Law Enforcement
DECEMBER 24, 2014
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.”
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