For several nights over the past week residents of the Queens New York housing project, Baisley Park, experienced something they haven’t seen for two decades – Hell Night from the New York City Police Department.
Eighteen years ago it was the shooting death of rookie police officer EDWARD BYRNE that prompted the police to kick in all the doors within this southeastern Queens neighborhood. BYRNE had been assigned a detail to guard a witness in a drug dealing murder trial. BYRNE was alone in his squadcar when a lone gunman approached the vehicle and pumped four bullets into the car. That event set off a hellish week of instense police intimidation of all residents in the neighborhood.
Everything from arrest raids to open harrassment was done in order to apprehend the person(s) involved with the BYRNE shooting. In the wake of their overzealousness the police left a community abused, scarred and raw. It wasn’t that the good people in this neighborhood weren’t tired of the drugs and the destruction that they wrought. It wasn’t that the fair-minded people in this neighborhood didn’t want justice for the murdered officer. These people were GOD-fearing, hard-working and tax-paying, but most importantly they wanted the respect that any human deserves. They were tired of being treated like chattel.
One of the biggest problems that Blacks suffer from is the fact that their communities are populated by several disparate and diverse classes of people. Those that aspire to middle class status are adjoining neighbors that don’t have these values. The working class residents are met with the same treatment from the police as the people that are more than likely to be involved in criminal activity. The criminal elements in the Black community are sponsored by the police and the mafia because these people are willing to be the supply side in the drug trade.
Drugs are not cultivated, refined, manufactured, processed or shipped by the Black community. They are issued to Blacks using the same conduits that were used for the illegal numbers and gaming rackets and later in prohibition these channels delivered the alcohol to these Black neighborhoods for distribution throughout the community. When someone attempts to contact the police in order to stem the flow of the contraband the police release the informers name to the racketeers who then use terrorism and violence against the informant. In this way the murder of EDWARD BYRNE was more than likely an inside job organized with the drug gangs using information given to them by the police. Why was a rookie cop left alone on an important overnight detail for a Federal drug and murder trial? These are questions that are not lost on the Blacks that are old enough to know better.
The case of SEAN BELL is not that of the murder of another police officer, but the continuation of the tragic cycle of terrorism and violence that follows when a police officer feels that his manhood has been questioned in a public setting. The police now collaborate with a different mafia to move their agenda forward. The mainstream media has corroborated every twist in testimony that the police have issued for this case. The media has used the spectre of prostitution and drugs along with publishing the criminal history of the unarmed men in order to qualify the legitimacy of the police. In a cynical and insidious turn the New York Times has even created an expert who terms the use of excessive force by the police as a phenomena called ‘contagious shooting‘.
So the Queens neighborhood finds itself under siege again, but this time it is their own victimization that has made them targets. As the police search for the phantom fourth passenger on the grassy knoll we can clearly see that supremacy has no intention of losing this battle in the court of law or the court of public opinion. Doors are kicked in again and a neighborhood kneels on the sidewalk with it’s collective hands behind their heads wondering when the terrorism will end.
The end already came for SEAN BELL. Supremacy is the inconvenient truth.
