Lead article
May 2000

Police brutality epidemic spurs community outrage

by Gerard Emmett

As the new century starts to unfold, American society stands at a crossroads. The racist moral bankruptcy of Mayor Giuliani's New York City and the death chambers of would-be President George W. Bush's Texas prison gulag present themselves as one possible "future" that drips with the blood and filth of centuries of oppression.

At the same time new movements are arising in response to the casual and ever-deepening brutality that has surrounded us today with a nationwide epidemic of police murders, a racist and inhuman death penalty, and the cancerous growth of a prison-industrial complex, in short, a distinctively American rebirth of totalitarianism, "half slave and half free" as Abraham Lincoln once put it.

These new opposition struggles, which have arisen in so many places around the country, are in the process of coalescing, of learning a new language and developing a new consciousness that can challenge America's current reality as fundamentally as the Abolitionists challenged slavery, or as the Civil Rights Movement challenged racism North and South.

One important aspect of this challenge is addressed by the tremendous new movement that showed itself in the demonstrations against global capitalism in Seattle and recently Washington, D.C. It is a battle fueled in large part by the idealism of a new generation of youth who have been active in the struggle against sweatshops as well as in support of imprisoned Black journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal and who have been learning their own lessons about police brutality in the streets.

REASON OF NEW VOICES

There was a real sense of this history-in-the-making at recent meetings at Lehigh University and Moravian College in Pennsylvania. Audiences of new young activists heard talks by Gwen Hogan from Chicago, a Black woman whose husband Kelsey Hogan was killed last year by an off-duty Cook County corrections officer, and Ramona Africa of MOVE, the sole adult survivor of the May 13, 1985 massacre of eleven MOVE children and adults by Philadelphia police.

It was tremendously moving to hear the dialogue between Gwen Hogan and Ramona Africa which embodied the experience of the whole historic period of reaction against the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, exemplified by thugs like Mayor Frank Rizzo of Philadelphia and achieving a national expression as Reaganism. They represented as well part of the cutting edge of struggle against this retrogression and made clear how central the development of consciousness, revolutionary consciousness, is to the logic of today's movements.

It is often just this kind of smaller-scale discussion that is not only fueling the larger and more high profile demonstrations but is one of the most significant aspects in deepening the movement's self-understanding. For example, mass outrage lent a high profile to the killing of Tyisha Miller in Riverside, Cal. and led to a series of "investigations" that parallel the "hearings" held in the Chicago police killings of LaTanya Haggerty and Robert Russ, as well as the acquittal verdict in the New York City police killing of Amadou Diallo.

Awareness is also growing that these and other young Black people have become targets through a practice of "racial profiling." It is so widespread and so blatant that even some police officers have been forced to break ranks and denounce it, as currently seen in Highland Park and other Chicago suburbs.

Racism, however, is rooted so deeply in American capitalist society that it is the ideological bedrock underlying the prison-industrial complex itself, with its two million warehoused human beings. The struggle against this system of injustice points to a resolution far beyond any simple reforms.

POLICE MAYHEM IN NEW YORK

Recent events in New York City in particular are representative of the new thinking. Just over a year after four New York City cops gunned down Amadou Diallo in a hail of 41 bullets, and just days after his murderers were acquitted of all charges, the cops killed two more unarmed young Black men, Malcolm Ferguson and Patrick Dorismond. It was as if the Diallo verdict gave the police the green light to kill anyone.

Now youth of every color and many adults say they are also afraid of cops, but the truth is, the cops are also suddenly afraid of the Black and Latino communities where the tension is palpable. A newly mobilized anti-police brutality movement is being joined by new layers of society, by people who are sickened by the killings and by Giuliani's racist, anti-human authoritarianism.

Twenty-three-year-old Malcolm Ferguson was killed March 1, three blocks from Diallo's apartment house where he had taken part in a demonstration on the night of the verdict five days before. According to his mother, he had been hassled by the cops ever since they broke his hand during an arrest and he sued them. After killing him, they put out the story that he had resisted arrest in a drug house, but in fact he was shot in the back while lying face down on the ground with his hands behind his back.

Twenty-six year old Patrick Dorismond, the son of Haitian immigrants, was killed on March 16 while working as a security guard. Undercover cops approached him and asked him where to buy drugs. They then claim that he reacted angrily and was shot "by mistake" in a scuffle.

Mayor Giuliani didn't apologize or attend the funeral, but rather demonized Dorismond, who had no criminal record, by illegally releasing his court-sealed juvenile arrest record and insisting that he had a violent temper. His mother Marie Dorismond said of Giuliani, "I was treated like a dog. They killed him once with a gun and then again with the mayor's mouth."

No fewer than 14 people have been killed by the NYPD since the Diallo murder, most of them Blacks and Latinos, but also Gidone Bush, an Orthodox Jew with a history of mental illness. He was neither violent nor threatening, yet was shot dead Aug. 30 while he prayed using a small inscribed hammer as a religious symbol. Cops chased away witnesses and made up a story that he attacked them when in fact he was sitting 15 feet away from them.

The Diallo verdict exonerating the killer cops and the latest murders have revived mass protests that followed Diallo's murder and added new dimensions. Black and Latino neighborhood people gathered at Diallo's building the night of the verdict, and large, multi-racial demonstrations took place in Manhattan for the next few days, always surrounded by a wall of shoulder-to-shoulder police in riot gear.

Nearly 20,000 mourners, many of them Haitians, came out to Dorismond's funeral in Brooklyn March 25. Cops came out in force and provoked a melee. They badly beat WBAI Pacifica reporter Errol Maitland who remains unable to work. He and seven others also face felony charges.

The truth about Bush, Ferguson and many other victims was told in New York by their relatives at the Stolen Lives Project's April 12 "induction ceremony" for the latest victims being added to the project's documentation of police killings, over 2,000 since 1990.

The relatives of the dead and injured told their stories, and the pattern was startlingly consistent. A young man doing nothing or perhaps some petty offense is shot in the back. The police leave him to die while they try to disperse any witnesses, plant a weapon or concoct a story. They delay telling the family, even lie and say they don't know where the missing child is, while they search for a criminal record to embellish their story.

Family members reject the label "tragedy" for these murders. They see the killings as a national epidemic that can be ended when people stand together. "We are the majority," Iris Baez, mother of murdered Anthony Baez, said at the meeting. "I come from a small place, Puerto Rico, but this problem is spread around the world. There are people from the whole world in the Bronx with me. My message is: Don't wait until your child is dead to get involved. Just say, I want to make the world better."

FROM THE LOS ANGELES REBELLION

The kind of social consciousness seen in New York and elsewhere is going to face a very difficult challenge in this election year in which not only the specter of a Bush presidency is looming, but rumors are that Bush is also considering death penalty advocate Governor Thomas Ridge of Pennsylvania as his running mate. This would be a comprehensive challenge in itself, especially to the movement against the death penalty and to the supporters of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

There is even more at stake. The greatest blow to the legacy of Reaganism was struck by the masses of people who rebelled on April 30 to May 1, 1992 in Los Angeles following the "Not Guilty" verdict in the police beating of Rodney King. They carried out the largest urban insurrection in American history.

It was this as much as anything that discredited the "kinder and gentler" presidency of the elder George Bush and led many to support Bill Clinton as an alternative. President Clinton's eight-year failure to provide any genuine alternative to Reaganism, though, makes the threat of George W. Bush so immediate.

The current police scandal in Los Angeles' Rampart district has served once again to raise some of the core issues of the 1992 rebellion. New and continuing revelations of police corruption, manufacture of evidence, brutality and outright murder have made Rampart the largest such scandal in American history, though still of a piece with earlier such scandals in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans and elsewhere. At least 70 officers are currently under investigation.

With California voters having approved the "anti-gang" Proposition 21, aimed at demonizing Black and Latino youth, the truth about the LAPD shows the world turned upside down.

Once again, mass outrage and the legacy of 1992 have forced the authorities to take some cosmetic action, dismissing and suspending a number of officers and overturning, as of today, nearly 100 convictions with more likely to follow.

"Investigations," though, won't change anything fundamental, as the earlier Christopher and Webster "blue ribbon" exposés failed to prevent the current scandal. The nature of this particular shell game was revealed all too clearly in 1992 when Willie Williams replaced Daryl Gates as Los Angeles' Police Chief. Williams had been a high-ranking Philadelphia police official at the time of the 1985 MOVE massacre.

INDEPENDENT THINKING KEY

What is raised by this election year, then, is the pressing need for the movements to continue to develop their own consciousness, independent and aimed at total freedom, to the fullest possible extent. Only such a movement can stand up to bourgeois politics in 2000 and the major parties' campaigns. Police brutality and the prison-industrial complex will, at best, remain unaddressed and fester in silence. At worst, there will be some horrid new twists to the familiar law-and-order projects of attacking and demonizing poor and non-white people, prisoners and youth.

Marxist-Humanism has historically viewed this need for independent consciousness as the key to the American revolution, spelled out as the category "Black masses as vanguard" in 1963's AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL. This pamphlet was written for the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and distributed at that year's March on Washington.

It calls the Kennedy administration's efforts to co-opt that demonstration "the kind of support a rope gives a hanging man," and continues, "This has brought the movement to the crossroads. Though it is impossible to stop the momentum of the Negro struggle, its forward development can be impeded if the underlying philosophy for total freedom is in any way compromised."

Today's movements have their own momentum and logic. Lives are being transformed. People like Gwen Hogan and Iris Baez and many more like them speak with moral authority. Prisoners in the American gulag are asking questions that cut to the heart of America's history, its social relations, and how these can be transformed. The new generation of activists challenging global capitalism can make the connections with these new passions and forces.

Taking responsibility for the revolutionary Marxist-Humanist body of ideas can, as history has shown, bring these questions together and point a way forward. As AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL says, "In this situation, a small organization like ours has a pivotal role to play both as a catalyst and a propellant."