[News] Bashing Critics Of Brutality Betrays Efforts To Reform Police - Rot In the Big Apple

[Anti-Imperialist News]

December 24, 2014
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/24/rot-in-the-big-apple/

*Bashing Critics Of Brutality Betrays Efforts To Reform Police*


  Rot In the Big Apple

by LINN WASHINGTON Jr.

Last fall an apparently unbalanced survivalist steeped in 
anti-government paranoia murdered a Pennsylvania State Trooper and 
seriously wounded another Trooper during a sniper attack. Recently an 
apparently unbalanced man with a criminal past murdered two New York 
City policemen as they sat in their patrol car hours after he allegedly 
shot a former girl friend.

Authorities said Eric Frien, the man now charged with attacking the 
State Troopers, acted out of anti-government beliefs to “wake people up” 
because he wanted to make a “change in government.”

Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the man who executed those two New York City 
policemen before he shot himself on a subway platform acted out of 
beliefs opposed to police brutality according to announcements from 
authorities based on Brinsley’s Internet postings.

Brinsley shot the officers as revenge for the police killings of Eric 
Garner in the Staten Island section of New York City and Michael Brown 
in Ferguson, Missouri, authorities claimed, based on his internet 
messages. He reportedly rode a bus from Baltimore to NYC, authorities 
said. After shooting his former girl friend. In NYC, he then went to 
Brooklyn, where he randomly shot Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, 
who were on a temporary assignment there in a squad car.

The murderous act of the unbalanced Eric Frien, who is white, and the 
murderous act of the unbalanced Brinsley, who is black, however, have 
triggered starkly different responses from law enforcement supporters.

Few of those law enforcement supporters publicly berated the entire 
anti-government movement during or after the 48-day search that ended in 
the capture of Frien -– a manhunt that cost Pennsylvania over $10-million.

Yet, shortly after those brutal murders by Brinsley, many supporters of 
law enforcement unleashed a barrage of caustic barbs at the 
anti-brutality movement and persons targeted by law enforcement 
supporters for backing anti-brutality protests. Law enforcement 
supporters have been incensed by the anti-brutality protests that have 
roiled cities across the country during the past few weeks.

Those law enforcement supporters that linked the lone act of Brinsley to 
all critics of police brutality significantly did not link the lone act 
of Frien to all critics who consider government to be the enemy. While 
anti-brutality protests have been predominately peaceful although 
sometimes raucous, anti-government activism includes vocal proponents 
whose adherents have a long history of violent and often murderous 
attacks police and prosecutors, and even on the public, terrorism 
actions that have killed dozens, including children.

The starkly different responses from law enforcement supporters to these 
two recent murderous attacks on police in Pennsylvania and NYC make it 
abundantly clear that police defenders are not working to ensure that 
the American justice system is truly just.

Law enforcement supporters vigorously and persistently oppose both 
criticism of police abuses (criticism protected by First Amendment 
rights) and even the most limited reforms initiated to reduce police 
abuses -– even limited reforms that ironically would reduce the need to 
criticize the police. In 1992, New York City police staged a violent 
protest outside that that town’s City Hall in opposition of then Mayor 
David Dinkins’ support of an independent civilian complaint review board 
to monitor abuses by police.

Law enforcement supporters consistently claim critics of police abuses 
are characterized by a blind hatred of all police. Supporters imply that 
this hatred is practically embedded in the collective DNA of critics. 
Yet, as one NYC activist noted on the eve of the 1999 trial for one of 
the NYPD officers charged with the brutal beating and broomstick 
sodomizing assault on Abner Louima: “We’re not anti-police. We’re 
anti-police state.”

Anti-brutality protestors condemn the legacy of double standards under 
which authorities on the one hand will proclaim their allegiance to 
“law-&-order,” while on the other they will remain oblivious to illegal 
brutality by police. A 1994 report on police corruption in NYC stated 
police department supervisors encouraged a tolerance of unnecessary force.

America’s legacy of accommodation toward abuses by law enforcement was 
cited in an April 2014 report from the United Nation’s Human Rights 
Committee. That report, virtually uncovered by American mainstream media 
condemned excessive use of force by law enforcement officials, racial 
profiling by police and racial disparities in the criminal justice 
system among other human rights violations in the United States.

“The Committee is concerned about the still high number of fatal 
shootings by certain police forces…,” that U.N. reported stated. That 
report urged American authorities to prosecute “perpetrators” of police 
abuse -– a suggestion not implemented in the cases of Brown, Garner and 
other news-making police abuse incidents in the months following 
released of that U.N. report.

The conclusions of that UN report clash with views of law enforcement 
and their supporters. The head of the national police union, Fraternal 
Order of Police President Chuck Canterbury, said “I don’t believe there 
are systemic problems in law enforcement,” during a recent “Meet the 
Press” television program. Canterbury also said, “We believe the 
existing system works,” countering criticisms leveled at failures of 
grand juries and police department internal investigators to hold police 
accountable for abusive misconduct.

Caustic criticism from some law enforcement supporters in the wake of 
the tragic New York City police murders have elevated the inane to the 
absurd.

Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, speaking on Fox 
TV, blasted current NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio and civil rights activist 
Al Sharpton for having “blood on their hands” for the murders of the two 
NYPD officers.

Kerik linked De Blasio and Sharpton to Brinsley’s contending their 
criticism of ongoing police abuses was an impetus for Brinsley’s 
rampage. De Blasio and Sharpton (along with millions nationwide) have 
condemned the failure of a grand jury to indict the NYPD officer who 
killed Garner with a chokehold that violated NYPD procedures. The death 
of Garner was captured on cell phone video that ended with a NYPD 
officer smiling at the camera.

Kerik, it should be noted, is the former law enforcement official who 
served a short sentence in federal prison after he pled guilty in 2009 
to corruption charges, including criminal conspiracy and lying under 
oath. Kerik is also the former law enforcement official (including a 
stint as head of NYC’s prison system) who pled guilty to ethics 
violations and paid $221,000 in fines three years before that federal 
guilty plea. And Kerik is the official who withdrew his nomination by 
then President George W. Bush to head Homeland Security because he had 
employed an illegal immigrant as a nanny. His tainted past did not stop 
the law enforcement supporters at FOX News from giving him a televised 
platform to assault critics of police abuse, though.

Other law enforcement supporters repeated that “blood on their hands” 
tar brush theme advanced by Kerik. Those supporters included former NYC 
federal prosecutor and mayor Rudy Giuliani and current NYC police union 
head Patrick Lynch.

Giuliani harangued U.S. President Barack Obama and black leaders for 
stoking “anti-police hatred.” Giuliani, during his two mayoral terms, 
was dismissive of critics who opposed the assault on Abner Louima, the 
fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo and a chain of other police brutality 
incidents in America’s largest city. A 1998 Human Rights Watch report on 
police brutality in America criticized Giuliani for his “persistent and 
seemingly automatic defense of officers accused of abusive treatment –- 
even when he lacked a factual basis to do so.”

Police union head Lynch quickly assailed brutality critics after the 
recent police killings – a contrast to his reserved posture expressed in 
the wake of the September 2014 police assault on a pregnant woman who 
was slammed onto a sidewalk belly first. That 1998 HRW report stated 
police unions in NYC have often been the “primary obstacle” to efforts 
at implementing reforms.

Critics of police abuses have long contended that too many police 
departments in America act more like occupying armies in poor and 
non-white communities than as organizations charged with protecting and 
serving the public.

America’s Declaration of Independence, issued in 1776, assailed the then 
King of England for having armed troops occupying the then America 
colonies. The Declaration pointedly criticized the King for “protecting 
[those troops] from punishment for any Murders which they should commit 
on the Inhabitants” of the American colonies.

Writer Paul Craig Roberts, a former assistant treasurer in the 
administration of Republican icon Ronald Reagan, stated in a recent 
commentary that the U.S. justice system is “no longer concerned with 
justice.”

Roberts argued that with the justice system focused on the careers of 
prosecutors, punishing the powerless and protecting the powerful “it is 
hardly surprising that police lack any concept of justice.”

*/Linn Washington, Jr./*/ is a founder of This Can’t Be Happening and a 
contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1849351104/counterpunchmaga>, 
(AK Press). He lives in Philadelphia./

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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