Updated, January 2, 2015 — Two weeks ago, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio called on the thousands of people protesting against police brutality and murder to temporarily suspend their generally peaceful public protests until the completion of the funerals for the two officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, who were killed last Saturday in Brooklyn by an emotionally troubled lone gunman. The NYPD took that as an invitation to disgracefully launch protests of their own at the funerals of officers Ramos and Liu.

The head of the Police Benevolent Association, Pat Lynch — who has taunted the families of those murdered by police — has, along with former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, ratcheted up tensions by ridiculously linking the murder of the two cops to the overwhelmingly peaceful protests. Lynch has nonsensically asserted that the Mayor, who has tried to reduce and contain abuses by police in New York City, has “blood on his hands” and warned the Mayor not to show up at the funerals for cops killed on the job — a position spurned by the family of Officer Ramos, who welcomed the Mayor’s heartfelt condolences.

“There’s blood on many hands tonight. … Those that incited violence on the street under the guise of protests that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did every day. We tried to warn, ‘It must not go on. It cannot be tolerated.’ That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall in the office of the mayor. When these funerals are over, those responsible will be called on the carpet and held accountable.“

– Pat Lynch

 

• LISTEN HERE to Amy Goodman’s and Juan Gonzalez’s excellent reportage on their show Democracy Now! broadcast live every weekday on WBAI radio, 99.5 FM in New York City.

Lost in Lynch’s vicious rhetoric and supremely unprofessional conduct — mirrored by the NYPD Sergeants’ Union — is any understanding that the shooter, 28-year-old Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who had absolutely nothing to do with the protests, had earlier in the day entered his former girlfriend’s apartment in Baltimore with a stolen key and shot her, before heading to New York City. Unfortunately, the NPYD is failing to make the critical link between domestic violence against women and the commission of wider acts of violence, and its union chief is cynically using the killing of the two police officers as an opportunity to smear those who condemn police violence, including the Mayor, to achieve (they hope) better bargaining position in the stalled contract dispute and in the upcoming election to determine who will head the Police Benevolent Association. Truth and decency are unknown flavors in the mouths of the police union honchos.

Even normally thoughtful NY Daily News columnist Mike Lupica has jumped on the NYPD’s rhetorical bandwagon, reframing the fight against the national epidemic of police murder of, primarily, Black young men, as follows:

“Still: If this mayor does not speak up against the kind of rhetoric that has been directed at the NYPD since the grand jury on Staten Island decided not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner, then he is suborning such rhetoric, and the great and dangerous lie behind it: That the people of the city need protecting from those sworn to protect them.”

Mayor de Blasio, whose kids are bi-racial, expressed the heartwrenching legitimate concern of most Black and Latino parents in having to instruct his kids to be careful and wary in dealing with the police. Lupica, who is White, never had to warn his kids. It’s a different universe of daily experience. Lupica’s tragic blindspot is what empowers Patrick Lynch’s violent rhetoric, which in turn sets the climate for the tragic murders we’re seeing.

The aptly named Lynch’s outrageous inflammatory bleatings constitute two decades of “judgmental lapse”. Fifteen years ago outside a Bronx courthouse following the murder of the unarmed 23-year-old Amadou Diallo by four of NYPD’s plainclothed finest, whose fingers triggered 41 bullets in the direction of the gentle, slight, unarmed Diallo (19 of them finding their target at close range — and what of the other 22 shots that went awry?), Lynch, in full inflammatory throttle, issued the following asinine assessment to the media and to the people of New York City:

“This is a tragedy, not a crime! Our lives are worth a hundred times more than a criminal’s!”

And thus, Lynch turned the innocent Diallo — a Black immigrant worker from the country of Guinea — into “a criminal” and rationalized his assassination. There’s little doubt that Lynch’s ongoing racist rhetoric contributed to the climate in which the two police officers were murdered. The blood Lynch decries falls on his own hands, and — like Lady Macbeth — for those families there is not enough water in all the oceans of the world to wash it off.

The racial line is exacerbated by the “aggressive” policing tactics — known as “Broken Windows” — favored by NYC Police Commissioner William Bratton and endorsed by Patrick Lynch. It reaches deep into the NYPD as well as the civilian population. The policy was developed by the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank, and adopted by Bratton during his first turn as NYC Police Commissioner under Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The Reuters news agency interviewed 25 African American male officers on the NYPD, 15 of whom are retired and 10 of whom are still serving. According to Reuters reporter Michelle Conlin, “all but one said that, when off duty and out of uniform, they had been victims of racial profiling, which refers to using race or ethnicity as grounds for suspecting someone of having committed a crime.”

The officers said this included being pulled over for no reason, having their heads slammed against their cars, getting guns brandished in their faces, being thrown into prison vans and experiencing stop and frisks while shopping. The majority of the officers said they had been pulled over multiple times while driving. Five had had guns pulled on them.

The black officers interviewed said they had been racially profiled by white officers exclusively, and about one third said they made some form of complaint to a supervisor.

All but one said their supervisors either dismissed the complaints or retaliated against them by denying them overtime, choice assignments, or promotions. The remaining officers who made no complaints said they refrained from doing so either because they feared retribution or because they saw racial profiling as part of the system.

                                          Photo from CommonDreams.org

Lone NYPD officer, in this gang, refuses to turn back on Mayor de Blasio despite what must have been enormous pressure on him to do so. Give that cop a big “thank you” for standing up to tyranny and fascism, and …. doing his job!

When the cops
turned their backs
on the Mayor
and attacked
and Lynch’s mob
derailed, detracked
or tried to

One cop
stood alone
Honored mission
like a stone
Courage comes
in many forms
and those not busy
being born
are busy dyin’*

-Mitchel Cohen

*Last line here from Bob Dylan’s “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleedin’)”

Systemic racism within the police departments of this country feeds into and even rewards the horrific behaviors of individual cops. The role of the police as an institution under capitalism is primarily to defend corporate property and “property values” at the expense of human rights. It uses racism to rationalize and sometimes mask its primary role. Far too many individual police officers take that as license to act with impunity, especially when egged on by their union chief, their sergeant’s organization, by District Attorneys who have no interest in achieving indictment from a Grand Jury, and by the noted “blue wall of silence” which lines up alongside murderers in their midst and publicly defends their fellow cops’ actions.

As one protester remarked, “Body cams, by themselves, will do nothing except to turn stops and arrests into a Reality TV show.”

• Listen to several talks on the subject, including my own, and some audio from a protest in Brooklyn. Click here.

• Listen here to report from protest in Newark.

• Here’s the first of several sets of interviews during the great march against police repression and murder Dec. 13 in New York City.

• Excerpts from Concert for Ferguson with Rev. Billy Talen, Bernardo Palombo and Joan Baez

• First Night of Chanukkah Demo at Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn

• Interview with Sister Justice Dragonfly during Dec. 13 march in NYC.

Below, please read several thoughtful articles on the need for the Movement against police brutality and killings to continue, and in fact to escalate. Black Lives — and ALL Lives — Matter.

– Mitchel Cohen

*     *     *

Athlete-Activists Can’t Be Scared Silent After the Murder of Two NYPD Officers

BY DAVE ZIRIN

Over the last month, we have seen a veritable “Sports World Spring” as athletes have spoken out on politics in a manner unseen since the 1960s. They have been inspired by the #blacklivesmatter demonstrations directed against the killing of unarmed black men and women by police as well as the inability of the criminal justice system to deliver justice.

The most remarkable part of these protests was not just their breadth nor the stature of the athletes involved but that commissioners and coaches seemed to be allowing it and, in some cases, even nodding in approval. Clearly suspending LeBron James for being upset about the killing of unarmed African-Americans was not seen as savvy public relations.

Now, in the wake of the horrific killing of two NYPD detectives, everything has changed. This eruption of athlete activism will probably not only come to a close but get thrown down the memory hole where the Masters of Sports keep the lost athletic years of Muhammad Ali, John Carlos and Craig Hodges. In other words, management support will die. The sports bosses — and probably friends and family as well—will tell players that it is time to shut up and play. They will be told that it would be the heights of insensitivity to be seen as criticizing the police while officers, their families and many others are in mourning. It would be tasteless, bad for business, and even dangerous.

If the athlete-activists do retreat into silence, it would be a tragic mistake. Now more than ever, players who wore the slogan “I Can’t Breathe” a week ago should wear it today. In fact, trying to find your breath when police and media are declaring war against a peaceful movement could not be more critical.

For players to say that standing with the families of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and others would now be “inappropriate” is a concession to political actors who are maliciously reframing why they stepped up in the first place. The senseless murder of two police officers by a suicidal lone gunman with a history of mental illness in no way negates the single most important organizing principle of the movement: that black lives matter. Those like Rudy Giuliani, George Pataki, and their ilk who are equating this movement with violence and murder have never given a damn about opposing police brutality. Instead, they see themselves as foot soldiers in a bigger project of chilling, burying or even criminalizing all criticism of anyone who wears a badge.

The entire focus of everyone involved in this movement — from the people in the street to LeBron and Derrick Rose — has been to demand that African-Americans be afforded the same humanity as everyone else: to be treated as people and not “demons” that need to be put down. There is nothing in the slogans “black lives matter” or “I can’t breathe” or the marches and die-ins that remotely suggests that projecting violence toward police is a solution to police violence. In fact, we have seen athletes like the NFL’s Reggie Bush and pro wrestler MVP who have been both part of the movement and have police officers in their immediate family. Given the explicit calls for vengeance by the NYPD and the rush by the media to place the blame for the shooting on people protesting violence, athletes could use their stature to assert that this movement is just.

I am well aware that this is easy as hell for me to say. It’s not my risk. It’s not my paycheck. It’s not my livelihood. But when you lend support to a movement, you bear a responsibility for that movement’s well being. Black lives matter, and in fact that needs to be expressed with urgency. As long-time criminal justice organizer Keeanga Yahmatta-Taylor said to me, “I can hardly imagine the fear coursing through black New York today. Don’t let your young sons out of the house. This is what we can’t give into — the siege in black communities to avenge murder in the name of the law.” It’s easy when management is patting you on the back, thousands are in the street and Fox News is in the corner mumbling to itself. But now the sunshine is gone and the chill is settling in. If LeBron or Derrick Rose—hell, if Nik Stauskas or Jeremy Lin — can turn their spotlight into even a little bit of sunlight, it will make a difference. If you believed that LeBron, Kenny Britt, Ariyana Smith, the women of Berkeley and so many other athlete activists were on the side of right a week ago, then there is no reason to not believe that they are still right today. Their voices are needed more than ever.

*     *     *

Political Mutiny in the New York Police Department. Does DeBlasio Order Officers to Turn in their Badges?

BY DR. MARSHA COLEMAN-ADEBAYO, BAR editor and columnist

“The movement to expose police crimes against black and brown civilian populations in the US has forged a wedge between power centers that have the potential to be explosive and politically significant…”

In light of the killing of two New York police officers, NYDP police officers literally turned their backs on Mayor de Blasio Saturday night. Armed law enforcement employees, either in urban battlefields or imperial outpost war theaters are under discipline to respect and protect superiors in their chain of command. The defiant action led by Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA) president Patrick Lynch sent an undeniable message to Mayor de Blasio that he could no longer depend on the unconditional commitment of the officers to protect him or his family.

Mayor de Blasio remarked to a group of police officers at the Brooklyn Hospital, “We’re all in this together.” The officers responded, “No we’re not.” This declaration indicates that there are no rules beyond their incestuous protections of the PBA and their rogue sense of entitlement.

In the military, the commanding officer would have sent them to the Brig immediately. Certainly, there are different rules of engagement between militarized police departments and the actual military but the message cannot be lost on those who depend upon police forces to provide personal protection. de Blasio, may wish he had the flexibility to discipline officers in his militarized police force as the armed forces enjoy. “It’s f–king open season on us right now,” one officer said. “When is he (deBlasio) going to step up?” These statements reflect open contempt for the office of the mayor and the people of New York. Since 1670, slave patrollers and their contemporaries, police officers have enjoyed open season and distained their duty to protect and serve Black people. For example, President Harry Truman fired highly decorated General Douglas Mac Arthur for insubordination.

The movement to expose police crimes against black and brown civilian populations in the US has forged a wedge between power centers that have the potential to be explosive and politically significant. Police, who are accustomed to unconditional power to murder and maim Black and Brown youth with immunity are now facing challenges to white supremacist prerogatives and the language is vitriolic. PBA president Patrick Lynch belched: “There’s blood on many hands tonight… That blood . . . starts on the steps of City Hall, in the Office of the Mayor,”

The powerful PBA had the gall to warn their superiors, the NY Mayor and Speaker, to stay away from the funerals of the fallen police officers.

CONTINUED HERE

Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo is the author of No FEAR: A Whistleblowers Triumph over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA, that is available through amazon.com. Dr. Coleman-Adebayo worked at the EPA for 18 years and blew the whistle on a US multinational corporation that endangered vanadium mine workers. She is Director of Transparency and Accountability for the Green Shadow Cabinet, and coordinates the DC-based Hands-Up Coalition (www.handsupcoalitiondc.com) Contact Marsha at: MarshaCAdebayo@blackagendareport.com and www.marshacoleman-adebayo.com

*     *     *

NYPD Throw Entirely Inappropriate Tantrum At Funeral After Mayor Suggests They Can’t Kill Black Kids With Impunity

Proving they’re often not just racist and brutal but petty, vengeful, childish, grossly insensitive and “stunningly thin-skinned,” hundreds of the same people who called for no protests until slain police officers were laid to rest chose to protest  at the funeral of one of their own by turning their backs on a democratically-elected-by-73%-of-the-population mayor who has (mostly) supported the right of free speech, movingly cited “a history that still hangs over us” in describing his fear over the fate of his own bi-racial son, and reasonably called on police to stop being racist, brutal et al in the name of doing what they’re supposed to be doing, which is protecting and serving. Though there were thousands who didn’t join them, the idiot cops who turned away from the video of de Blasio acknowledging the “family of the NYPD, which is hurting so deeply” thus managed to politicize a personal tragedy, to upstage and disrespect a grieving family, and to offer what Keith Olbermann called “a giant EFF YOU to the citizens of this city.” In other words, wrong place, wrong time, wrong cause, and time to be big boys now. The officer killed, Rafael Ramos, was by all accounts one of the good guys: A 40-year-old, Puerto Rican father of two who cared about his community, served as a marriage counselor for his church and was studying to become a police chaplain. The thugs protesting – led by a toxic police union president who has blamed de Blasio and protesters for having “blood on (their) hands” – are not, and are on the wrong side of history. This will be a long hard changing of the guard, but it will come. Police Commissioner Bill Bratton “If we can learn to see each other, to see that our cops are people like officer Ramos and officer Liu, to see our communities filled with people like them too…If we can learn to see each other then, when we see each other we’ll heal.”

 

*     *     *

Cops Threaten a Blue Coup in New York City

By GLEN FORD
Executive Editor, Black Agenda Report

“The police union chief instructed his members to impose a martial law-type policing regime on the city.”

When Police Benevolent Association chief Patrick Lynch said New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has the blood of two dead cops on his hands, he was issuing a physical threat to both the person of the mayor and the civil authority to which the police are subordinate and sworn to protect. In a nation under the rule of law, such a statement by a representative of an armed and enflamed constabulary – 35,000-strong, the equivalent of three light infantry divisions – would trigger an immediate defensive response from the State, to guard against mutiny. But, of course, no such thing happened.

When Lynch’s PBA declared, in a prepared statement, that “we have, for the first time in a number of years, become a ‘wartime’ police department” and “will act accordingly,” that constituted an instruction to union members to impose a martial law-type policing regime on the city – with no authorization other than the weapons they carry. Sounds very much like a coup.

On Internet message boards, police union activists instructed the rank and file to refuse to respond to incidents unless two units were dispatched to the scene, and to double up even if given orders to the contrary. Under this “wartime” footing, the police would simply seize the power to deploy and assign themselves, as they liked – and to hell with the chain of command and civilian authorities.

To hell, especially, with Mayor de Blasio, who now travels nowhere except under the protective custody of police commissioner Bill Bratton, a “cop’s cop” and architect of the “Broken Windows” policing strategy that begat stop-and-frisk. Bratton translates de Blasio’s words into cop-speak, and has forged a tense truce between the uniformed legions and the man who won 95 percent of the Black vote on the promise to put a leash on the gendarmes.

There is no doubt the cops feel betrayed – a rage that has been building in synch with the growth of a nationwide movement that challenges the legitimacy of the Mass Black Incarceration State, of which they are the frontline troops, the “heroes” in the war to criminalize and contain an entire people. The chants and placards are an insult and an indictment of THEM, and of their centrality to the racist project that has been an organizing principle of the nation for more than two generations. How is it that cops can be compelled to “protect and serve” marchers whose purpose is anathema to the American policing mission: to beat down, lock up, and extrajudicially execute dissident, disorderly, uppity or merely inconvenient Black people?

The cops understand the law, and that the law is conditional, based on place, race and wealth, and that in the end there is only force, the use of which is their sacred monopoly. It’s what gives them a status that union paychecks cannot buy; what makes blue collar guys and gals “somebody” in society. Most of all, they know who is nobody: the beatable, friskable, disposable, killable folks who would be prey on any other day, but have lately been allowed to repeatedly parade down the most protected streets of the richest island in the country, screaming defamations.

“The cops’ rage has been building in synch with the growth of a nationwide movement that challenges the legitimacy of the Mass Black Incarceration State, of which they are the frontline troops.”

The cops are understandably angry and confused. As primary enforcers of the social order, they have an intimate knowledge of actual class and race relationships in America. Their perspectives are molded by the geographic and social boundaries they patrol; they are shaped and informed by the inequalities of the system they protect on behalf of the powerful people they serve. (Yes, they really do “serve and protect” somebody.) The cops’ worldview is also firmly anchored in the history of the United States. He may not be aware of his profession’s antecedents in the slave patrols, or even that the U.S. Supreme Court once ruled that Black people have no rights that the white man is bound to respect, but cops are the reigning experts on the borders that delineate rights and privileges in their localities. They know that public housing residents have virtually no rights that cops – as agents of the rulers – are bound to respect. They know that whole sections of their cities, encompassing most of the Black and brown populations, are designated as drug zones where everyone is suspect and probable cause is a given, or as high-crime zones where every shooting is pre-qualified as a good one.

These are the Constitution-free zones, full of people who get and deserve no protection by or from the police. The very existence of Constitution-free zones means that the Bill of Rights is not the law of the land, but a Potemkin façade, a con game, a chimera – and no one knows this better than the cops, whose job is to ensure, as best they can, that everyone stays within their designated space.

For about a million Black people, the assigned “space” is prison. The Mass Black Incarceration State is the edifice that defines the American system of justice, setting it apart from the rest of the world in size, racial selectivity, draconian sentencing and institutionalized torture (80,000 inmates in solitary confinement on any given day). The police are the drones that feed the infernal prison machine, and keep Black America in a state of rightlessness. As Shakespeare’s mercenary warrior Othello would put it: We “have done the state some service, and they know it.”

“New York City’s police force is especially prone to mutiny and coup-plotting.”

The cops threaten mutiny if the State does not stick up for the men and women who do its dirty work. PBA honcho Patrick Lynch denounced “those that incited violence on the street under the guise of protests that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did everyday. We tried to warn, ‘It must not go on. It cannot be tolerated.’”

To which the protesters answer: the police killings and the criminalization of a whole people must not go on and cannot be tolerated.

The movement has come to a critical juncture, a moment that would have arrived even if Ismaaiyl Brinsley had not made his own fatal decision. It was always inevitable that the cops would at some point demand that the State dispense with civil liberties pretenses and allow them to crush the nascent movement. New York City’s police force – by far the nation’s largest army of domestic occupation – is especially prone to mutiny and coup-plotting. Thousands of cops, many of them drunk, stormed City Hall in 1992 to express their utter contempt for Black mayor David Dinkins.

But, the current crisis is far different, because it is the movement’s show, not the cops’. The people are exposing the most acute contradictions of American life through direct confrontation with the armed enforcers of the State. The cops are supposed to be upset. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. explained, “the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” The crisis is here, and will grow deeper, but freedom is non-negotiable. The movement must win or be crushed.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

*     *     *

The Police Aren’t Under Attack. Institutionalized Racism Is.

BY KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR