Posts
The
NYPD Declares Martial Law in Brooklyn
14
March, 2013
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.”
“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.
Gregory
Malandrucco, a PhD Candidate and Lecturer at the University of
Chicago, studies history with a specialization on the Italian Fascist
dictatorship and Fascist ideology. On February 7, 2010 he was a
victim of police brutality. The violent assault by Chicago Police he
endured has resulted in a federal civil rights lawsuit against the
city, the Chicago Police, and the individual officers who attacked
him. You can find him on Twitter at @GMalandrucco
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