Sharpton vows to 'close this city' after officer acquittals

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

NEW YORK — Hundreds of angry people marched through Harlem on Saturday after the Rev. Al Sharpton promised to "close this city down" to protest the acquittals of three police detectives in the 50-shot barrage that killed a groom on his wedding day and wounded two friends.

"We strategically know how to stop the city so people stand still and realize that you do not have the right to shoot down unarmed, innocent civilians," Sharpton told an overflow crowd of several hundred people at his National Action Network office in the historically black Manhattan neighborhood. "This city is going to deal with the blood of Sean Bell."

Sharpton was joined by the family of 23-year-old Sean Bell — a black man — and a friend of Bell who was wounded in the 2006 shooting outside a Queens strip club. Two of the three officers charged were also black.

The rally at Sharpton's office was followed by a 20-block march down Malcolm X Boulevard and then across 125th Street, Harlem's main business thoroughfare, where some bystanders yelled out "Kill the police!"

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Let's assume, for a moment, that there was no racism in this case. And, no, I'm not saying that because two of the cops involved were Black--there are studies suggesting that all cops, black and white alike, tend to internalize traditional police attitudes towards minorities. I'm just going into hypothetical mode. Let's also assume that these three NYPD officers did everything by the book, that, according to the law and rules of police procedure, they did everything perfectly.

Don't we still have an enormous problem?

No matter how you size this up, the cops fired fifty shots at a group of unarmed African-American men. Whether the individual cops had racist motives is irrelevant: when seen against the backdrop of our nation's racist history, police killing innocent and unarmed Black men is racist oppression, plain and simple--as if cops killing any innocent and unarmed human being wasn't bad enough. I, for one, am not at all satisfied to say "unfortunate accident, bound to happen from time to time" and then forget about it. Because this kind of thing has happened many times before, and it's definitely going to happen many more times in the future, maybe tomorrow, maybe right now.

Why must cops use lethal force at all?

We've put men on the moon. We can communicate in real time with people on the other side of the planet. It seems to me that guns are insanely old-fashioned. And if good technology actually doesn't exist right now, if Tasers really are as problematic as reports suggest, then it's insane that we're not pouring billions into research to find workable alternatives. It makes no sense to me that cops have to kill anybody at all, except in the most dire of circumstances.

Why do people of color, especially African-American men, bear the brunt of most police violence, whether it's legal or not?

It is no secret that Blacks are disproportionately represented in our criminal justice system. It seems as though it's all geared toward keeping African-Americans down. If Blacks simply commit more crimes, which I doubt, then we, as a society, need to deal with the social situations that breed such crime, which would hopefully translate into a positive shift in above mentioned traditional police attitudes toward minorities. If Blacks are simply targeted more than whites, which I think is entirely possible, then we're in big fucking trouble: police departments throughout the nation are totally and straight-up racist. I don't even know how to begin unraveling that one.

I've called Al Sharpton a Bozo before, for his grandstanding and narcissistic grabs at media coverage, which I believe tend to alienate would-be white supporters. But that doesn't mean he doesn't do some good work, and he's totally in his element here, doing the old school civil rights agitation on which he cut his teeth. Nobody else seems to be asking these kinds of questions. The political and media establishments appear to be silent on this. If Sharpton wasn't out there leading this protest, the murder of Sean Bell would be, in the eyes of the white power structure and its propaganda, just another "unfortunate accident" to be forgotten about, and Black Americans, all Americans really, at least those who give a shit, would be once again left to just fume about it.

I really do hope they shut the city down. This kind of violence is completely unnecessary and must end. Now.

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