Early Response to Sean Bell Verdict

People’s Justice had called for a protest in front of the Queens District Attorney's office at 5:30 p.m. in the event of an acquittal for the police officers who killed Sean Bell. FYI, People’s Justice is an impressive network of organizations and projects led mostly by under-40 people of color, like Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Audre Lorde Project, Immigrant Justice Solidarity Project. Though there had been an angry gathering in front of the Court House right when the verdict was announced, this was the first planned response for which a broad call had been issued.

On first view, the scene was a little disheartening: crowd of a few hundred, bad sound system, not much focus, and the usual suspects--the organizing groups and SDS and some other young people, plus the hard left and too many middle-aged people who looked familiar to me. The grassy knoll near the court offices obviously didn’t get a lot of community foot traffic or passers by. And despite the incredible rage evident at many workplaces that day, the remote location (35 minutes from midtown by train, much more from Harlem, Brooklyn or the Bronx) and the end-of-work week timing had clearly limited the turn-out.

As the sound improved, it was possible to hear Sean Bell’s step-brother, I believe the only family member who spoke, yelling “F…the police,” a chant picked up by some of the crowd. Overall the tone was angry, militant, purposeful, determined to respect the family’s call for non-violence but determined also to make the system pay.

Things picked up with the call to march. Gathering together and moving we were louder and had more momentum, though I wasn’t the only one not clear about our destination—which turned out to be the Club Kahlua, where the shooting happened. The police didn’t try to stop us from taking Queens Boulevard and they clearly had been ordered to be cool, with many community officers present.

After almost a mile, we turned onto Jamaica Avenue, a much busier street with stores and pedestrians doing errands. Here people started to join the march and the chanting grew louder. We reached a thunderous level with the help of the echo effect under the Archer Avenue subway and Long Island Railroad Station, stopping for a couple of minutes and chanting “Sean Bell, Sean Bell." Turning onto the street where the shooting happened, we were joined by more local residents. One woman got in her car and hit the horn to amp up our volume on the chants, others seemed to bring more noise-makers out of their houses. Organizers led a count to 50 shots, a moment of silence, and asked for a pledge to keep struggling against police brutality and for people’s power.

At this point, most elders left while some youngbloods marched around the neighborhood and into the projects. Walking back, we wound up next to an African-American young woman in her early teens, holding her little brother by the hand. She was talking very excitedly into her cell phone: “See, I told you there was gonna be a protest! So when I heard the people yelling, we came out and marched and I taped the whole thing…”

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Sean Bell & Peyton Strickland—Compare and Contrast!

For the third but undoubtedly not the final time, Fire on the Mountain turns to the simmering rage in NYC’s Black community about the 50-shot police murder of the unarmed Sean Bell in the early hours of his wedding day, November 25.

Ajamu Dillahunt on his North Carolina-based blog Sankofa Meets the Future has drawn an instructive comparison between the Sean Bell case and another recent police shooting. A young man in Wilmington, NC named Peyton Strickland was killed on December 1 as a heavily-armed police task force followed up a complaint that he had stolen two new Play Stations. Peyton Strickland was killed when Deputy Christopher Long of the New Hanover County Sheriff's Office Emergency Response Team fired his pistol through the front door, even as it was being knocked down by a police battering ram. The unarmed Strickland was hit in the head and shoulder, fatally.

By December 8, just a week after the shooting, Deputy Long was fired from the Sheriff's Office. On December 11, he was indicted on charges of second-degree murder brought before a New Hanover County grand jury by District Attorney Ben David:

After interviews with other law enforcement personnel at the scene, it became clear that Long's perception "was not the belief of others," David said. Long's actions were not "objectively reasonable," David said, even though the ERT had information that the occupants of the house might be armed and dangerous. To obtain a second-degree murder conviction, prosecutors must prove that Long committed an unlawful killing with malice, but not premeditation and deliberation.

Is anyone reading this surprised to learn that Peyton Strickland was white and that his father is a prominent attorney in the Durham area?

I didn’t think so.

In NYC, we have a crime just as egregious being played out as a shell game, with politicians like Bloomberg, police spokespersons and the media shuffling statements of concern, declarations of fealty to the legal process and broad hints about fleeing, gun-toting friends of Sean Bell. Only calculated leaks from within the NYPD have provided any information. One nugget that has come out is that a couple of the killer cops reported that they didn’t know whether they had fired their guns or not! These people are still on the payroll. Feel safer, New Yorkers? The Queens District Attorney can’t tell us when, if ever, a grand jury might be convened or what charges it might consider.

As Ajamu Dillahunt points out:

So what we have in Wilmington is a swift action against a law enforcement officer... in a case that is no more compelling then the deaths of Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo and countless hundreds of other People of Color who are victims of "armies of occupation" in our communities. Clearly Strickland's racial, ethnic and class background have compelled the Sheriff and the District Attorney to move quickly and seriously.

In closing I want to call attention to another important point the first Sankofa Meets the Future piece makes. It cites a local news story on the family’s response:

His father, Durham-area lawyer Don Strickland, said Saturday that he would address Long's firing "at the appropriate time."

"Right now, I'm just going to let the judicial process do its work," Strickland said.

Can anyone reading this imagine the parents of an African American victim of police murder in New York City proclaiming that they’re going to be quiet and let the system work?

I didn’t think so.

As Ajamu Dillahunt sums up:

While he may not be conscious of it, only a sense of White Privilege positions a person to take this approach to such a serious blow to their family. His legal background and experience with the criminal justice system may be responsible for him refraining. In contrast, Black and Latino families, based on a long history of injustice in these kinds of investigations have usually joined communities in speaking out against the atrocity and have often joined the outraged masses in the streets.

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Ten of Thousands March for Sean Bell

Yesterday, I joined some tens of thousands of New Yorkers in a solemn demonstration demanding justice for Sean Bell, the unarmed 23-year-old Black man gunned down by NYC cops while leaving his bachelor party, less than 12 hours before his wedding.

And it was one hell of a demonstration. Tens of thousands of us—I’m pretty good at counting marches but this one was just too damn big—strode down Fifth Avenue past the iconic Rockefeller Center tree in the middle of all the Christmas shopping hoo-hah. The media keep calling it a silent demo, because it was announced as one. Not hardly—plenty of chants and unison counting up to 50, the number of shots in the fusillade that killed Sean Bell and wounded two friends in his car.

A few observations follow—add your own in the comments, please.

1. The march was overwhelmingly Black, 80-85%, I’d say. The African American turnout was likely slightly lower because of a solid turnout from Africans and Haitians. Also significant, it was not a particularly young demonstration—there were plenty of kids and junior high students there with parents or grandparents, and even some high school kids seemed to be in family mode. I would say the bulk of the crowd ranged in age from 35 to 70, and judging by signifiers like neat dreads, kofis, and mudcloth jackets, they were folks who had actively identified with the upsurge of the Black Liberation Movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s. There were banners from unions, church groups, NAACP chapters, the National Action Movement, and so on, but the number of folks from unions and churches exceeded the organized contingents by an order of magnitude or two. This was a noteworthy chunk of NYC’s Black working class on the move.

I recognized more of the white folk marching than I would have liked. Beyond usual suspects, folks turned out by their unions, and clumps of lefties, organized predominantly white contingents were few and far between. UFPJ, to its credit, was there with a big banner and a modest and well-framed flier, and there was supposed to be a NOW demo around the killing downtown at City Hall an hour earlier. If those folks subwayed up, I didn’t see ‘em.

2. Signs proclaiming “Improve Police and Community Relations” were handed out free by the NAACP and predominated, but there were plenty of homemade efforts as well. The NJ–based People’s Organization for Progress had two distinct clumps in the march (contingent integrity was very difficult to maintain in the jam-packed assembly area), but their distinctive signs—with much more direct and militant slogans--were scattered throughout the march as well. Many in the crowd addressed themselves to the officers guarding the route, and had some pithy things to say to the Black officers in particular.

3. The march screwed up holiday traffic in Midtown for hours; while the march was on, neither cars nor pedestrians could cross Fifth Avenue above 30th Street. Good! On the other hand, police containment tactics were distressingly effective. The entire march route, maybe a mile and a half, was very heavily copped out. Worse, it was lined with double layers of the interlocking metal barricades they’ve been using to keep rallies controlled and split up in recent years, and the police adjusted seamlessly to the unexpectedly large turnout by expanding the march’s right of way, once we stepped off, from one lane to the whole of Fifth Avenue. The police were unusually respectful, especially in light of the righteous anger that was being directed at them by marchers. They were scared, right up to the highest level.

4. The cops’ nervousness reflects the fact that the rulers of the city are running kind of scared themselves. And they should be—killer cops get off scot-free in NYC as a matter of course, and people are righteously sick of it. Folks are angry. Ed Koch, former mayor and current has-been columnist for give-away newspapers, made a point of complimenting Rev. Al Sharpton in his most recent outing, just as Bloomberg made a point of being photographed with him.

The problem is that after decades of the likes of Koch and Giuliani, there is a veritable thicket of laws, procedures and “safeguards” which make getting a cop behind bars for even the most outrageous shooting nearly impossible, even pretending for a moment that the city administration really wanted to. Impunity, racism and lamentable training make future Sean Bells and Amadou Diallos a certainty, and at some point the rage is likely to erupt.

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Sleeping While Black (in Queens)

As a blogging newbie, I had every intention of exercising self-discipline and not going post-crazy, especially in light of the fact that nobody even knows Fire on the Mountain exists yet. But the NYPD has turned my good intentions to dust. A friend forwarded me an article from the Friday NY Daily News with this title and the laconic introduction, "Things have really gotten out of control..."

Most people reading this blog, wherever you might be from, have likely heard about the 50 police bullets fired into the car of Sean Bell, a 23 year old Black man celebrating in the early hours of the day sct for his wedding to Nicole Paultre. Bell was killed outright and two companions wounded. None of them were armed. New Yorkers are very much on edge at this blunt reminder of the deadly peril Black males face any time they come in contact with the pig.

Mayor Bloomberg knows how tense things are. Instead of automatically defending the cops a la Giuliani, he has questioned their judgement and made damn sure to be photographed with Reverends Al Sharpton and Herbert Daughtry, longtime camaigners against police brutality. But today's paper describes a reign of terror being perpetated as the cops careen through the community seeking a "fourth passenger" who somehow fled the deadly fusillade and had a gun. Read this excerpt from the column by the estimable Juan Gonzales:

Around 6 a.m. Wednesday, LaToya Smith, 26, was playing in her bed in southeastern Queens with her 7-month-old son Jalyn.

Just then, she heard a strange noise in her family's darkened house. Her locked bedroom door suddenly burst open, and several uniformed cops burst into the room with flashlights and guns drawn.

According to Smith, the cops ordered her to lie facedown on the floor.

"My baby, my baby. Where's my baby?" she recalls pleading to them as they hustled her into the living room. There, they gathered her brothers Timothy Smith, 19, and Stanley Smith, 23; her mother, Laura; the baby and Christopher Keys, 18, a friend who was staying in the apartment. Meanwhile, a dozen officers searched the entire place.

Police officials said they found a loaded 9-mm. pistol in the apartment and a small bag of marijuana, whereupon they hauled the young woman and the three men to the 103rd Precinct stationhouse. They charged the men with gun possession, but released LaToya Smith.

Police also are saying the apartment was a known drug-dealing location.

But the real purpose of the raid was not to find guns or pot.

All the cops' questions at the stationhouse were about last weekend's police shooting of Sean Bell, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield outside the Kalua Cabaret, Smith said.

They kept asking if she knew the whereabouts of certain friends of the three men shooting victims.

"If you don't tell us what we want to hear, you know, you can get five years," she says one cop told her.

New York may not blow over this, but an old wound has been torn open and it will not heal any time soon. (Modern Pitung, at the blog All Out for the Fight, has pointed out one bright spot--the solid response by the John Brown caucus of the newly-formed NYC SDS/MDS chapter.)


UPDATE

Anybody thinks that I'm throwing too much drama with a formulation like "New York may not blow over this" ought to give a listen to "50 Shots," the cut by rapper Papoose just posted at the online music mag Prefix. You're not listening to fabulous flow or lyric brilliance, you are listening to raw anger. (h/t to Steve Gilliard)

UPDATE 2
12/4

These pictures are to accompany the new comment on this thread by Bondi on media coverage of this week's demo in Newark, NJ around Sean Bell organized by the People's Organization for Progress.

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