NYPD Declares "Frozen Zone" in East Flatbush, Brooklyn

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NYPD Declares "Frozen Zone" in East Flatbush, Brooklyn

Postby Bruce Dazzling » Fri Mar 15, 2013 5:16 pm

NYPD Declares Martial Law in Brooklyn
Before It's News
Thursday, March 14, 2013 20:11

On the heels of three nights of protests over the police slaying of 16 year old Kimani Gray, the NYPD has turned the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn into a State of Exception, claiming emergency powers to suspend the constitutional guarantees of the citizenry.

The people regularly targeted by police harassment and violence, overwhelmingly the city’s poor and minority populations, have taken to the streets to speak out against the NYPD’s draconian tactics. The police have in turn responded with even further harsh measures by suppressing the right of the people to voice dissatisfaction with that very same police force.

Cops kettled protesters at Wednesday night’s candlelight vigil, resulting in 46 arrests. Police even arrested Kimani Gray’s distraught sister, Mahnefeh.

The NYPD euphemistically calls the public spaces in which the Constitutional rights of the people are suspended “frozen zones.”

Allison Kilkenny wrote about the NYPD’s so-called “frozen zones” in December 2011:

“The ‘frozen zone’ is an arbitrary, official police business-sounding title that has absolutely zero legal merit. It’s something the NYPD made up, just as the ‘First Amendment zone’ is something [Los Angeles Mayor Antonio] Villaraigosa made up to suppress media coverage of the Occupy raids.”

According to FIERCE, the “frozen zone” in East Flatbush is being used to prevent media from covering the protests and arrests. Meanwhile, people inside the “frozen zone” can be subjected to arrest merely by exercising their constitutional rights.

“It basically means the area is under temporary martial law,” writes FIERCE. “The last times the NYPD declared a Frozen Zone was on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and during the beginning of OWS.”

An arbitrary dictate that arrests protest and free speech, set forth by the institution that is itself the target of the protests, creates a potentially dangerous precedent of placing the NYPD beyond reproach.

Occupy Austin reposted this poignant summary of events by Jen Roesch as they were unfolding in Brooklyn last night:

“East Flatbush, Brooklyn is under martial law as the NYPD declares it a ‘frozen zone’. Media are being monitored and kept from moving and reporting freely. Dozens of arrests and much brutality. Kimani was shot in the back seven times; a witness is sure he was unarmed; multiple reports are coming out that the police had been waging a campaign of harassment against the young man (including taunting him about a friend who had died in a car accident and threatening to shoot him when he tried to leave). This is just blocks from where Shantel Davis was shot, dragged from her car and left to bleed to death in the street last summer. After that shooting, police went to all the surrounding delis and confiscated their surveillance videos. Residents in the neighborhood live in a state of terror. Heartbreaking, enraging, the stuff that riots are made of. This city is at a breaking point.”

Kimani Gray’s parents are scheduled to hold a press conference this evening to address the March 9 police slaying of their young son.
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Re: NYPD Declares "Frozen Zone" in East Flatbush, Brooklyn

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Mar 15, 2013 11:18 pm

Thank you, I wanted to start this earlier but didn't have the chance.

Some stuff I've received:

Image

by e-mail wrote:The NYPD has declared a portion of Flatbush a “Frozen Zone”, meaning media are not allowed in and people can be subjected to arrest for not following police orders. It basically means the area is under temporary martial law. The last times the NYPD declared a Frozen Zone was on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and during the beginning of OWS.

Please call 311 to demand that everyone in connection to tonight’s Kimani vigil/march be released from the 71st precinct in Brooklyn. There’s one Malcolm X Grassroots Movement member arrested & two Justice Committee (JC) members arrested. A ton of community members who were at the vigil/march were also arrested. If you have friends/family in NYC please tell them to call 311. If you live in NYC please call 311. Let’s get them free! Please share!

NYPD decided not to release community members and Cop Watchers arrested at the vigil for Kimani “Kiki” Gray. Please call 7182502001 to demand NO charges be brought against all arrested


Image

#BrooklynProtest IN EAST FLATBUSH
Candlelight Vigil For Kimani Gray


http://www.occupyastorialic.org/blog/20 ... -flatbush/

This week, there have been vigils and marches in response to the NYPD shooting and killing Kimani Gray in Brooklyn. I was there on Wednesday, and although the vigil and march started out peacefully, the cops decided to block us from using a crosswalk while we were on the sidewalk, and continued agitating the whole night. I believe that’s what we call a “police riot.” Click here for more info. Below are two of my photos from the night of March 13, 2013. Follow this link for more photos. – Jenna Pope


Image

In recent months through Occupy I have had the unique honor of getting somewhat to know the photographer and hellscallion Jenna Pope, a.k.a. #BatmanWI, the WI being Wisconsin of the Capitol protests, from whence she came to us. As for the Batman - I think she picked that up because she's everywhere!

Police brutality, police murders, and ending "Stop and Frisk" are going to be the big struggles in New York City this year.

See also http://www.occupyastorialic.org/forum/v ... f=19&t=190

The stop and frisk campaign has been one of Commissioner Kelly's signature strategies. The number of stops skyrocketed under his watch, as did the allegations of civil rights violations. But both he and Bloomberg have stubbornly defended it in the face of the criticism, basically by insisting that the number of stops follow trends in crime.

Lawyers for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is financing the litigation, allege that many of the stops took place without reasonable suspicion of a crime. Blacks and Latinos make up 52 percent of the population, but 90 percent of the stops.

If the city loses the trial, it would be a strong rebuke of the strategy, and could lead the court to appoint a monitor to oversee the NYPD--a move that would be unprecedented. Such a setback would tarnish Bloomberg's legacy and make sure that Kelly will not continue as PC after Mayor Mike is gone.

The Schoolcraft recordings captured police bosses ordering cops to do stop and frisks to make their quotas. The tapes place in sharp relief that the vast rise in stops was caused more by pressure from police commanders emanating from headquarters for officers to hit their unwritten quotas than some direct racial bias. In addition, the sharp rise is also explained by better record keeping, spurred by the fact that the number of stops became a number that the NYPD tracked to assess how well a precinct was doing its job.


And of course this incredible article by Steve Martinot on "The Militarization of the Police," posted by WR here:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=34301

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Re: NYPD Declares "Frozen Zone" in East Flatbush, Brooklyn

Postby Nordic » Sat Mar 16, 2013 5:05 am

I totally avoid mainstream corporate "news" .... is any of this in the "news"? I've read about it all over Facebook, because I friend and like so many alternative sites. But somehow I sorta doubt this is being covered in the Propaganda Press.
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Re: NYPD Declares "Frozen Zone" in East Flatbush, Brooklyn

Postby jcivil » Sat Mar 16, 2013 2:08 pm

Kiki and all the victims of the shitstem, above the law machine of slaves castrating and berating their brethren.

WAR. CLASS WAR. WAR.

Unconstitutional (fuck that constitution but still!) filth. Free speech zones. Frozen zones.

They had to drop the towers straight down so they would not strike 1 police plaza

downtown

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Re: NYPD Declares "Frozen Zone" in East Flatbush, Brooklyn

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Mar 16, 2013 3:32 pm

Nordic wrote:I totally avoid mainstream corporate "news" .... is any of this in the "news"? I've read about it all over Facebook, because I friend and like so many alternative sites. But somehow I sorta doubt this is being covered in the Propaganda Press.


of course not. total black-out. but this is not going away, and i believe the manifestations are going to become enormous. this is the year to fight back and maybe even roll back the local police state. it's really gone too far.
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Re: NYPD Declares "Frozen Zone" in East Flatbush, Brooklyn

Postby kelley » Sat Mar 16, 2013 8:40 pm

seriously? because what one expects and what one will get aren't the same.

what the NYPD is trying to draft in brooklyn is the prescription for a race war. one incident in the numerous liminal zones of the borough-- say, in or around the hoyt schermerhorn station on the A/C G line, where lines of color and class generally cross in the daily commute to and from their respective neighborhoods-- will be enough to set it off.

i'm assuming nobody wants this, but that's what it'll come to. on the part of the state it's typical divide-and-conquer bullshit, but i fear that's what it'll take to get fellow citizens to recognize their solidarity as middle-class aspirations for all continue to evaporate.
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Re: NYPD Declares "Frozen Zone" in East Flatbush, Brooklyn

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Mar 16, 2013 9:41 pm

That is the question. Maybe I'm optimistic from being in an Occupy bubble. Or from seeing the beginning of the end for the war on drugs (which is still going to take 15 years, assuredly).

But we're in the same city, and I also know plenty of angry white people around who think everything NYPD does is all just and necessary, for sure.
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Re: NYPD Declares "Frozen Zone" in East Flatbush, Brooklyn

Postby Luther Blissett » Sat Mar 16, 2013 9:43 pm

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Re: NYPD Declares "Frozen Zone" in East Flatbush, Brooklyn

Postby kelley » Sat Mar 16, 2013 10:01 pm

thanks jack. this episode in brooklyn has me worried more than any single thing that's happened here in the last twenty years. it's a generational conflict for sure, but complicated by issues of race, class, property, position . . . this can go many ways, but i fear each has a frightening outcome.
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Re: NYPD Declares "Frozen Zone" in East Flatbush, Brooklyn

Postby Luther Blissett » Sun Mar 17, 2013 1:57 pm

This piece posted by seemslikeadream in the Aurora shhoting thread is also apt. Didn't someone here once say that the wrong police murder of the wrong teenager in the wrong neighborhood could make the climate rife for revolution?


seemslikeadream wrote:
Tomgram: Stephan Salisbury, Life in the American Slaughterhouse
Posted by Stephan Salisbury at 5:31pm, July 29, 2012.

Is America an increasingly violent society? Statistics seemingly tell us no. From 2001 to 2010, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, violent crime victimizations actually dropped 34%.

While this decrease is part of a longer-term trend (and there’s still startling amounts of carnage in this country), it begs the question of whether the United States is really less violent than previously and, if so, where all that excess violence went.

It’s notable that, since 2001, the U.S. has been exporting and facilitating violence of all sorts all over the globe. Some of this violence is thoroughly sanctioned and some isn’t. In Iraq, members of the U.S. military committed violent acts against untold numbers of Iraqis, including military personnel who served Saddam Hussein’s regime, as well as insurgents, and civilians. (The U.S. invasion itself touched off Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence that killed tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands and continues to this day.) Though the numbers may not be comparable, much the same story could be told about Afghanistan, not to speak of Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Americans have also killed African pirates on the high seas and, just days ago, an Indian fisherman on a boat in the Persian Gulf.

Recently, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents have been killing suspected drug smugglers in Honduras. U.S. arms have been sent to Middle Eastern autocrats visiting violence on their own people and the U.S. military has trained African troops to more effectively kill African insurgents. American weapons have flooded Mexico and supercharged drug violence there. A war in Libya, involving the U.S. military, led to Tuareg fighters looting Libyan weapons stockpiles and committing acts of violence across the border in Mali (which was plunged into further violence due to a military coup by an American-trained officer). Today, America’s commander-in-chief regularly selects individuals in a number of countries to be placed on a “kill list,” targeted, and assassinated. And so it goes.

Exporting violence is not, of course, simply a post-9/11 phenomenon. It’s been an American tradition, from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, from Haiti to Hiroshima. When the U.S. exported war to Southeast Asia, it eventually engulfed Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in utter carnage. One way civilians there were frequently killed resulted from what historian David Hunt has trenchantly called “the sin of running.” A Vietnamese villager frightened by the roar of a helicopter or a door-gunner pointing an M-60 machine gun at her would bolt in fear or a young military-age man would take flight when armed American teenagers, who might detain, beat, or kill him, approached. As Vietnam veterans would later tell me, “running” branded Vietnamese as guilty, and so as enemies, in the minds of many U.S. troops and led to startling numbers of noncombatants being gunned down.

Today, TomDispatch regular Stephan Salisbury examines police violence in America, which may, hardly noticed, be on the rise. In poor neighborhoods, in particular, the “sin of running,” it appears, is alive and well. For the last decade, we’ve barely noticed as the U.S. spread violence globally. At home, we generally take note of only a few of the most egregious or spectacular cases of violence. Luckily, Salisbury has delved deeper and offers a window onto the less-reported version of American violence that most of us fail to see. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Salisbury discusses the lack of good numbers on police shootings and why they are so poorly covered, click here or download it to your iPod here.) Nick Turse

Police Shootings Echo Nationwide
Aurora Gets the Attention, But Guns Are Going Off Everywhere
By Stephan Salisbury

Welcome to the abattoir -- a nation where a man can walk into a store and buy an assault rifle, a shotgun, a couple of Glocks; where in the comfort of his darkened living room, windows blocked from the sunlight, he can rig a series of bombs unperturbed and buy thousands of rounds of ammo on the Internet; where a movie theater can turn into a killing floor at the midnight hour.

We know about all of this. We know because the weekend of July 20th became all-Aurora-all-the-time, a round-the-clock engorgement of TV news reports, replete with massacre theme music, an endless loop of victims, their loved ones, eyewitness accounts, cell-phone video, police briefings, informal memorials, and “healing,” all washed down with a presidential visit and hour upon hour of anchor and “expert” speculation. We know this because within a few days a Google search for “Aurora movie shootings” produced over 200 million hits referencing the massacre that left 70-plus casualties, including 12 fatalities.

We know a lot less about Anaheim and the killing of Manuel Angel Diaz, shot in the back and in the head by that city’s police just a few short hours after the awful Aurora murders.

But to the people living near La Palma Avenue and North Anna Drive, the shooting of Manuel Diaz was all too familiar: it was the sixth, seventh, or eighth police shooting in Anaheim, California, since the beginning of 2012. (No one seems quite sure of the exact count, though the Orange County District Attorney’s office claims six shootings, five fatalities.)

Diaz, 25, and as far as police are concerned, a “documented gang member,” was unarmed. He was apparently running when he was shot in the back and left to lie on the ground bleeding to death as police moved witnesses away from the scene. “He’s alive, man, call a cop!” a man shouted at the police. “Why would you guys shoot him in the head?” a woman demanded.

“Get back,” officers repeatedly said, pushing mothers and youngsters away from the scene, which they surrounded with yellow crime-scene tape.

Neighborhood residents gathered on lawns along the street, upset at what had happened near their homes, upset at what has been occurring repeatedly in Anaheim. Then, police, seeking to disperse the crowd, began firing what appeared to be rubber bullets and bean bag rounds directly at those women and children, among others. Screaming chaos ensued. A police dog was unleashed and lunged for a toddler in a stroller. A mother and father, seeking to protect their child, were themselves attacked by the dog.

We know this because a local CBS affiliate, KCAL, broadcast footage of the attack. We know it because cell phone video, which police at the scene sought to buy, according to KCAL, showed it in all its stark and sudden brutality. We know it also because neighbors immediately began to organize. On Sunday they demonstrated at police headquarters, demanding answers. “No justice, no peace,” they chanted.

Who Is Being Killed and in What Numbers?

This is daily life in less suburban, less white America. On Sunday, when the first of growing daily protests took place, Anaheim police shot and killed another man running away, Joel Mathew Acevedo, 21. Acevedo was armed and opened fired, police maintained -- yet another suspected gang member.

It is not hyperbole to say this is virtually a daily routine in America. It’s considered so humdrum, so much background noise, that it is rarely reported beyond local newscasts and metro briefs. In the days bracketing the Aurora massacre, San Francisco police shot and killed mentally ill Pralith Pralourng; Tampa police shot and killed Javon Neal, 16; an off-duty cop shot Pierre Davis, 20, of Chicago; Miami-Dade police shot and killed an unidentified “stalking suspect”; an off-duty FBI agent shot an unnamed man in Queens; Kansas City police shot and killed 58-year-old Danny L. Walsh; Lynn police and a Massachusetts state trooper shot and killed Brandon Payne, 23, a father of three; Henderson police shot and killed Andy Puente Soto, 42, out in the desert wastes near Las Vegas.

These are some of the anonymous dead. Their names are occasionally afloat on seas of Internet data or in local news reports. Many are young, even very young; many are people of color; many are wanted by the police for one thing or another; some are crazy; some are armed; some, like Manuel Diaz, are not.

In the end, though, we know remarkably little about these victims of police action. The FBI, which annually tracks every two-bit break-in, car theft, and felony, keeps no comprehensive records of incidents involving police use of deadly force, nor are there comprehensive national records that track what police officers do with their guns. Because of that we have no sense of whether such killings are waxing or waning, whether different cities present different threats, whether increased use of private security guards poses a greater or lesser danger to the public, whether neighborhood watch groups are a blessing or a bane to their neighborhoods. The Trayvon Martins of the world, who could perhaps speak to that last point, are mute.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report does include a more limited category of “Justifiable Homicide by Weapon, Law Enforcement,” defined as “the killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of duty.” That figure has hovered around 400 annually for the last several years. (In 2010, it was 387, down from 414 in 2009; in 2006, it was 386.)

Would Manuel Diaz fall into that category? Was he a felon? Can running fit the bill for “justifiable homicide”? The FBI does list all police officers killed while on duty, whether they are gunned down deliberately by violent suspects or hit accidentally by a car. (In 2010, the FBI reported, 56 officers died “feloniously,” while 72 were killed “accidentally.”) But the Manuel Diazes of America are not included in the FBI data sets.

Ramarley Graham, 18, followed and shot by New York City police last February, is of little interest to FBI statisticians. But the Graham killing, which has resulted in manslaughter charges against a member of the NYPD, stirred numerous protests in that city. Luther Brown Jr., killed by Stockton, California, police in April, and James Rivera, killed by Stockton police two years ago, stirred community protest as well. Would their names make the FBI list of “justifiable homicide”? Who makes that judgment and on what basis?

The Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics has been compiling data on deaths of suspects following arrests, but the information covers just 40 states and only includes arrest fatalities. From January 2003 through December 2009, bureau statistics show 4,813 deaths occurred during “an arrest or restraint process.” Of those, 61% (2,931) were classified as homicides by law enforcement personnel, 11% (541) as suicides, 11% (525) as due to intoxication, 6% (272) as accidental injuries, and 5% (244) were attributed to natural causes. About 42% of the dead were white, 32% were black, and 20% were Hispanic.

Total gun deaths nationwide in 2010? 11,493, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Who Is At Risk?

The lack of authoritative and comprehensive national data on police shootings and the reluctance of local law enforcement departments to release information on the use of deadly force has sent researchers onto the Internet searching for stories and anecdotal evidence. Newspapers looking into the issue must painstakingly gather information and documents from multiple agencies and courts to determine who is being killed and why. One major recent independent effort by the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2011 -- undertaken in the wake of community protests over two police shootings in 2010 -- confirmed anecdotal evidence drawn from virtually all major metropolitan areas. If you are a young man, a person of color, and live in a poor urban area, you are far more likely to become a victim of police gunfire than if you are none of those things.

The newspaper, which analyzed court cases, police data, and other documents, determined that there had been 378 victims of police gunfire in the Las Vegas area since January 1990; 142 of the shootings were fatal. And deaths from police gunfire, the paper found, had risen from two in 1990 to 31 in 2010.

Over the entire period of the study, the paper found that “blacks, less than 10 percent of Clark County's population, account for about 30 percent of Las Vegas police shooting subjects. Moreover, 18 percent of blacks shot at by police were unarmed.”

A joint study carried out by the Chicago Reporter and the online news site Colorlines in 2007 determined that “about 9,500 people nationally were killed by police during the years 1980 to 2005 -- an average of nearly one fatal shooting per day.” African-Americans “were overrepresented among police shooting victims in every city” investigated (the nation’s 10 largest).

African-Americans would not be surprised by this finding; nor would it come as a surprise to Hispanics to learn that they are increasingly at risk of police gunfire. Bureau of Justice statistics show that 949 Hispanics suffered arrest-related deaths from 2003 to 2009 (out of the total of 4,813 such deaths noted above). The numbers have bounced around over the years, but are trending up from 109 in 2003 to 130 in 2009.

Certainly, the Latino community of Anaheim is familiar with this territory. Orange County and Anaheim authorities have promised investigations of the two recent police shootings. The FBI is reviewing the shootings and the U.S. Attorney’s office has agreed to conduct an investigation at the request of Anaheim’s civilian authorities. Those authorities -- the mayor and five-member city council -- are all Anglo, while Hispanics constitute about 52% of that city's 336,000 residents. There is no civilian complaint review board in place to conduct any probe of police actions, no independent group gathering information over time. The family of Manuel Diaz has filed a federal civil rights suit in the case and called for community calm as protestors become increasingly restive.

“There is a racial and economic component to this shooting,” said Dana Douglas, a Diaz family attorney. “Police don’t roust white kids in affluent neighborhoods who are just having a conversation. And those kids have no reason to fear police. But young men with brown skin in poor neighborhoods do. They are targeted by police.”

Post-9/11 Money Is No Help

The last decade, of course, has seen an enormous flow of federal counterterrorism money to local police and law enforcement agencies. Since 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security has allocated $30 to $40 billion to local police for all manner of training programs and equipment upgrades. Other federal funding has also been freely dispensed.

Yet for all the beefing up of post-9/11 visual surveillance, communications, and Internet-monitoring capabilities, for all the easing of laws governing searches and wiretaps, law enforcement authorities failed to pick up on the multiple weapons purchases, the massive Internet ammo buys, and the numerous package deliveries to the dark apartment in the building on Paris Street where preparations for the Aurora massacre took place for months.

Orange County, where Manuel Diaz lived, now has a fleet of seven armored vehicles. SWAT officers turn out in 30 to 40 pounds of gear, including ballistic helmets, safety goggles, radio headsets with microphones, bulletproof vests, flash bangs, smoke canisters, and loads of ammunition. The Anaheim police and other area departments are networked by countywide Wi-Fi. They run their own intelligence collection and dissemination center. They are linked to surveillance helicopters.

The feds have also anted up for extensive police training for Anaheim officers. In fact, Anaheim and Orange County have received about $100 million from the federal government since 2002 to bring operations up to twenty-first century speed in the age of terror. Yet for all that money, training, and equipment, police still managed to shoot and kill a running unarmed man in the back, just as NYPD officers shot unarmed Liberian-born Amadou Diallo after chasing him up his Bronx apartment building steps in February of 1999.

Diallo was infamously shot 41 times after pulling his wallet from his pocket, apparently to show identification. Police thought it was a gun. The shooting precipitated national protests and acquittals in a subsequent trial of the police officers involved. The year Diallo was killed was also the year of the Columbine massacre, 20 miles from Aurora. It seems like only last week.

Since that time the nation as a whole has become poorer and less white, while police departments everywhere are building up their capabilities and firepower with 9/11-related funding. Gun ownership of almost any sort has been cemented into our American world as a constitutional right and a partial ban on purchases of assault weapons lapsed in 2004, thanks to congressional inaction. This combination of trends should make everyone uneasy.

Stephan Salisbury is cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a TomDispatch regular. His most recent book is Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Salisbury discusses the lack of good numbers on police shootings and why they are so poorly covered, click here or download it to your iPod here.

Note: Bureau of Justice Statistics data on the demographics of arrest-related deaths can be found by clicking here.
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Re: NYPD Declares "Frozen Zone" in East Flatbush, Brooklyn

Postby kelley » Wed Mar 20, 2013 8:35 am

on continued NYPD presence in east flatbush:

http://observer.com/2013/03/in-east-fla ... mani-gray/

In East Flatbush, Remembering ‘Hood Star’ Kimani Gray
By Rafi Kohan 3/19 7:23pm

Walking east along Church Avenue from Nostrand last Thursday afternoon, The Observer counted two police officers on every corner. At New York Avenue, there were five cops and two squad cars. From a row house just past East 35th Street, three men in bulletproof vests and black topcoats emerged. And once we reached Albany Avenue and saw the Police Department’s outsized Communications Division Command Post vehicle, we stopped counting.

“We’re kind of used to it,” one man told The Observer. “In neighborhoods like this, there are always cops around. It’s just more now.”

More, of course, because of the controversial killing of 16-year-old local Kimani Gray, who was shot seven times late the previous Saturday night by two plainclothes officers after allegedly drawing a weapon, and because of the subsequent nights of demonstrations, which resulted in instances of looting and dozens of arrests.

“It was terrible last night—the crowd, the stone throwing. I haven’t seen anything like this,” said Junior Harrison, owner of Island Pride restaurant. “I thought it was L.A. for one minute. It’s getting worse every day.”

Mr. Harrison remembered Mr. Gray as “nice kid” from the neighborhood. “All the kids around here, they always eat here,” he said, standing outside of his store near East 54th Street, less than a block from the vigil site. “The same day he passed away, he had his meal here. I’m going to miss him. He’s a good kid, from my point of view.”

Near where he was shot, a poster hanging in the window of a hardware store called for an independent investigation into the shooting. Inside, there were three men sitting on overturned paint buckets. Asked about the incident, the man in the middle took off his Twin Towers ball cap, scratched at his skull and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I have nothing to tell you.”

A variety of media reports have blamed outside agitators for stirring up the community’s emotions. While there were a variety of non-locals at the scene of the vigil even when The Observer visited it, at 4 p.m. on Thursday, it was clear that the community’s emotions were real.

“You can’t just take a life!” said the proprietor of an event hall called Extreme Elegance, who declined to give his full name, as we walked with him back down Church Avenue.

“Right now, if I have a problem with you, I wouldn’t call the police,” he continued. “People come inside here and rob me, and I would never call the police. Never!”

“Eleven shots!” chimed in Kevon Julian.

“He got hit seven times, but they shot at him 11. These kids, they’re terrible. But they get older. To me, they targeted him. Out of the crowd, they see him. They know what he’s about, and they said he had something, but he really didn’t have anything that day.”

A group of young teens stood staring at the posters around the neighborhood, which held grieving testimonials to Mr. Gray’s short life, until one said, “I’m out, son. I can’t see this kid anymore,” while two reporters shoved mics into another young resident’s face and grilled him about Mr. Gray.

“He used to do a lot of bad stuff,” the subject said.

“Were you afraid of him?” one of the reporters asked.

“No.”

Community organizer Shamar Thomas, who rose to YouTube fame with his video “1 Marine vs. 30 Cops,” in which he beseeches police officers to stop physically harming members of the Occupy movement, implored others to be constructive.

“We have to channel the anger,” the Brooklyn resident said. “Everyone is out here egging it on. But going to jail, messing with the cops that are right here. These ain’t the killer cops. We yelling at the regular motherfuckers that are on the street. Organizing is our only weapon. Unity is our threat.”

And then, on cue, Mr. Thomas broke away to calm down a middle-aged man who was not a local and was getting himself very riled up.

“They cornered us into a little group,” the man said, reliving the previous night’s demonstrations. “It
was like hundreds of us on top of each other, the way they locked us down. You couldn’t breathe … Then they started arresting the young ones. They threw me against the wall a few times. I didn’t understand. Grown-ups were getting thrown against the wall and they wasn’t getting locked up.”

Ostensibly all these demonstrations were for Kimani Gray—whom one resident described as “a hood star”—but they were rooted in long-standing tensions between residents and police. Many at the scene of the vigil were wearing anti-stop-and-frisk buttons.

“I don’t like how cops pull over black males for no reason. They don’t stop—no disrespect—white males. And then when kids die, people think it’s not a big deal,” said 13-year-old Iziah McPhatter, who hails from Downtown Brooklyn but was here with his twin brother and his father, a former Bloods gang member who founded an organization called Gangstas Making Astronomical Community Changes, or GMACC.

According to Mr. Harrison, it’s important for the community to have some closure. “They know what they’re mad about—it’s about the shooting,” he said, before adding, almost rhetorically: “Where do we go from here?”
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