More than eight thousand persons
participated in a demonstration in Wall St. March 3 to protest the murder of
Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Black man who was about to enter the building where he
lived in the Bronx, by four New York City police on February 4. The police fired
41 shots hitting Diallo 21 times.
The demonstration was the latest in a series of almost daily protests and other activities which have been held throughout the city to protest this and hundreds of other murders by New York City police. It was organized by African American Reverend Al Sharpton who along with five other persons was arrested for an act of civil disobedience when they sat on Broadway to block traffic. Another nineteen persons were arrested for occupying the office of multibillion dollar stock broker Merrill Lynch.
On February 22 about one thousand persons rallied in front of City Hall and then blocked traffic on Broadway in another act of civil disobedience. Four persons were arrested that day. Rallies are being held every day in front of the Bronx courthouse where the case against the killer cops is being held. There have also been marches and street rallies in most of New York's boroughs.
Amadou Diallo was an immigrant from Guinea who worked as a street vendor in Manhattan. He was a quiet person and a devout Muslim who did not even drink liquor and was much loved by his neighbors. His parents traveled from Guinea to take his body back to their native country for burial.
African Americans and Latinos are particularly incensed because unarmed African Americans and Latinos have been the victims of hundreds of similar police murders over the last several years. In addition there have been thousands of beatings and senseless arrests of youth of color.
The mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, has repeatedly defended the murders by his police, saying that they acted in self-defense. In the Diallo shooting he has again defended the murderers because they supposedly thought that Diallo was a dangerous criminal. In fact, the four cops have not even been suspended and continue to work. Two years ago one of the four policemen who killed Diallo also killed a young unarmed Black man named Patrick Bailey.
More demonstrations are being planned through the month of March including a march through Times Square and a rally in front of the Department of Justice to demand the NYC police be put under federal control.
There is very little coordination of the different activities organized by community groups and political organizations. Although several groups have put forward demands for reforms which would reduce the number of police murders and abuses, socialists within different organizations have emphasized that the problem of police brutality will not be solved until capitalism itself is eliminated. Racism and class oppression are inseparable from capitalism. They manifest themselves at the work place, at school, in housing and in health care. In fact, the increase in police violence is due to the ever more repressive nature of capitalism which has decided that Blacks and Latinos are excess labor which are only good for cheap or slave (prison) labor. Capitalism's new crisis of overproduction has resulted in down-sizings and firing of workers all over the USA. The large number of unemployed and underemployed, the state has decided, must be kept under control by violence and intimidation. Thus, the murders by police will likely go unpunished by the state.
Police murders and abuse are not unique to NYC and in a future article we will describe how it has become a plague across the United States of America.
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