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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 9/12/15

US Apartheid law enforcement: Standing While Black in New York Can Get You Attacked by NYPD Thugs

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I can't pretend anymore. Not after Israel's Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, explicitly declaring stone-throwing to be terrorism, drove the passage of a bill holding stone-throwers liable to up to 20 years in prison.

The law did not specify that it targeted only Palestinian stone-throwers. It didn't have to.

Just one week later, pro-settlement Jews hurled rocks, furniture, and bottles of urine at Israeli soldiers and police at a West Bank settlement, and in response, Benjamin Netanyahu immediately rewarded the Jewish stone-throwers with a pledge to build hundreds of new settlement homes.

This is what has become of the rule of law. Two sets of books. One for Us, and one to throw at Them. Apartheid.

Writing that kind of article in Israel, where right-wing nuts can be pretty threatening to people who take even a modest pro-Palestinian stand, took a lot of guts. A lot more guts than it takes to call out official racism in the US.

So where are the editors in the US willing to write that the same thing is true of "justice" and law-enforcement in the US, and that incidents like the killing of a black boy by a Cincinnati cop, or the shooting of a latino with his hands up in Texas, are not isolated problems but systemic?

One can take the analogy to Israel too far. There is no such thing as a Palestinian celebrity in Israel -- no Palestinian actors or sports stars who, for example, might be treated with respect and kid gloves by Israeli law enforcement officers the way black celebrities often are in the US. In Israel, all Palestinians are potential victims, with even those who are Israeli citizens legally in a second-class status and viewed with suspicion and animosity. But in the US, where supposedly blacks are fully US citizens as much as any white person, they just aren't treated equally by the law, which tends to assume they are guilty from the get-go, and then treats them as presumptive threats, acting accordingly.

Blake, who said his initial thought was to stay quiet about his scary experience with New York's Not-So-Fine, after talking about it with his wife, decided to go public and to demand an apology in view of the huge national uproar over an epidemic of police killings of unarmed blacks and other people of color. He decided that making an issue over this incident would help to expose the truth about law enforcement in America.

He showed, in doing that, that we too, like Israel, are an apartheid society.

Black Americans, and Latinos as well -- really anyone with dark skin as an elderly man visiting from India discovered in Alabama last year when he was thrown to the ground by a cop for the crime of taking a walk in broad daylight in his immigrant son's suburban neighborhood and ended up with a serious neck injury that left him unable to walk -- have to worry for their safety and indeed their life in any situation involving a police officer. Violence is not only the operative response of police when dealing with people of color. It is condoned and excused both by police higher-ups and by prosecutors and the courts, except in rare exceptions where photographic or video evidence of criminality is overwhelming, and even then not always.

But it's not just the cops. Prosecutors and the courts are apartheid zones in their own right, where people who are supposed to be presumed innocent are terrorized into copping guilty pleas even when they're innocent because of threats made to lock them up on far more serious charges for which they could serve lengthy or even life sentences. This is why America has become a prison nation with more people in jail or out of jail after having served time than any other country in the world, including China. And police, prosecutorial and judicial apartheid is the only explanation for why, despite being only 13% of the US population, blacks account for a staggering 60% of the 2.1 million men and women locked up in US jails and prisons.

Blake, as he has said, will not be one of those people because he's wealthy and famous, but he, at least, knows that he could easily have been one of them had he not had money and celebrity.

As he said of his decision to go public and to demand an apology from the NYPD and the City of New York, "I have resources to get to the bottom of this. I have a voice. But what about someone who doesn't have those resources and doesn't have a voice?"

Well, ask Eric Garner's family: killed by a white cop for being uncooperative, though hardly violent, when being arrested for selling loose single cigarettes on the street to support his family.

Or ask any of those hundreds of thousands of black, hispanic, native American and other men and women of color languishing in prison, most of them for minor or non-violent crimes that white people usually managed to get off for, or at least avoid jail for.

Apartheid justice and out-of-control police. That's what we're dealing with in the United States.

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Dave Lindorff, winner of a 2019 "Izzy" Award for Outstanding Independent Journalism from the Park Center for Independent Media in Ithaca, is a founding member of the collectively-owned, journalist-run online newspaper (more...)
 

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