Occupy Phase Two

There’s a thread (actually, several) on Facebook, the past week. It’s taking several forms, depending on whose talking on whose timeline, but it comes down to a few things:

What business do you Occupiers have being here? Why do you care? What business is it of yours? It’s not just some of the good folks from East Flatbush asking these questions, because quite a few are asking us to be there. It’s not just the Occupiers who aren’t there, or the “Kimani had a gun and got what he deserved” crowd, either. It’s a few folks from each of these crowds that are saying it. It’s so much who is and who isn’t there that speaks volumes; truthfully, only a dozen or so of us “Outside agitators” have been going. A lot of them are there because of my endless screeds to be there. Others have their own screeds, others just see it as newsworthy and in need of documentation.

I went first because it was East Flatbush. I’m from East Flatbush, and it’s always (in my lifetime) been a place no one lives on purpose. You live there because you can’t afford any place else, and because it’s got better shopping than Brownsville, next door, which is arguably the worst neighborhood in NYC. You live there if you have chronic medical problems that require you to live in close proximity to a full-service hospital, even one as nightmarish as Kings County, and you can’t afford to live near Bellevue. You live there because you have a minimum wage job, or because you’re an entry level municipal employee who takes home less after taxes and union dues than a minimum wage worker does. You live there because your parents do, and you need help raising a kid alone, and can’t handle the rent and the food and the babysitters yourself, and you just don’t trust anyone else. It’s a neighborhood with 3 generations in a 1 bedroom apartment, where you fear to call the police on the violent nut jobs downstairs, because you’re a single mom and they’re a scary family of psychos and arresting you is easier than arresting them. Little by little, it drives you crazy. You work and you work and you work and the harder you work the less you have. Your children grow up without you ever having any quality time with them, and you just want to get them out of the hood in one piece so maybe they’ll forgive you for never being there and think well of you when you get old, but it doesn’t work. See, the neighborhood will never really let you leave. How dare you think you’re going to leave us all behind? Did you think because you moved a few miles north we’d forget you? Well, Kimani Gray’s mom knows the answer to that question. Did you think getting your son away from here would save him from the worst cops NYPD has to offer? 

I don’t doubt that Kimani Gray may have done something, but I doubt it had anything to do with a .38 caliber pea shooter. The only witnesses that say they saw him point a gun at the cops are the cops, and the cops who say he did it are hardly boy scouts. I think maybe he got away with something that made those two feel humiliated, and they came looking for revenge. Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity, maybe it was a gang thing. I do know, however, that if he was a member of the bloods, then he sure as hell didn’t point a .38 at the police, because no East Flatbush gangsta would be caught dead with a .38 special. NO GANG BANGER CARRIES A REVOLVER. Listen to some hip hop, and here the words: NINE. 9mm. Glock, 9mm. Who carries a .38 special? Old police men. It was the standard side arm of NYPD until the late 90’s. 

Now I’ll mention a little NYPD tradition. It’s called a throw away gun, and every cop is supposed to have one. It’s a gun to plant on a suspect you shot who turned out to be clean, or a mistaken identity. It has no history, and there’s no way to trace it. Sometimes it’s taken off a suspect, or bought on the black market, which is rumored to be largely run by….cops. I believe in .38 special throwaway. It meets the profile, a hell of a lot more than straight-a student at a magnet school for architecture meets the profile of a gang banger, and that brings us to my next reason: NYPD.

To be totally honest, my commitment or nostalgia for my old hood only goes so far, but my fear at what my country and my city are devolving into goes a lot deeper. Think about this how many times this past year have you been horrified by something the NYPD did? How about shooting a helpless man WHO DID NOTHING in his car on a freeway in the Bronx because he took too long to pull over, and writing it off as justified because there was an electric drill on the floor of the car (they say) and they thought he might be reaching for it? How about two cops offering to escort a drunken woman home and then raping her? How about an officer using the FBI’s computer system to find the bra sizes of women he intended to kidnap, cook, and eat? I’m not even going to go the fact that within the past week, it was found that and entire group of officers and their CO’s had completely fabricated the charges against a protestor who was arrested for assaulting an officer, only to have video of the scene show the officers assaulted the accused? How many of these have to happen before you start to question their version of events? Ever heard of the boy who cried wolf?

This is beyond mere corruption. This is institutionalized terrorism. It’s the kind of random terror that’s intended to send a message to the populace that you obey without question or bad things will happen to you, and no one will ever be punished for it. We can do anything to you we want and get away with it. The Ton Ton Macoutes were Baby Doc Duvalier’s private army, the NYPD are Mike Bloomberg’s, and I’m NOT exaggerating. We may not be up to the level of sadism and cruelty and out-right expropriation of Mobuto Sese Seko, or of Anastasio Somoza, but we are going there, fast. So while you may have dismissed this incident as just one more in a seemingly endless stream of “justified” shootings, you’ve done this because someone you’re supposed to believe told you there was a gun, while all the witnesses say there wasn’t one. You say why did they shoot him then? Why did they shoot the guy in the car in the bronx? Why did they rape the woman in the East Village? Why did they want to cook and eat women? Why not? They’re cops, and as long as the regime that began with Rudolph Giuliani launching his campaign for mayor in 1993 with a brownshirt rally by the PBA and threatens to continue with the election of Christie Quinn as Mike Bloomberg’s “chosen successor”, just as Bloomberg himself was Giuliani’s chosen successor,  remains in power, none of them will ever see the inside of a jail cell, loet alone stand accused in a court room. 

We are on the fast track to the kinds of dictatorships the corporate state created throughout the developing world in the 1960’s and 1970’s that we looked upon in horror and wondered how our government could support such brutal sadistic dictators, and the answer should now be obvious: because our country as well is ruled by the same kind of people, and they are becoming more brazen with each passing day. 

So, why am I doing this? I guess I’m doing it because I still can. I’m doing it because I’d rather do this now, than hide my head in the sand and wait for the inevitable knock on the door, and all that happens to people like me under governments like what ours has now revealed itself to be. I guess the question is not, why am I doing this, the real question is, when will the rest of you start doing this?