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December 24, 2014<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/24/rot-in-the-big-apple/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/24/rot-in-the-big-apple/</a><br>
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<div class="subheadlinestyle"><b><big><big>Bashing Critics Of
Brutality Betrays Efforts To Reform Police</big></big></b></div>
<h1 class="article-title">Rot In the Big Apple</h1>
<div class="mainauthorstyle">by LINN WASHINGTON Jr.</div>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><strong><em>Linn Washington, Jr.</em></strong><em> is a
founder of This Can’t Be Happening and a contributor to <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1849351104/counterpunchmaga"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.amazon.com']);">Hopeless:
Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion</a>, (AK
Press). He lives in Philadelphia.</em></p>
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