Demonstration Against NYPD Police Tactics at New School

Student Action Defense Committee

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

11:40am - 5:00pm

Lang Courtyard, 66 w.12th st

“We take police brutality sitting down”

Shocked, terrified, or just plain pissed off about the administration’s use of the NYPD during a student protest? Horrified at the wanton acts of police brutality perpetrated on our campus? So speak up! We’re having a sit-in in the Lang courtyard on Wednesday. We’ll have some street theater, some food, maybe some music (anybody have an old-school boombox?). This is about facilitating open discussion among the student body, as well as a demonstration against NYPD presence at student protests. If they kick us out of the courtyard, we move to the streets!

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Boycott NY Post until Sean Delonas is Fired

The Huffington Post recently drew attention to this shocking cartoon published in the NY Post today. The cartoon, although reputedly playing off a chimp rampage in Connecticut, the deeper meaning is clear. Obama, as a black man, is the chimp who wrote the stimulus bill, and in the cartoon, has apparently been mistakenly shot by two police officers. What point could be conveyed, other than drawing together several of the most offensive racist tropes, is unclear. Such blatant racism is surprising, even from a publication as opportunistic as the Post. 

It is worth listing the racist tropes which this cartoon invokes. 

1. Black people are less than human, they are apes. 

2. Police shoot black people mistakenly, like animals, or chimps (but as a conservative paper, this is portrayed as hardly prolematic). 

3. Obama, as the author of the stimulus package, is incompentent and stupid because he is black/a monkey

4. Suggestive of the assassination of the US's first black president, a goal openly advocated by white supremcist groups. 

Gawker has compiled the cartoons of Sean Delonas, and it is very clear that this scum-bag artist loves to appeal to the very lowest forms of humour. If anyone doubted that this cartoon was blatantly racist, only check out some of Delonas's other fine offerings. 

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Police Execute Man at Train Station in Oakland

It seems impossible to explain why an officer for the Bay Area Rapid Transit Police shot and killed Oscar Grant execution style in the early morning of New Years Day. The Oakland community has begun to react with outrage, and clashes with police have escalated.

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Police Ignored Pattern of Violence Against Latinos in Long Island

The attack by a group of teenage boys that led tothe death of Marcelo Lucero, an immigrant from Ecuador, was not simply an isolated incident, but part of a long pattern of violence against Latinos by the young men in the neighborhood.  The Times provides an important look into why many believe that the Police failed to notice a clear pattern of racially motivated violence.

From the Times article: 

The attacks were such an established pastime that the youths, who have pleaded not guilty, had a casual and derogatory term for it, “beaner hopping.” One of the youths told the authorities, “I don’t go out doing this very often, maybe once a week.”

That was not news to Latinos in Patchogue, who say that regular harassment, muggings and assaults have had them living in fear — 11 men told The New York Times of 13 attacks, nine of them in the past two years.

But the Suffolk County police said it was news to them.

“We hadn’t noticed this,” Richard Dormer, the Suffolk County police commissioner, said in an interview last month when asked about the attacks by groups of young men. “And that’s a concern to us.”

Mr. Orellana is one of many Latino residents who believe that Mr. Lucero would be alive today if the police had taken crimes against them more seriously and recognized them as symptoms of a larger problem. While some Latino immigrants say they are reluctant to report crimes because they are in the country illegally or fear the police will assume they are, they and their advocates believe the police did not see a pattern because they did not want to see one.

“I told people, here the authorities are waiting for a white to kill a Hispanic or a Hispanic to kill a white,” Mr. Orellana said. “They keep attacking and robbing, and nothing changes. There had to be a death, and the death was Lucero.”

Prosecutors say the teenagers charged in the attack on Mr. Lucero chased another Latino man and shot a BB gun at a third that day. But the problems began long before Mr. Lucero’s death. And by the men’s accounts, the series of attacks involved far more teenagers.

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