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.
If you didn’t already know, this is where you’d learn. Nicely done, DP.
Trying to figure this picture out……….
Is dude dead or just fucked up?!
ironic…killing a black man creates an excuse to harass the whole black community in search of a phantom perp….win/win
o btw..ever seen clockers?! fav movie ever…harvey kittel (sp?) and Da Bomb lol….great flick…o we can’t forget about “scientific” lol…gotta read the book it was based on
DP, Straight up, to the point and on target. Hate to say it, but some of them youngins’ need drop by and learn a thing two.
DallasPenn.Com….Hip Hop with conscience!
Keep brining the History Dallas, you’re better than Google.
Ya man Fat Cat Nichols is gonna be a subject on American Gangster, correct?
Wa da, Fuk?
Yaw’ll just went ballistic since I been gone! This is terrible! The only insight I get is through your column. Keep spitting the truth! There are those of us out here that depend on you for it!
“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”
What beats me the most about that case in particular is why in the HECK would they assign a rookie a job that the Feds should be on top of anyhow? Cyatdag it…the nonsense in this country…
A great post Dallas. I’ve mentioned you here at my blog. I’m not at your superstar level of bloggativity, but I’m workin’ on it. 🙂
^Bloggativity ?!?
That still sounds better than “stream of concciousness rants”
True shit very true my nizzle.
great post DP
RACE & THE NYPD
By ADAM BRODSKY
December 3, 2006 — City Councilwoman Helen Foster says, point blank, that Sean Bell’s death was a “racist” act. Councilman Al Vann bemoans “institutional racism.” Councilman Charles Barron, taking the prize for recklessness, insists blacks “are being murdered” by cops.
What repugnant lies.
Racism almost certainly was not a factor in the tragic gunfire that left the 23-year-old groom dead.
But race definitely was.
Start with a fact that every cop surely knows: While the victim of an accidental police shooting is likely to be black, so too is the perp when cops are killed.
Of 21 NYPD officers shot to death in the line of duty since 1994, police records show that 14 (67 percent) were killed by African-Americans, four (19 percent) by Hispanics and three (14 percent) by whites. (In one other case, the killers included one black and five Hispanics.)
And, yes, New York cops do confront blacks more than they do whites. But that’s because blacks are disproportionately involved with crime – both as victims and as perps.
Even the Rev. Jesse Jackson admitted that, in walking city streets, he worries more about groups of black youths than white ones.
Two decades ago, then-Police Commissioner Ben Ward – who was black – made the point more bluntly (even citing the very area where Bell was killed): “Young, black men,” Ward said, “are ripping off the neighborhoods. They are doing the shooting out in southeast Queens and killing innocent people.”
Crime’s way down since then, but the racial breakdowns haven’t changed much. African-Americans, about 25 percent of New Yorkers, account for 60 percent of the city’s crime victims so far this year, according to an NYPD analysis last month. And more than 60 percent of perpetrators in murder cases were black (93 percent were male).
For each of the past three years, NYPD records show, nine of every 10 crime victims citywide were either African-American or Hispanic.
So were a similar percentage of perps.
With police responding to more crimes involving blacks, there are more opportunities for police abuse of blacks – including (rare) accidental police shootings.
(Again, blacks also benefit disproportionately when cops do their job; the vast drop in New York City homicides over the past decade has saved the lives of mostly blacks and other minorities.)
Let’s face it: To fight crime, cops must go to the areas where it occurs. A disproportionate number of police operations, like responding to calls, take place in minority communities.
The Kalua Cabaret, for instance, where the Bell tragedy started, is in a largely black neighborhood – and is heavily patronized by blacks. NYPD officials note that cops were called to the scene 26 times in the past 12 months.
Presumably, most of the callers were black.
The point is that if cops are going to protect the city – if they are going to respond to calls from blacks as well as whites – then inevitably they are going to come into contact with more African-Americans than with other folks.
And greater contact breeds greater potential for conflict – and for tragedies, like that of Sean Bell – even as blacks also gain from all the crime averted.
How unfortunate that racial activists mislead folks about the reasons for confrontations – insisting that police actions are often not just ill-motivated, but illegal.
If black leaders really want to cut down on wrongful killings in their community, one idea might be to focus more on stanching crime.
Steering more young black men into legal, productive lives would not only give these youths more hopeful futures, it would also reduce the number of interactions with cops and, thus, the opportunities for disaster.
Of course, curbing crime means helping cops – not attacking them.
A first step might be to stop calling them “murderers.”
abrodsky@nypost.com
Can some people deal with alcohol and other drugs better than others? WBR LeoP