A year or two ago Howard Safir, the police commissioner of New York City, and Mayor Giuliani approved an advertising campaign for the police department in response to the growing public out cry against the continued abuses and terrorizing of innocent citizens by the police force. Courtesy, Professionalism, and Respect (CPR also stands for cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, medical lingo for, you know, getting a stopped heart beating again) were the focus of its advertisements. This campaign was aimed at improving the image of New York cops. Posters advertising this police CPR were placed in New York's subways and trains and found their way into local schools. I don’t see any of these advertisements in my daily subway rides anymore. Now in 1999 in New York City the same Mayor has been noted in local newspapers referring to the first public protests against police for the assassination of Amadou Diallo, as "silly and posturing for media attention".

The very same police commissioner responded immediately to the Diallo shooting by by saying that he found nothing unusual in his cops firing forty-one bullets at an unarmed man (I’m talking no weapon at all) and killing him. These two white men, the mayor and the commissioner, are occasionally recorded in interviews spouting and sporting their "couldn’t care less (that is careless) attitudes when it comes to the civil liberties and protections of those people who are not white. These men are just part of racist mechanisms that have long operated against the very lives of people in this fair city whose skin color is other than white.

As we get ready to turn the page to the year 2000, too many stories remain the same. The issue of racially motivated attacks and abuses by police against the people they are employed to protect, is not new news among non-whites. Most recently, before the assassination of Amadou Diallo, there was the shooting by New Jersey State cops of four unarmed black college students on the NJ Turnpike. As reported in both the New York Times and the Village Voice, they were shot at while in their van as it slowly rolled backwards, after it had been pulled over. The young man at the wheel said he was so nervous at being stopped by the cops that he accidentally shifted in to the wrong gear. The cops began shooting into the van as he tried to stop the van, but he was shot. The justification given by the officers for pulling over the van in the first place was that the group looked suspicious to them. The justification for firing 11 bullets into the occupied van was that they felt they were in danger when the van began to roll back. The young men were on their way to a basketball seminar. They survived to bring a civil suit against the New Jersey State Police. Their case is currently being tried in the New Jersey courts.

Also previous to the Diallo shooting was the brutal rape with a plunger, and torture of Abner Louima by Brooklyn police in a police precinct. It was the voice of Nurse Magalie Laurent recorded calling again and again to report this police crime. In 1997 I was asked to co-host with poet/writer Reg E. Gaines an event we calledBreak the Silence-Stop Police Brutality at the Judson Memorial Church organized by Refuse & Resist! At the event Ms. Laurent was presented with a Courageous Resister Award for her actions. I had the opportunity to hear Ms. Laurent recount her hindered and difficult attempts to report the brutal acts against Louima by the cops. According to Ms. Laurent, she had spoken a nurse who examined Louima when he was wheeled into the emergency room. He was brought there by some of those same cops who knew about his rape and torture at the hands of their fellow police officers. The nurse did not believe that the cops who brought him in were telling the truth about how his injuries occurred. This nurse further told Laurent that she was afraid to report this police crime because the nursing staff had strong affiliations with the local cops and their precincts. Some of these cops wives and girlfriends were nurses in the hospital. Nurse Magalie Laurent made the call. She endured threats, lies, and attempts at physical intimidation from other nurses and hospital staffers. She continued to call to make sure her voice was heard and some action was taken to correctly document Loiuma’s injuries and descriptions of the police attack.

All these incidents can be related to what is most recently referred to as racial profiling. Racial profiling is the police practice of suspecting someone of guilt because they are non-white, There is also profile stopping (which for years I had known as DWB or driving while black) the police practice of stopping a person and/or pulling over a vehicle and passengers because they are non-white. These present racist policies and practices indicate that the institution of racism is alive and doing well in the good ole U S of A (United States of Assholes).

Sadly, there have been many other racist killings, attacks, and abuses at the hands of the police (Michael Stewart, Eleanor Bumpurs, Rodney King, and Anthony Baez come to mind) before the assassination of Amadou Diallo. These atrocious acts, while not thoroughly and consistently covered by American media sources, have led people to organize their own groups to keep record, keep confronting, and exposing the corrupt racist practices in AmeriKKKa’s police forces. Some of these groups are Mothers Against Police Brutality,The Baez Foundation (begun by Iris Baez whose son was held in a choke hold by a police officer, asphyxiated, and killed), and "Stolen Lives" organized by the October 22 Coalition against police brutality. "Stolen Lives" is a book that documents, with descriptive text and photographs, those who have been brutalized and killed by corrupt police in America. In 1997, I organized and hosted the reading The Brutal Truth: Poets and Musicians Speak Out Against Police Brutality at The Nuyorican Poets Cafe to raise funds for this project. The pages of the book "Stolen Lives" continue to increase.

In 1996 Amnesty International released a report that stated attention should be paid to the rise of documented police acts of brutality against the populace in America. Even this report from a respectable national and international abuse watchdog organization did little to spur public officials into investigating and correcting these racist offenses. It was the protests of people after the Louima rape and torture that kept the issue in American media. It was the voices of New Jersey clergy speaking out and calling for New Jersey’s top police officials to step down after the NJ Turnpike shooting. The same clergy exposed the practices of racial profiling and race biased police training that caused New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman to request and receive the resignation of a top racist cop and finally investigate it’s police force. It has been the voices of protesters (led by Reverend Al Sharpton) and their arrests at One Police and the composed, astute, and elegant words of Diallo’s mother in the midst of her grief over her son’s brutal death that has helped people of varied races, cultures, and economic status to come together and not just let these racist acts to continue without authorities being held responsible.

I went to the last of the protests at One Police Plaza. There I interviewed some of the protesters and Rev. Sharpton himself about their participation in these anti-police brutality protests. There I once again heard the voices of the people who will not be quiet to racist corrupt police, and are not afraid to force New York City and America to confront it’s deadly racist present and past. Their words were not "silly" but clearly voiced a demand for accountability and change. It was the voices of these people in public protests that spoke truth to power. It will be the people who are able to come together and forget their differences who will keep racist police and other racist public servants in check.