STILL WAITING FOR A WHITE SUSPECT TO GO DOWN IN A HAIL OF POLICE BULLETS
Chris Stevenson
December 16, 2006
A horribly bad situation is becoming astonishingly worse in Queens NY. Once you find out whose responsible, you won’t be surprised. Some black residents are now being harassed or having their homes targeted for raids by the NYPD. The going excuse among these blue guerillas is their search for what they claim is a mysterious 4th suspect who managed to sneak away from that barrage of 50 shots that wounded two black men (Joseph Guzman & Trent Benefield), and killed another (Sean Bell). It’s not that I doubt the claims of police in these situations, but this 4th brother must have been wearing body armor and riding a jet powered skateboard to escape that one.
How far will police go to prevent themselves from admitting they were wrong? I don’t expect rocket science from these guys, they are in many respects just high school educated white boys drafted into former Mayor Giuliani’s carpe diem (seize the blacks?) war. Problem is, with crime gone down in the city due to those same “Giuliani-Time” cops (what drug dealer wants a broom handle rammed up his bong?), what black New Yorkers have to contend with now are a bunch of Rambo’s without a Vietnam. It’s not “Kramer” that’s the problem; it’s the legion of racist police officers who are willing to go “Kramer” on blacks that is still the problem.
This altercation started in a strip club where the trio of black men was celebrating with more of their friends during a bachelor party for one of them. Not many people are inquiring what the police were doing in the club in the first place, the surviving victims, and witnesses claim those police never identified themselves. If true this actually puts Sean Bell at a worse advantage than Luis Baez was back in ’79. Baez, the Puerto Rican whose mother called the police because he was having an epileptic fit, and NYPD showed up only to fire on him like he was Godzilla, hitting him between 16-24 times. Or the black female Tyisha Shenee Miller, of Riverside CA back in the late ‘90’s, she was fired upon 27 times while in her car by 4 officers, and was hit with 12 rounds.
And then there is the Amadou Diallo case, perhaps the most famous racist cop shooting, the one immediately compared to this one because of its killer similarities, the dirty hands of undercover NYPD, the excessive amount of bullets fired, and that famous of all police excuses: “we thought he was going for (or had) a gun.” That shop that sells invisible guns in the inner cities is evidently still in business. What exposes the lie to that knee-jerk response is that white perpetrators do not get the “hail of bullets” even when they are caught in the act. Last September Kimveer Gill went on a shooting spree at a Montreal college. Wounding 19 and killing 1. Police came and shot him in the arm. Gill then shot himself. It was later found on his web page that he wanted to “die in a hail of gunfire.” No such hail occurred; Gill-like his idols the Columbine shooters-was white. “Hail of bullets” denotes something other than just stopping someone, it crosses the line of neutral to that of hate.
Stevenson is a columnist for the Buffalo Criterion. email comments to Stevenson at pointblankDTA@yahoo.com
How far will police go to prevent themselves from admitting they were wrong? I don’t expect rocket science from these guys, they are in many respects just high school educated white boys drafted into former Mayor Giuliani’s carpe diem (seize the blacks?) war. Problem is, with crime gone down in the city due to those same “Giuliani-Time” cops (what drug dealer wants a broom handle rammed up his bong?), what black New Yorkers have to contend with now are a bunch of Rambo’s without a Vietnam. It’s not “Kramer” that’s the problem; it’s the legion of racist police officers who are willing to go “Kramer” on blacks that is still the problem.
This altercation started in a strip club where the trio of black men was celebrating with more of their friends during a bachelor party for one of them. Not many people are inquiring what the police were doing in the club in the first place, the surviving victims, and witnesses claim those police never identified themselves. If true this actually puts Sean Bell at a worse advantage than Luis Baez was back in ’79. Baez, the Puerto Rican whose mother called the police because he was having an epileptic fit, and NYPD showed up only to fire on him like he was Godzilla, hitting him between 16-24 times. Or the black female Tyisha Shenee Miller, of Riverside CA back in the late ‘90’s, she was fired upon 27 times while in her car by 4 officers, and was hit with 12 rounds.
And then there is the Amadou Diallo case, perhaps the most famous racist cop shooting, the one immediately compared to this one because of its killer similarities, the dirty hands of undercover NYPD, the excessive amount of bullets fired, and that famous of all police excuses: “we thought he was going for (or had) a gun.” That shop that sells invisible guns in the inner cities is evidently still in business. What exposes the lie to that knee-jerk response is that white perpetrators do not get the “hail of bullets” even when they are caught in the act. Last September Kimveer Gill went on a shooting spree at a Montreal college. Wounding 19 and killing 1. Police came and shot him in the arm. Gill then shot himself. It was later found on his web page that he wanted to “die in a hail of gunfire.” No such hail occurred; Gill-like his idols the Columbine shooters-was white. “Hail of bullets” denotes something other than just stopping someone, it crosses the line of neutral to that of hate.
Stevenson is a columnist for the Buffalo Criterion. email comments to Stevenson at pointblankDTA@yahoo.com
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