by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
BAR’s executive editor Glen Ford
“The police union chief instructed his members to impose a martial law-type policing regime on the city.”
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen Police Benevolent Association chief Patrick Lynch said New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has the blood of two dead cops on his hands [1], he was issuing a physical threat to both the person of the mayor and the civil authority to which the police are subordinate and sworn to protect. In a nation under the rule of law, such a statement by a representative of an armed and enflamed constabulary – 35,000-strong, the equivalent of three light infantry divisions – would trigger an immediate defensive response from the State, to guard against mutiny. But, of course, no such thing happened.
When Lynch’s PBA declared, in a prepared statement [1], that “we have, for the first time in a number of years, become a ‘wartime’ police department” and “will act accordingly,” that constituted an instruction to union members to impose a martial law-type policing regime on the city – with no authorization other than the weapons they carry. Sounds very much like a coup.
The “sacred monopoly of force” is what gives police a status that union paychecks cannot buy; what makes blue collar guys and gals “somebody” in society.
On Internet message boards, police union activists instructed the rank and file to refuse to respond to incidents unless two units were dispatched to the scene, and to double up even if given orders to the contrary. Under this “wartime” footing, the police would simply seize the power to deploy and assign themselves, as they liked – and to hell with the chain of command and civilian authorities.
To hell, especially, with Mayor de Blasio, who now travels nowhere except under the protective custody of police commissioner Bill Bratton, a “cop’s cop” and architect of the “Broken Windows” policing strategy that begat stop-and-frisk. Bratton translates de Blasio’s words into cop-speak, and has forged a tense truce between the uniformed legions and the man who won 95 percent of the Black vote [2] on the promise to put a leash on the gendarmes.
There is no doubt the cops feel betrayed – a rage that has been building in sync with the growth of a nationwide movement that challenges the legitimacy of the Mass Black Incarceration State, of which they are the frontline troops, the “heroes” in the war to criminalize and contain an entire people. The chants and placards are an insult and an indictment of THEM, and of their centrality to the racist project that has been an organizing principle of the nation for more than two generations. How is it that cops can be compelled to “protect and serve” marchers whose purpose is anathema to the American policing mission: to beat down, lock up, and extrajudicially execute dissident, disorderly, uppity or merely inconvenient Black people?
The cops understand the law, and that the law is conditional, based on place, race and wealth, and that in the end there is only force, the use of which is their sacred monopoly. It’s what gives them a status that union paychecks cannot buy; what makes blue collar guys and gals “somebody” in society. Most of all, they know who is nobody: the beatable, friskable, disposable, killable folks who would be prey on any other day, but have lately been allowed to repeatedly parade down the most protected streets of the richest island in the country, screaming defamations.
“The cops’ rage has been building in synch with the growth of a nationwide movement that challenges the legitimacy of the Mass Black Incarceration State, of which they are the frontline troops.”
The cops are understandably angry and confused. As primary enforcers of the social order, they have an intimate knowledge of actual class and race relationships in America. Their perspectives are molded by the geographic and social boundaries they patrol; they are shaped and informed by the inequalities of the system they protect on behalf of the powerful people they serve. (Yes, they really do “serve and protect” somebody.) The cop’s worldview is also firmly anchored in the history of the United States. He may not be aware of his profession’s antecedents in the slave patrols, or even that the U.S. Supreme Court once ruled that Black people have no rights that the white man is bound to respect, but cops are the reigning experts on the borders that delineate rights and privileges in their localities. They know that public housing residents have virtually no rights that cops – as agents of the rulers – are bound to respect. They know that whole sections of their cities, encompassing most of the Black and brown populations, are designated as drug zones where everyone is suspect and probable cause is a given, or as high-crime zones where every shooting is pre-qualified as a good one.
These are the Constitution-free zones, full of people who get and deserve no protection by or from the police. The very existence of Constitution-free zones means that the Bill of Rights is not the law of the land, but a Potemkin façade, a con game, a chimera – and no one knows this better than the cops, whose job is to ensure, as best they can, that everyone stays within their designated space.
For about a million Black people, the assigned “space” is prison. The Mass Black Incarceration State is the edifice that defines the American system of justice, setting it apart from the rest of the world in size, racial selectivity, draconian sentencing and institutionalized torture (80,000 inmates in solitary confinement on any given day). The police are the drones that feed the infernal prison machine, and keep Black America in a state of rightlessness. As Shakespeare’s mercenary warrior Othello would put it: We “have done the state some service, and they know it.”
“New York City’s police force is especially prone to mutiny and coup-plotting.”
The cops threaten mutiny if the State does not stick up for the men and women who do its dirty work. PBA honcho Patrick Lynch denounced “those that incited violence on the street under the guise of protests that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did everyday. We tried to warn, ‘It must not go on. It cannot be tolerated.’”
To which the protesters answer: the police killings and the criminalization of a whole people must not go on and cannot be tolerated.
The movement has come to a critical juncture, a moment that would have arrived even if Ismaaiyl Brinsley had not made his own fatal decision. It was always inevitable that the cops would at some point demand that the State dispense with civil liberties pretenses and allow them to crush the nascent movement. New York City’s police force – by far the nation’s largest army of domestic occupation – is especially prone to mutiny and coup-plotting. Thousands of cops, many of them drunk, stormed City Hall in 1992 [3] to express their utter contempt for Black mayor David Dinkins. But, the current crisis is far different, because it is the movement’s show, not the cops’. The people are exposing the most acute contradictions of American life through direct confrontation with the armed enforcers of the State. The cops are supposed to be upset. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. explained, “the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” The crisis is here, and will grow deeper, but freedom is non-negotiable. The movement must win or be crushed.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Political Mutiny in the New York Police Department. Does DeBlasio Order Officers to Turn in their Badges?
By Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, BAR editor and columnist
“The movement to expose police crimes against black and brown civilian populations in the US has forged a wedge between power centers that have the potential to be explosive and politically significant…”
[dropcap]In light of the killing[/dropcap] of two New York police officers, NYDP police officers literally turned their backs on Mayor de Blasio [1] Saturday night. Armed law enforcement employees, either in urban battlefields or imperial outpost war theaters are under discipline to respect and protect superiors in their chain of command. The defiant action led by Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association [2] (PBA) president Patrick Lynch sent an undeniable message to Mayor de Blasio that he could no longer depend on the unconditional commitment of the officers to protect him or his family.
Mayor de Blasio remarked to a group of police officers at the Brooklyn Hospital, “We’re all in this together.” The officers responded, “No we’re not.” This declaration indicates that there are no rules beyond their incestuous protections of the PBA and their rogue sense of entitlement. In the military, the commanding officer would have sent them to the Brig immediately. Certainly, there are different rules of engagement between militarized police departments and the actual military but the message cannot be lost on those who depend upon police forces to provide personal protection. de Blasio, may wish he had the flexibility to discipline officers in his militarized police force as the armed forces enjoy. “It’s f–king open season on us right now,” one officer said. “When is he (deBlasio) going to step up?” These statements reflect open contempt for the office of the mayor and the people of New York. Since 1670, slave patrollers and their contemporaries, police officers have enjoyed open season and distained their duty to protect and serve Black people. For example, President Harry Truman fired highly decorated General Douglas Mac Arthur for insubordination.
The movement to expose police crimes against black and brown civilian populations in the US has forged a wedge between power centers that have the potential to be explosive and politically significant. Police, who are accustomed to unconditional power to murder and maim Black and Brown youth with immunity are now facing challenges to white supremacist prerogatives and the language is vitriolic. PBA president Patrick Lynch belched: “There’s blood on many hands tonight… That blood . . . starts on the steps of City Hall, in the Office of the Mayor,”
The powerful PBA had the gall to warn their superiors, the NY Mayor and Speaker, to stay away from the funerals of the fallen police officers. Wouldn’t it be prudent for the governor given: 1). The history of violence by the NYPD; 2) the statement and display of insubordination and 3). The PBA warning to the mayor and speaker to stay away from the funerals to call out the national guard to protect the Mayor and Speaker from their own police department. This would set the precedent for calling out the National Guard to protect innocence from the police department.
“…political spokesmen ranging from the president, Attorney General, the New York Police Chief to the representative of the fraternal order of police have focused on citizens marching to end police terror instead of the need to improve America’s mental health capacities….”
The fight for justice, however, must be sustained in the face of efforts to undermine and weaken our resolve. African-American communities face overwhelming military and abusive treatment by police officers on a daily basis. However, civil rights organizations value every human life, including police officers. Statements below calling for increased activism and sustained actions by human rights and anti-police terror organizations reflect our commitment to this struggle:
Washington, DC: The Hands Up Coalition DC joins in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter and Ferguson Action in expressing our condolence to the families of the two police officers killed in New York by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28. We also extend our sympathy to the family of Shaneka Nicole Thompson, 29, who was reportedly also shot by Brinsley in the abdomen with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun at her residence in Baltimore, Maryland before he travelled to New York. Thompson is listed in critical but stable condition at a hospital in Maryland.
Mr. Brinsley attacked three people on December 20th and previous to those attacks had attempted suicide. Apparently, he was suffering from mental illness.
Unfortunately, political spokesmen ranging from the president, Attorney General, the New York Police Chief to the representative of the fraternal order of police have focused on citizens marching to end police terror instead of the need to improve America’s mental health capacities. These politicians have seized the opportunity to undermine courageous anti-police terror campaigns against black boys and men across this country. But we must never forget why we march. We march in the name of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Vonderitt Myers, Sean Bell, John Crawford, III and countless others who were assassinated by police with impunity.
There can be no correlation between the actions of a mentally challenged individual and the courageous demonstration of a new generation determined to end police terror and thus the destruction of the Black community. Political arguments attempting to link incongruent events is disingenuous and fallacious.
It is the goal and mission of political forces antithetical to the movement to end police terror to distract and attempt to deprive our movement of political oxygen.
We must not allow that to happen. #
New York, NY – Ferguson Action, the wide coalition first conceived in Ferguson, MO and recently responsible for the series of highly organized responses to police killings and abuses nation-wide has issued the following statement in response to the murder of two NYPD officers in Brooklyn earlier today:
“We are shocked and saddened by the news of two NYPD officers killed today in Brooklyn. We mourned with the families of Eric Garner and Mike Brown who experienced unspeakable loss, and similarly our hearts go out to the families of these officers who are now experiencing that same grief. They deserve all of our prayers.
“Unfortunately, there have been attempts to draw misleading connections between this movement and today’s tragic events. Millions have stood together in acts of non-violent civil disobedience, one of the cornerstones of our democracy. It is irresponsible to draw connections between this movement and the actions of a troubled man who took the lives of these officers and attempted to take the life of his ex-partner, before ultimately taking his own. Today’s events are a tragedy in their own right. To conflate them with the brave activism of millions of people across the country is nothing short of cheap political punditry.
“Elected officials and law enforcement leaders must not allow this narrative to continue, as it only serves to heighten tensions at a time when the families of those killed are in mourning.
“We stand with the families in mourning, we stand united against senseless killings, and we stand for a justice system that works for all.” #
#BlackLives Matter Issues Response to Murder of Two NYPD Officers
New York, NY – #BlackLivesMatter, a national grassroots and social media driven movement at the heart of much of the recent mobilizations against police violence has issued the following statement in response to today’s murders of two NYPD officers:
“Our hearts grieve with New York, a community already reeling from the losses of Eric Garner, Ramarley Graham, Kimani Gray, Akai Gurley, Islan Nettles and many more. An eye for an eye is not our vision of justice, and we who have taken to the streets seeking justice and liberation know that we need deep transformation to correct the larger institutional problems of racial profiling, abuse, and violence.
“We know all too well the pain and the trauma that follows the senseless loss of our family members and loved ones. We extend our hearts and prayers to the families of those who lost their loved ones this week. No one should suffer the loss of those whom they love.
“At the heart of our movement work is a deep and profound love for our people, and we are rooted in the belief that Black people in the U.S. must reassert our right to live be well in a country where our lives have been deemed valueless. Together, we champion a complete transformation of the ways we see and relate to one another.
“Now is our moment to advance a dramatic overhaul of policing practices. Now is the time to direct more resources into community mental health services and practices. Now is a moment for empathy and deep listening. Now is the time to end violence against women and trans people. Now is our moment to come together to end state violence.
“Our movement, grown from the love for our people and for all people, will continue to advance our vision of justice for all of us. Let’s hold each other close as we work together to end violence in our communities—once and for all.”
#BlackLivesMatter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression. #
Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo is the author of No FEAR: A Whistleblowers Triumph over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA, that is available through amazon.com. Dr. Coleman-Adebayo worked at the EPA for 18 years and blew the whistle on a US multinational corporation that endangered vanadium mine workers. Marsha’s successful lawsuit led to the introduction and passage of the first civil rights and whistleblower law of the 21st century: the Notification of Federal Employees Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No FEAR Act). She is Director of Transparency and Accountability for the Green Shadow Cabinet, serves on the Advisory Board of ExposeFacts.com., and coordinates the DC-based Hands-Up Coalition (www.handsupcoalitiondc.com)
Contact Marsha at: MarshaCAdebayo@blackagendareport.com and www.marshacoleman-adebayo.com
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