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Title: Hot Spring Author: L.A. Kauffman Date: March 2000 Language: en Topics: Free Radical, police brutality, New York City Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20021205063430/http://www.free-radical.org/issue3.shtml Notes: Issue #3 of Free Radical
New York City is on the verge of an explosion. With the March 16 police
shooting of Patrick Dorismond, the number of unarmed black men gunned
down by the NYPD in the last year has risen to three. People here are
beyond grief, even beyond anger, so sickened and fed up with the
out-of-control police force and our vicious Mayor Giuliani that they're
ready to shut the city down.
The corporate media have tended to write about the burgeoning movement
against police brutality as if it were mobilized and directed by
Reverend Al Sharpton, a man whose political savvy seems finally to be
catching up with his media skill. But while Sharpton has played a large
and important role, gaining new respect from former critics, the focus
on him has obscured the breadth and militancy of street-level protest.
Thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers have already been stirred into
action, and the numbers will certainly grow. More importantly, they
represent a broader cross-section of the city than in protests past, and
they're less inclined to limit themselves to purely legal forms of
expression.
There have already been a number of high-school walkouts here, and more
are planned for the coming weeks. Explains high-school student Morgan
Benson, "We're not going to just march around in the streets singing or
whatever. We're going to stir things up a bit. There's a general
restlessless around -- people are just so outraged by this."
Young people of color today seem more willing to engage in direct action
than at any time since the heyday of the 1950s and 1960s black civil
rights movement.
While it was the black freedom struggle that pioneered large-scale civil
disobedience in the United States, during the 1980s and 1990s the tactic
became the almost exclusive province of predominantly white movements:
environmentalism, anti-nuclear activism, animal rights, and so forth
(with a few major exceptions, such as the anti- apartheid and
anti-toxics movements).
"Young blacks and Latinos have not been eager to do civil disobedience,"
notes Richie Perez of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights,
"because many of them have been through the [criminal justice] system,
or have been touched by the system in one way or another. There's been a
tremendous increase of police interference in people's lives, and people
want to get away from it, they don't want more of it."
But youth of color have now begun doing direct action by the hundreds, a
shift with far-reaching implications. And it's not just happening in New
York: The widespread civil disobedience in California surrounding the
passage of the Youth Crime Initiative earlier this year speaks to a
national trend in the making.
The movement against police misconduct has been further strengthened by
another national trend: the increased willingness of activists from an
array of movements to work together across racial, age, and issue lines.
The much-touted labor-environmental alliance of recent years has many
lower-profile counterparts, from the joint campaign against highway
construction by Native American activists and eco-radicals in Minnesota
to the combined effort here by immigrant rights groups and Lower East
Side leftists to unionize undocumented greengrocer workers.
The large protests to date against police brutality in New York City
have been solidly multiracial and multi-generational, which has often
not been the case in the past. Much of the credit goes to People's
Justice 2000, a coalition of more than a dozen action-oriented community
groups who have been building alliances with one another since the
mid-1990s.
There's another factor, too. Much as the in-your-face corporate power
grab embodied by the World Trade Organization has brought
environmentalists, human rights activists, and organized labor together,
the unchecked abuse of police power under Mayor Giuliani has given
whites and Asians new common ground with black and Latino movements.
"When people see Asians [at police brutality protests]," observes Bronx
high-school student Rom Chy, "they're surprised because they never see
Asian people come out for this kind of stuff. They think it doesn't
happen to us. But every day, young people come up to me and tell me that
the police harass them."
White activists like myself -- who are never stopped and frisked for the
way we look -- have nonetheless come to experience police abuse
firsthand, in a way that gives us new insight into what communities of
color routinely face.
That's because Mayor Giuliani consistently uses police force to stifle
political expression and punish his critics. Going to any publicly
announced demonstration nowadays means walking into an armed camp:
Staggering numbers of police are mobilized for even the tamest rallies.
The police brass brazenly pick known organizers out of the crowd,
jailing them on the slimmest of pretenses. Beatings are alarmingly
common.
It used to be that civil disobedience arrests here meant a few hours at
the local precinct and maybe a slap on the wrist. Now political
protesters -- community gardeners trying to stop the City from
bulldozing their land, Irish gays and lesbians protesting their
exclusion from the St. Patrick's Day Parade, you name it -- invariably
spend more than 24 hours in jail, most of them in the fetid underground
hell of Manhattan's infamous Tombs.
Just the other night, a group of friends and I were stopped in Greenwich
Village and detained by the police for allegedly putting up posters
announcing some upcoming protests. We stood lined up against a Bleecker
Street bar for an hour as the size of the undercover operation that had
been mounted against us became clear. The NYPD had employed a police
captain, two detectives, three squad cars, an SUV filled with
undercovers, two beat cops, two bicycle cops and even an officer on
horseback to catch us.
We got away with only a summons and a court date, and at first I found
myself greatly relieved that I wouldn't have to go back to the Tombs for
the fourth time in a year.
Then I came to my senses and felt a rage proportionate to the NYPD's
excess. With overkill having quite literally become the Police
Department's policy, an uprising feels near at hand.