A big problem is that they’re trying to conflate protesters, peaceful protesters, people exercising their constitutional right, and saying that they have some kind of culpability for this. And the protesters are not causing police brutality. They’re not causing these police deaths. The protests have arisen as a reaction to police brutality.
But this is sort of the way that racism works. In Ferguson, we had Darren Wilson, who is not indicted. He doesn’t apologize. He says he has nothing on his conscience. He probably was paid a fair amount of money for his interview and probably will make more writing a book, and so on and so forth. He doesn’t have any culpability. But racism, I think, in a lot of ways plays out in police interactions, that all black people somehow now have to apologize for this crime, and all protesters have to apologize for this crime.
And Mayor Giuliani, of course, has no problem linking the two. And, you know, he—his own daughter has been arrested for shoplifting, and—or, shoplifted—I don’t know whether she was arrested or not. I don’t think that he would be comfortable with the police reacting to her the way that they would have in other cases, but he makes it sounds like there’s no need for a judge or a jury or a trial for police to used brutal, mortal force against somebody.
as with the families such as Eric Garner and others who have died over the years, you know, because after the cameras are gone, no one questions what condition the families are in after the funeral. And that’s another thing that you might want to look at and write about, the tragedy that goes on post-media in a lot of families. And some of—I talk with people suffering with depression, thoughts of suicide, insomnia. It’s very horrific what goes on after the person has been laid to rest.
Any time you’re inconveniencing people and challenging them to change their way of life, there’s going to be friction. And this, of course, is going to cause a lot of friction here in New York City.
The mayor came into the office not with a great deal of credibility with the police department as a civilian and already talking, not as pointedly as he has in the past few months, but talking about his son. When he did talk about having the talk with his son, which every black father, including mine, had with me—he’s white, but he had it with his mixed-race black son—that caused so much uproar with the police department, it was already obvious that there was going to be a lot of pushback.
The thing that is most confusing, and I don’t know how to deal with this, is that you do see him and you see the police department enacting certain reforms. I think if you go back a couple of years, we had 700,000 stop-and-frisks, and this year we should tap out, I think, around 35,000-40,000 by the end of the month. But at the same time, even though they’re down and crime is down at the same time, I believe they’re over 80 percent still of black and Hispanic young men. How do you change that? I mean, that’s not simply a matter of doing a different kind of training. That can help a little bit, but that really speaks to sort of the inherent racism and racial profiling that we have in our whole society.
— source democracynow.org
Steven Thrasher, weekly columnist for the Guardian U.S. and a doctoral student in American Studies at New York University. His most recent article is “Two NYPD cops get killed and ‘wartime’ police blame the protesters. Have we learned nothing?”
Graham Weatherspoon, retired detective with the New York City Police Department. He is also a board member of the Amadou Diallo Foundation.