Police
The
NYPD Declares War
The Politics of Dead Cops and the Coming Repression
by
MIKE KING
There’s blood on many
hands tonight. Those that incited violence on this street under the guise of
protest, 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.
That blood on the hands starts on the steps of city hall in the office of the
mayor.
“We have, for the first
time in a number of years, become a ‘wartime’ police department. We will act
accordingly.”
Already
a suspect in the shooting of his girlfriend earlier that morning in Baltimore,
Ismaaiyl Brinsley ambushed NYC police
officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos Saturday afternoon as they sat in their
patrol car in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Brinsley had recently posted his
plans on Instagram – to kill two
police officers as an act of revenge for the killing of Eric Garner in Staten
Island, New York and Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Brinsley
killed himself after being pursued by responding officers. New York City now
stands on the brink of a police mutiny, as the killing of these two police
officers has heightened tensions over policing in the city with the largest
police force in the country.
Lynch,
the NYPD’s union chief has consistently challenged Mayor de Blasio’s
leadership, here holding him and the movement that has arisen in opposition to
police violence and unaccountability, responsible for the police deaths.
The
former mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, also used the recently killed cops
to criminalize the movement. Never one to fall short in a hyperbole
competition, Giuliani’s identification of
Brinsley’s ‘accomplices’ aimed even higher than de Blasio, with Giuliani
stating, “We’ve had four months of propaganda – starting with the president –
that everybody should hate the police.” New York’s Governor George Pataki took to Twitter,
which I guess is an accepted Gubernatorial forum for the expression of grief
over two dead police, with the following: “Sickened by these barbaric acts,
which sadly are a predictable outcome of divisive anti-cop rhetoric of Eric
Holder and Mayor de Blasio.”
These
‘us versus them’ dichotomies and bombastic finger-pointings are not exceptional
in this country today, they are standard political maneuvers designed to
obscure, intimidate, and silence. A rational person might attempt to add that the
sole perpetrator of this crime, theonly one responsible (in any way
whatsoever) for the death of those two officers in Brooklyn, is dead. That is a
fact that Giuliani, Lynch, Pataki and others will try to make taboo,
unthinkable, unpatriotic, etc., but it is a fact that is hard to refute.
These statements are for
political effect, but who is the target? Is it de Blasio? Obama? No. Quite
clearly the target of the NYPD’s moralistic monologue is the movement as a
whole – each and every person who has taken to the streets in the past few
months, all across the country, to say no to police killings of unarmed Black
men, no to racial profiling, no to the racist drug war, no to all forms of
state-sanctioned racism. Whether you were using your body to stop traffic on
the highway, or you were holding a sign standing on the sidewalk; whether you
seek to abolish the police, or simply want a criminal trial for Darren Wilson
in St. Louis or Daniel Pantaleo in New York – if you see yourself in any way
affiliated with the movement that has arisen in the past months to try and put
an end to racist police practices, you are the target of this sabre rattling.
Moving forward, movement
solidarity will be key as the NYPD’s talk of “war” starts to materialize into
physical repression and various power holders start handing out respectability
badges to anyone who will throw more militant or radical protesters under the
(armored police) bus...
Read more at: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/23/the-politics-of-dead-cops-and-the-coming-repression/
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