Jose Guzman, were unarmed. But that
didn't stop police from firing 50 bullets into the car that carried
the three. "It was an execution," Nicole Paultre told
a New York radio station. "They barricaded him in and executed
him."
Benefield has been released
from the hospital, but as Socialist Worker went to press,
Guzman was still in critical condition.
The funeral provided a grim
reunion for two mothers of other innocent Black men murdered
by the NYPD, Kadiatou Diallo and Marie Rose Dorismond (who traveled
28 hours by bus from Florida to attend)-and for Nicholas Heyward,
whose 13-year-old son was killed by New York police in 1994.
Abner Louima, who was tortured by the NYPD in 1997, also attended
the funeral.
Margarita Rosario, the founder
of Parents Against Police Brutality, whose son Anthony was killed
by the New York cops, came because she thought it was "important
for young people who have never gone through this experience
to know that there are more of us out there. We need to learn
from the past struggles."
* *
*
IN AN atmosphere of rising
tension, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg moved swiftly
to show that he would not automatically defend the actions of
the police-a sharp departure from his predecessor, Rudolph Giuliani.
Bloomberg traveled to Queens
to meet privately with Bell's family, and then with clergy from
the Community Church of Christ. He also convened a meeting of
Black elected officials and clergy that included Rep. Charles
Rangel and Rev. Al Sharpton. Comptroller William Thompson Jr.
told the New York Times, "Just the fact of meeting,
or discussion, or expressing concern and outrage on the part
of this administration was different."
But not everyone was as impressed.
After the meeting, Sharpton said, "We prefer talking than
not talking, but the object is not a conversation. The object
is fairness and justice."
Sharpton did not, however,
support Council member Charles Barron's call for the resignation
of Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. After the meeting with
the mayor, Sharpton and the other Black leaders surrounded Bloomberg
as he defended Kelly, saying, "I think we have the best
police commissioner the city has ever had."
Bloomberg called the shooting
"excessive," but emphasized the need for a "fair
and impartial investigation."
Thus far, the NYPD's idea of
a "fair and impartial investigation" has consisted
of a frenzied hunt for an alleged "fourth man" who
police now claim had a gun near the car, but supposedly ran away
when the shooting began.
Adding fuel to the fire, police
last week began raiding the homes of people who knew the victims.
So far, at least six people have been arrested in the police
department's desperate attempt to provide a justification for
Bell's death.
On November 29, for example,
LaToya Smith was lying in bed with her 7-year-old son Jalyn around
6 a.m., when she heard a noise. According to left-wing commentator
Juan Gonzalez writing in the New York Daily News, "Her
locked bedroom door suddenly burst open, and several uniformed
cops burst into the room with flashlights and guns drawn."
The police herded LaToya, her
two brothers, her mother, her baby and a friend into the living
room. LaToya and the three men were taken into custody.
Police claim they found a loaded
gun and a small bag of marijuana in the apartment. But police
interrogators didn't ask them about drugs-they asked about the
shooting in Queens. The police wanted LaToya to tell them about
friends of Bell, Guzman and Benefield. "If you don't tell
us what we want to hear," one cop threatened, "you
can get five years."
The next morning, police arrested
two more people in the same apartment building. One was Erskine
Williams Jr., arrested on a warrant for an outstanding fine of
$25. When his father called the 103rd precinct looking for his
son, he was told he wasn't there.
Ann Victor, a student from
Queens, says this kind of behavior from police isn't new. "You
walk around Queens' Southside, and you see cops all over the
place, on every street corner," she said. "You think
you have a sense of security, but all you have to do is look
at them the wrong way, and they got you hemmed up, they got you
locked up-and in this case, they got Sean shot up."
* *
*
FEARING A violent backlash
against police, Black leaders have largely appealed for calm.
"Recklessness will only make it look like Sean Bell and
his friends were reckless and deserved what they got," Sharpton
warned.
But the expressions of anger
over this latest police killing are impossible to miss. In addition
to Bell's funeral, there have already been at least three public
protests-two at the hospital where Guzman continues to be treated,
and one at the Kalua Cabaret, the club that Bell and his friends
had left shortly before officers opened fired on them.
A protest is planned for December
6 at 1 Police Plaza in downtown New York City. Unfortunately,
the time for the protest had yet to be announced when Socialist
Worker went to press-a sign of the disorganized state of
the anti-police brutality movement in New York.
At its height in the late 1990s,
the movement brought together tens of thousands of people for
major protests. In 1997, some 20,000 people marched across the
Brooklyn Bridge to protest the police torture of Abner Louima.
Two years later, the killing of Amadou Diallo sparked mass civil
disobedience at police headquarters.
The protests made "racial
profiling" a national issue-and put police on notice, resulting
in a tangible decrease in incidents of brutality.
Since Diallo's death, however,
102 people have been killed by the NYPD, and the level of racist
repression has only grown. But tragically, the movement has been
in retreat.
One reason is the fact that
officers who shot Diallo were acquitted, causing a sense of demoralization
among those who demanded justice. More generally, the right-wing
backlash after the September 11 attacks re-legitimized racial
profiling, refurbished the image of police and put progressive
movements on the defensive.
But in the wake of Sean Bell's
murder, activists like Margarita Rosario are beginning to organize
again. "We have to do more right now," she said. "This
is a case that could bring some serious change."
PUBLIC MEETING
Bloomberg calls it "excessive"
We call it MURDER!
Come to a panel discussion
featuring: Yusef Salaam, wrongly convicted and imprisoned in
the Central Park jogger case; Margarita Rosario, founder of Parents
Against Police Brutality, whose son Anthony was killed by the
NYPD; and Brian Jones, an activist, teacher and member of the
International Socialist Organization.
Date: Friday, December 8th Time: 6:30 pm Place: St. Mary's Church, 521 W. 126th (between Broadway
and Amsterdam, 1/A/B/C/D to 125th Street).
CCCAAANNN you put an email
link on the email address in this graph:
Sponsored by the International Socialist Organization. Call 656-554-8592
or email seanpetty@gmail.com
for more information.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
