Revolutionary Worker #1166, September 15, 2002, posted at http://rwor.org
August 26, 8:30 p.m .--police shoot and kill Marcellus Graham in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
August 27, 2:30 p.m .--police shoot and kill Ernest Prather in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
August 31, 7:30 p.m .--police shoot and kill Paul Angel in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.
September 1, 6:00 a.m. --police shoot and kill Jamil Moore in Canarsie, Brooklyn.
In the week before Labor Day, the NYPD gunned down four men in Brooklyn. The killings received little notice in the media--much in the way the other NYPD killings have been minimized since September 11, 2001. Here is what's been reported about these incidents.
Marcellus Graham was shot dead by cops answering a call about a domestic dispute. According to the story told by the police, Graham had threatened and then attacked his wife with a knife. The police claim that they shot Graham because he refused to obey orders to drop his knife.
Ernest Prather was shot by cops who claim he refused to drop a gun. The "deadly weapon" turned out to be a toy gun. Prather, known as Dred, was described in the media as a "homeless man." In fact, he and his wife were squatters in a Bedford Stuyvesant building. He volunteered at the "So Great a Salvation" soup kitchen--where the incident that led to the end of his life began.
According to witnesses, Prather got into an argument with a woman at the soup kitchen after scolding her for stealing and things spun out of control. Prather followed the woman to a laundromat. She says she called police when Prather threatened her and said he was going to get a gun.
When the police arrived, they came up on Prather walking down the street and stopped him. The police say he refused orders to drop the gun and instead "waved" it at them. They fired seven rounds, hitting him with three.
According to Newsday,however, one bystander said Prather was shot as he was lifting his shirt to show police that the gun was fake. Another woman on the scene reported, "I was two stoops away from where he [Prather] got shot. He said he ain't got nothing but a toy gun. They opened fire and he fell to the ground."
Another witness told the Daily News that Prather initially had the toy gun in his waistband, and he never pointed it at the cops. "The man lifted the gun out. He had the gun pointed at himself when they shot him."
Paul Angel was killed after reaching into a police car. The police say Angel stabbed the driver in the shoulder and hand, and the cop then pulled out his gun and fired a fatal shot at Angel in the chest. People in the neighborhood could not believe what the police said about Angel. Known as "Paulie," Angel was a neighborhood character. One man said, "Why would he do that? He's a nice guy."
Jamil Moore had been arguing with his mother and her fiance when someone called the cops. When four cops showed up, they confronted Moore on the stairway of his apartment building. The cops claim that Moore refused to drop a knife and that they "had nowhere to go" to get away from him. They fired twice, hitting him in the torso. His mother, Jennifer, who witnessed her son being blasted away in front of her, says, "He did not have a knife in his hand."
Two of the men killed, Ernest Prather and Jamil Moore, were Black. The nationalities of the others were not mentioned in the news reports.
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There is a pattern in these killings and the way the police portray them. In each case, the police claimed they were justified in gunning down their victim. And they quickly released information to the media in order to publicly vilify their victims. Tapes of 911 calls as well as criminal records and speculation about the "mental stability" of those killed all made their way into the papers. In this way, the police have attempted to have the "case" tried and judged on the basis of the police's own proclamations.
Each shooting has been presented as an isolated incident, not as part of a series of such incidents. People are not supposed to get alarmed about four people being shot to death by cops in the space of six days in a single area of the city. People are not supposed to question why the police shoot people involved in family disputes or who might have mental problems. People are not supposed to connect these incidents to a larger pattern of police brutality.
The recent shootings are the latest in a string of NYPD killings this year:
On June 5 a grand jury decided not to charge Luke Blake, a recently retired NYPD cop, for the April 21 killing of Mexican immigrant Ricardo Colon in Staten Island. Blake claimed Colon came at him with a knife, but friends with Colon the night he was gunned down say he had no such knife. The killing sparked outrage. According to the New York Committee of the October 22 Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, "The community (mostly Mexican workers) mobilized for ten days straight, and then there were nightly processions of 50 to 100 people."
At the end of June, Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes announced he was dropping the investigation of the NYPD's killing of Haitian immigrant Georgy Louisgene. On January 17, two cops fired five times at Louisgene outside of Brooklyn's Vandeveer Estate projects. The bullets hit him in the groin, left forearm, stomach, buttock, and back. Claiming that Louisgene "lunged at them" with a knife and a hook, the cops spun out a story of a "deranged" man who had to be killed. Since then another version of events has emerged.
An August article in the Village Voice described the account of a woman who let Louisgene into her building after he begged her for help. The police claim that Louisgene had "forced himself" into this woman's building. But she said that Louisgene was in panic, trying to flee from a group of men who had beaten him. She said he grabbed a grappling hook and a knife from her place to defend himself against the men who were chasing him. And she said Louisgene had asked her to call the police.
Another witness, who had seen Louisgene being beaten by the men, described what happened when the cops arrived: "He was reaching up with the stick, to gesture to the men behind [the cops]. He was begging [the cops] for help, said something like, `Those are the guys behind you! Arrest the guys!' " Instead, the cops shot Louisgene. Georgy Louisgene's family continues to demand justice.
The NYPD calls Kedrian Edwards a "raving, knife-wielding man" in order to justify killing him. On July 29 the police confronted Edwards in a subway car in the Bronx. They first fired rubber bullets into his chest, sprayed him with a blast from a portable water cannon, hit him with darts from two stun guns, and then moved in with shields. Edwards, 19 years old, was then shot four times in the chest.
Since September 2001, the people have been subjected to an endless chorus of praise for the NYPD "heroes"--while the cops continue to brutalize and kill. In opposition to this sickening tribute to the killers in blue, the voices of those who demand justice for the victims of police brutality stand out powerfully.
Ernest Prather's father, a retired NYPD cop, told the press, "He was my only son. We want to know the real circumstances, and how and why these things happened." Jamil Moore's mother, Jennifer, who works as a city bus driver, said, "You would think they come to protect people. This was a family dispute. They had no reason to shoot him. They come into my house and kill my son in front of me." Her fiance said, "It's cold-blooded murder."
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