PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness
ISSN: 1543-0855
Issue 5 (2007)
| PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness ISSN: 1543-0855 Issue 5 (2007) |
|
SEAN BELL, THE BLA AND 50-PLUS SHOTS–A REPORT: OR, POLICE BRUTALITY AND MURDER IN A POLICE STATE FOR U.S. BLACKS |
Say you shot at the man, ’cause you thought he was strapped.
But you killed a man ’cause you thought he was shooting back.
Black America, what type of garbage is that?
The police academy arming these fools with gats.
If your reason was you thought he carry a gun,
That mean you killed him for nothing, ’cause he ain’t have one.
I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired, son.
Hope change get here before the revolution come!
—Papoose, “50 Shots”
If there’s one thing “America’s” institution of law enforcement is consistently doing as a deviation from protecting and serving our communities, it’s been punishing and slaughtering. The state is continuing to create an environment of fear in our society, rather than establishing peace and safety. Recently, the FBI cracked down on eight out of the nine Black Liberation Army (BLA) members indicted under charges of conspiracy and murder of a San Francisco police officer in 1971. Similarly, the criminalization of the victims and witnesses in the case of Sean Bell, a 23 year-old bridegroom shot 50-plus times by five New York City police officers in front of a nightclub in Queens, New York, showcases a blatant disregard for Black life as well. The public needs to address the system’s attempt to reinvent the wheel of history, as it seeks to take our freedom away via the violence of militarization, whether through pistols, prisons, or policy.
There was a sweep of arrests made across the nation—on Tuesday, January 23, 2007: Francisco Torres (58) was taken from his home and arrested in Queens, New York. Herman Bell (59) and Jalil Muntaqim (55), currently serving time in upstate New York prisons at Great Meadows Correctional Facility and Auburn Correctional Facility, respectively, were re-arrested. Richard Brown (65) and Richard O’Neal (57) were arrested in San Francisco, California, and held on $3 million bail. Mr. Brown is charged with murder and conspiracy; Mr. O’Neal was charged with conspiracy. Ray Michael Boudreaux (64) and Henry Watson Jones (71) of Los Angeles were also arrested. In Panama City, Florida, Harold Taylor (58) was detained by police and is himself being held on a $3 million bond.
The FBI is still looking for Ronald Stanley Bridgeforth (62) on charges of supposed murder, conspiracy and assault. According to reports, Mr. Bridgeforth is believed to be now living somewhere in Africa.
These were members of the Black Liberation Army. Many of them had formerly been members of the Black Panther Party (BPP). The Black Liberation Army was a freedom fighting organization that believed in the unity of Black peoples through liberation struggle. They believed in self-determination, as had the Black Panther Party (BPP), which established health-care programs, which offered free medical check-ups, and drug detox programs. Legal-political education was provided to the community, too. The BPP helped tenants fight slumlords when tenants’ rights were violated, and created the Free Breakfast Program for children, later to be co-opted after COINTELPRO (the FBI’s “counter-intelligence program”) and placed into the U.S. public school system.
At the same time, because of pervasive police violence, the BPP and the BLA armed themselves for self-defense. The U.S. government saw determined, self-determining Black people as a threat to its status-quo and attacked any and all representations of a Black liberation movement. Many of the leading activists of these organizations and networks were directly affected by this onslaught: Fred Hampton, Jalil Muntaqim, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, and Assata Shakur all come to mind. Countless others were either killed, incarcerated, or chased into exile. Yet the “Fraternal Order of Police” blames the BLA for the killing of thirteen police officers over a ten-year period in the late 1960s and early’70s, even though there was and is no evidence to support these accusations.
From COINTELPRO to the death of habeas corpus with the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the U.S. government is making sure dissent is shot to the ground. The writ of habeas corpus was meant to serve as an important check on the manner in which state courts pay respect to federal constitutional rights. Famously, the writ is “the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action,” according to the U.S Supreme Court. But after the recent Military Commissions Act, many officials in the current administration would not be held liable for war crimes, torture, or punishment administered during the wars “America” is fighting in the Middle East, Guantánamo Bay and other undisclosed CIA sites where people are being detained and tortured. To lose habeas corpus means that thousands of prisoners in U.S. custody around the world can be detained for the rest of their lives and will never be able to go to court to obtain their release or justice.
In reference to the belated BLA sweep at the beginning of 2007, media and law enforcement are already deeming these eight people responsible for murder even though the information they have is entirely inaccurate. In the case of Muntaqim, reports have been made that he is being indicted on charges associated with this killing. However, Muntaqim had already been taken into police custody the day before the shooting, which took place during a standoff with police.
On June 27, 2006, Muntaqim was forced to give DNA samples by law enforcement at Auburn Correctional in relation to the San Francisco shooting. The federal government had his DNA on record; they took another sample to illegally harass him. Meanwhile, Muntaqim was serving time for allegedly killing two NYPD (New York Police Department) officers, a crime which he maintains he did not commit. Still, reports from the Associated Press claim that Muntaqim admitted that he had devised a plan to attack the Ingleside Police Station and discussed it with Herman Bell. Police reports to media add that he planned to be at the San Francisco police station. This is despite the fact that when federal investigators in San Francisco asked Muntaqim about the incident on tape, on June 27, the recording reveals him to say that he had no knowledge of the incident or why he was being forced to give a DNA sample. As further reported on July 10, 2006, in the New York Daily News, Francisco Torres was also forced a week before by federal agents to take DNA sample himself.
In addition, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that prosecutors planned on using ex-BLA member Ruben Scott to assist them in the closure of their case. But using Scott to testify during trial is an easily questionable tactic, especially since in 1973 he was one of the former Panthers who were repeatedly and inhumanely tortured for “evidence.” The court ruled in 1974 that both San Francisco and New Orleans police had engaged in torture to extract a “confession,” and a San Francisco judge dismissed charges against three men in 1975 based upon that very ruling.
It is in the interest of the “American” system of so-called “justice” to use scare tactics make examples out of others, to ensure that people will not act or speak out against oppression while uplifting those who are benefiting from this oppression. As stated in the New York Times, New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said that these arrests dealt a blow to the legacy of the protest group – for him, a violent offshoot of the Black nationalist Black Panther Party, which operated from the late 1960s until the early 1980s. Mr. Kelly said the arrests testified to the long memory of the police, especially for the killing of one of their own. “It is a good day for police officers in New York and San Francisco and everywhere else,” Kelly said in a telephone interview from Washington: “It underscores the fact that the law enforcement community is never going to forget.”
His statement is ironic, as a day after it the grand jury in Queens started to take in testimony and evidence from the controversial case of Sean Bell, who was himself killed by five NYPD police officers just hours before he was to get married. The police murder of him leaves behind his fiancé (now without a husband) and his child (now without a father). Friends of the bridegroom, Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman, were severely injured in this shooting which took place on November 23, 2006. “Law enforcement” agents will commit to justice when they lose one of their own. But, when “law enforcement” agents kill the civilians whom they are supposed to be serving, history shows us that justice gets thrown out the window – and shot to the ground as well.
These “homicides” are always deemed “justifiable,” which explains why recently only three of the five officers involved in the shooting were indicted; why they were indicted on relatively minor charges; and why the case was still pending trial six months after the shooting took place.
Sean Bell is not the first in New York City to be a victim of police brutality, to be sure. Amadou Diallo, Timothy Stansbury, and Anthony Baez among countless others have died innocently at the hands of the NYPD. Many community members are up in arms at this current case because of the repeated abuse or use of excessive force on innocent and unarmed people. One shot was one too many, and so many ask, “What motivated them to fire 50-plus shots?” What’s more, the case hits home with regard to a plight that concerns many of us in the Black community, the well-being of the Black family. Many of our men we know are in prison. Statistics show more than 70 percent of those in prison are Black and Latino men. Now we are losing Black men to police violence as well as drug dealing and other related crimes of economics. This leaves us with so many mothers raising their children without the support of fathers, trying to maintain financial stability against already terrible socio-economic odds. How common is this scenario in the inner cities of this country?
An additional frustration comes from the fact that NYPD cops have also harassed those who were witnesses at the scene and family members of the victims in efforts to criminalize them and lessen their credibility. In the media, reports were even released saying that Sean Bell had an alcohol level above the limit allowed to be able to operate a vehicle. The media has not placed much emphasis on the fact that one of the police officers shooting had drinks prior to the incident at the club attended by Bell, Benefield, and Guzman. Benefield was ticketed on December 28, for allegedly being involved in a “gambling bust” where people were playing cards and shooting dice inside a building in Harlem. When ticketed, the cops even asked him why he was on crutches, implying that they knew who he was, evidently, although the police maintain that they did not know it was Benefield whom they were ticketing, of course.
After photos of the cops involved in the shooting were released to the public, some made the argument that the shooting could not have been racially motivated because three out of the five cops were “people of color.” Commissioner Ray Kelly and other supporters of this view have maintained that the NYPD has diversified itself over the years, and that “incidents” like this are not “incidents” of brutality but, instead, “accidents.”
In any event, we know that the NYPD is part of a greater system, one which is built upon notions of racial hierarchy, one which embodies a racial hierarchy, without a doubt. Many institutions in “America,” including the government itself, enact laws and/or policies grounded in institutionalized racism. Consider how much time individuals serve for crack vs. cocaine offenses, for instance, or the stipulations made for taking out loans and mortgages. From these practices emerge white privilege, fortified. Together racism, capitalism, and patriarchy have created a vicious cycle of oppression that allow “people of color” to fall “in line” with the fraternal order of these negative ideologies; they allow and encourage “people of color” to become sell-outs.
“Practice without thought is blind; thought without practice is empty.” Thus spoke the great leader of independence in Ghana, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. What is fostering this mentality of “democratic fascism” in “America,” the U.S.? This is where “justice” is served only when it is not a threat to the Tower of Babel foundation of the system? The decades-belated BLA take-down and the Sean Bell case are just two cases in a long history of examples demonstrating what our people have had to struggle against since the days of slave-raiding and colonization in Africa. Capital punishment has always been a way to get rid of the spiritual and physical tradition of Black protest; and the fraternal order of policing in this state has created many divisions in our community to ensure that unity does not result in our self-determination. As our predecessor Fannie Lou Hamer as well as Hip-Hop’s newcomer Papoose explain, quite frankly, the Black community has been sick and tired of being sick and tired for far too long; and we will take our freedom rather than ask for it – now.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/us/24frisco.html?ref=us
http://www.freejalil.com/history.html
http://www.freejalil.com/jalil.html
http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/Announcements/pdf/Francisco_Torres_pick_up.pdf
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/01/25/MNGAUNOPVJ1.DTL
http://socialjustice.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/index.php/Black_Liberation_Army
http://www.freedomarchives.org/BPP/docs/DNA_Warrant_Harassment.pdf
http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html
http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/ENGAMR511542006
http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=1&aid=66507
http://www.gothamgazette.com/article//20040405/202/938
http://revcom.us/a/v20/970-79/978/baez.htm
http://www.ibiblio.org/sncc/hamer.html
Citation Format:
Allen Kwabena Frimpong. “Sean Bell, the BLA and 50-Plus Shots–A Report: Or, Police Brutality and Murder in a Police State for U.S. Blacks,” PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness: Issue 5, 2007
Copyright © 2007 Africa Resource Center, Inc.