After violent arrests went viral over the weekend, activists are holding New York City officials accountable for suspected misuse of social distancing orders to racially profile people of color. That misuse is being reported during the coronavirus pandemic, which is already disproportionally killing Black and brown people. Activist Tamika Mallory, who helped lead the 2017 Women’s March, called for a protest Monday on Instagram.
“We have to hit the streets to protect our brothers and sisters...especially our youth...from this terrorism,” she said. “We have to put our bodies on the line before these people kill someone. I see some of you already out there. We need a unified force.”
Mallory’s post included a video of three white police officers manhandling a Black teen in Brooklyn and threatening bystanders with arrest. “What are you looking at? You want to go with your friend,” a cop on the scene is shown asking one of the bystanders. When the young man asked what offense he would be detained for, the cop responded: “For not wearing a mask.”
Activist Shaun King also shared the video on Instagram and identified one of the officers involved as Michael Amello. “That’s a CHILD that this @NYPD goon punched in the face like that. When the video cuts off it’s because he started assaulting another young boy,” King said. “A family member sent me this. They were devastated.”
In another incident, three officers piled on a Black man in an attempt to handcuff him Saturday while another cop identified in media reports as Francisco Garcia confronted an onlooker. "Move the f--k back," the cop yelled as the zapping sound of a Taser can be heard in the background. "What you flexing for? Don't flex."
The onlooker identified in news articles as Donni Wright appeared to be stepping toward Garcia in the street when he grabbed Wright by the neck, slapped him repeatedly, and dragged him a few steps from the street to the sidewalk. “This did start out as a social distancing encounter,” Police Commissioner Dermot Shea told Spectrum News. “It escalated into what you see on this video with a total of three arrests made, recovery of a small amount of I believe marijuana, recovery of a Taser that was not an NYPD Taser in this encounter.”
Shea said although the majority of social distancing police encounters—and there have been hundreds of thousands of them in recent months—have led to compliance, there were "certainly some tactics that I was not happy with" in the recent incident.
Authorities told reporters Wright was arrested on charges of assault against a police officer, resisting arrest, menacing, and disorderly conduct, and the officer is being investigated internally.
"Saw the video from the Lower East Side and was really disturbed by it," New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted Sunday night. "The officer involved has been placed on modified duty and an investigation has begun. The behavior I saw in that video is simply not acceptable.”
It was, however, predictable. Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, said four weeks ago he pointed out the problem in the city’s overreliance on the police department to enforce social distancing orders. Historical inequity should have prompted a different response, he said. It didn’t, and now Black and brown communities are starting to see more signs of the same inequity playing out.
"In one community you see people being handed masks or nothing at all," Williams told PIX 11. "In another one, you see people being punched and thrown to the ground for the same infraction, the same violation."
Williams said in a statement Monday that he asked the administration to release demographic data on social distancing enforcement two weeks ago. “Now, we see both why they have been resistant to our calls and why it is even more critical and urgent they address this selective enforcement against people and communities of more color,” Williams said in the statement.
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Patrick Lynch, the president of the Police Benevolent Association, said in a statement Monday that officers are being used as scapegoats for poorly executed social distancing measures. “This situation is untenable: the NYPD needs to get cops out of the social distancing enforcement business altogether,” he said.
“The cowards who run this city have given us nothing but vague guidelines and mixed messages, leaving the cops on the street corners to fend for ourselves,” Lynch added. “Nobody has a right to interfere with a police action. But now that the inevitable backlash has arrived, they are once again throwing us under the bus.”
If nothing else, Lynch—who vehemently defended the cop at the center of the chokehold death of Eric Garner— is consistent. No matter how grave the brutality a person of color has suffered at the hands of police, Lynch can usually manage to persistently toe the party line: woe is the police.
from Daily Kos https://ift.tt/2SHTCjf
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