I worked with the NYPD throughout my 45 year long professional. The great majority were effective and responsive to the clients my staff and i worked with. As many commentators have noted, things changed for the worst after 9/11 -- the emphasis on combatting terrorism; police militarization; the use of "stop and frisk" to target young black men. An attitude towards young men of color -- what I'll term "Guantanamo in New York" -- seemed to permeate the NYPD .... and most other PDs throughout the country.
New Yorkers recently elected a mayor who promised to address the maltreatment of Blacks and Latinos at the hands of the NYPD; with the murders of unarmed black men in Ferguson and Staten Island, thousands of protesters in NYC and across the country demanded an end to the police's murderous behavior towards black men. With the assassinations of two NYPD patrolmen and the hands of an apparently deranged black man, right wing extremists in and out of the NYP seized on the deaths of the two police officers to foist the blame for them onto the protesters and Mayor DiBlasio, succeeding, in Rupert Murdoch's NY Post, Wall St. Journal and Fox News, to push the need for police reform off the table. The other corporate controlled media, with the editorial exception of the NY Times, followed suit.
When I was a young activist, working to organize welfare mothers in the late 1960's, early 1970's, a cohort of mounted police ran roughshod over a group of mothers protesting peacefully in front of City Hall. The police claimed then, as they do now, that they were provoked, harassed, felt themselves to be at risk. Just a few years ago, the NYPD did a good job disrupting protesters at the Republican convention; did a good job beating up and arresting Occupiers; did an even better job arresting young Black men in Brownsville for waking down the street. We're not talking about a few bad apples here, but an NYPD where the orders for these actions came from the top. With Giuliani and Bloomberg, NY cops got the message they could act with impunity against ordinary New Yorkers. A day of reckoning for the police had to come and it has arrived. The struggle will now be joined between those who wish to deny any accountability for what has transpired in NYC and elsewhere, particularly since 9/11, and those ordinary folks, like you and me, who are demanding that those responsible be held accountable and that what the did and continue to do cease.
Simply put, democracy versus oppression. A few thousand kids, no matter how determined, how tactically smart, can't win this one on their own. They -- all of us -- are up against those who continue to protect the country's ruling class and their collaborators for Iraq, the NSA, the torture of alleged terrorists, the arbitrary imprisonment of Black men and now their murders. As my avatar, Joe Hill, was supposed to have said just before he was shot by a Utah firing squad, "Don't mourn, organize!"
