article_1.html

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
<HTML>
<BODY BGCOLOR=#FFFFFF TEXT=#000000 LINK=#FF1614 VLINK=#0F000F>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Hacked LAPD</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="The Los Angeles Police Department is really a
death squad who's mission it is to discriminate against, beat, rape, murder
and prosecute innocent citizens, especially niggers.">
<META Name="keywords" Content="LAPD, Death Squad, Discriminate, Beat, Rape,
Murder, Prosecute, Innocent, Niggers, We Are Better Than You, Suck Our White
Dicks, Porno Rules">
</HEAD>

<B>New Light Shed On Nationwide Police<BR>
Brutality Toward Blacks.<P>
Article by Paul Siegel<BR>
Staff Writer, Socialist Action newsmagazine</B><P>

The Mark Furhman tapes played during the O.J. Simpson trial have dramatically
revealed the hate-filled racism, brutality, and corruption that pervades the Los
Angeles police force. Furhman described in the tapes how cops routinely arrest
[black] people without reason, destroy evidence that would exonerate defendants,
plant evidence against them, beat confessions out of them, and give false
testimony. Los Angeles politicians and police union officials have attempted to
portray Furhman as an aberration, but there is no gainsaying the depth of the
corruption and brutality not only of the Los Angeles police, but of the police in
the Black communities of Philadelphia, New York, and other major cities of the
United States: New Orleans, Atlanta, Jersey City, and Chicago; have recently had
their own scandals.<P>

The pattern is the same everywhere-widespread brutality that eventually becomes
publicized through a few glaring atrocities, investigations, promises of reform,
and a continuance of the same practices. The underlying reason for this state of
affairs was given by the African-American novelist James Baldwin more than 40
years ago. "The only way to police a ghetto", he wrote, "...is to be oppressive."
The police "represent the force of the white world, and that world's intentions
are, simply, for that world's criminal profit and ease, to keep the Black man
corralled. The policeman, therefore, moves through the Black community "like an
occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country". This statement remains
basically true, although a more accurate formulation would substitute for "the
white world" the phrase phrase "the capitalist class's white power structure".<P>

<B>LAPD: An Occupying Army.</B><P>

As a Los Angeles Black police officer, Bob Grant, recently said, "A lot of people
[in the black community] describe us an an occupying force, and in many we we are
an occupying force. People not only don't trust us, but they hate the things we
do to other people". The LAPD was long led by chiefs of police who encouraged
racist attitudes [and racist crimes]. Chief Parker, who led it from 1950 to 1966,
would not even permit patrol cars to be integrated until the early 1960's. He
said of Mexican Americans, "some of them aren't far removed from the wild tribes
of Mexico." During the 1965 Watts uprising, he warned: "It is estimated that by
1970, 45 percent of the metropolitan area of Los Angeles will be Negro. if you
want any protection for your home and family...you're going to have to get in and
support a strong police department. If you don't, come 1970, God help you!"<P>

His successor, Ed Davis, fought fiercely against the increased hiring of women
and minorities. Darryl Gates, who was police chief from 1978 until forced to
resign after the 1992 uprisings that followed the initial exoneration of the cops
seen beating Rodney King on television, once said that the reason a number of
African Americans died when being held in police chokeholds was "that in some
Blacks...the veins and arteries do not open up as fast as they do in normal
people." The present chief, Willie Williams, is an African American who was
appointed to defect the tremendous agitation resulting from the Rodney King
incident. Constance L. Rice, a lawyer and regional director for the NAACP Legal
Defense Fund, told The New York Times (August 31, 1995) that "the hiring of Mr.
Williams had only hardened the resistance to change among many veteran police
officers. It's gotten worse since Chief Williams came on."<P>

Bob Grant, who moved from street patrols to a desk job after he complained about
bias in the department, said of Williams, "He's just window dressing. He isn't
there as a problem-solver. He's there to pacify people asking for change back
then. Black police officers in Los Angeles generally learn that in order to get
along in the department they have to go along. They come to accept the police
culture, just as Black cops of the apartheid culture of South Africa did.
However, some Black officers have now formed the Bryant Foundation, a 500-member
organization. It has file a lawsuit against the 7700-member Police Protective
League, the police officers union, charging it with being a "bastion of white
supremacy" and with having spent millions of dollars in membership funds in
defense legal fees.<P>

<B>Philadelphia's "Reign of Terror".</B><P>

The same pattern as in Los Angeles is present in Philadelphia and New
York--shocking revelations, an intransigent police union, and a city
administration that vows to root out corruption but denies that the corruption is
systemic. The Philadelphia Inquirer stated of a current federal investigation of
police corruption in that city: "Officers conducted a virtual reign of terror in
poor Black neighborhoods for years, stopping suspects at will, stealing money,
searching homes with phony warrants, and sometimes even planting drugs ...Working
with virtual impunity, these officers were driven by the opportunity to steal
money and drugs from street dealers and earn overtime pay for court appearances."
The Philadelphia cops in their "war on drugs" became themselves criminals and
drug dealers, and even got extra pay for lying in court. Nearly 50 drug cases
have already been overturned, and at least 1400 other cases are expected to be
reviewed.<P>

The city may lose millions of dollars in lawsuits, money that Mayor Edward G.
Rendell laments: "we desperately need for human needs and basic services". He did
not, however, show any particular concern in the past for these human needs and
basic services, any more that he showed concern for the neighborhoods that were
the prey of the crooked cops. So, too, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia
Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) has lamented that the expectation of more arrests
of police is "killing morale" in the department. This is the same police
organization that has been orchestrating a campaign for the execution of Mumia
Abu Jamal, who was sentenced in a travesty of a trial for allegedly killing a
policeman. Indicative of the bloodlust of its members are the mocking chants of
out-of-uniform police counter-demonstrators, chanting "Adieu, Abu" and "Burn,
Baby, Burn!", in response to demonstrations for Mumia's freedom.<p>

It's easy to see why the Philadelphia police harbor a special hatred for Mumia
Abu Jamal. In his death row-authored book, "Live from Death Row", Mumia documents
in a 1993 essay--Rodney wasn't the only one"--the systematic terror campaign of
police in Black and Latino communities. Citing a study by University of Florida
sociology professor Joseph Feagin, who studied 130 regional reports of police
brutality over a two-year period, Mumia writes:."The Feagin study showed that
African Americans or Latinos were victims of police brutality in 97 percent of
such cases, and white cops were centrally involved in over 93 percent of the
beatings". Mumia goes on to write about an astonishing report broadcast on the TV
show 'Justice Files'. "From 1981 to 1991, more than 79,000 cases of police
brutality, coast to coast occurred. If accurate, Mumia states, "These numbers
mean more than 7900 assaults by police a year in America. A civilian is
brutalized by police, on average, more than 638 times a month, more than 164
times a week!" Certainly we can describe this as an epidemic of police brutality.<P>

<B>New York Police Department: Corruption in New York.</B><P>

New York had its scandal and investigations earlier. The Mollen Commission issued
its report on police corruption in July 1994. This damning indictment was borne
out by subsequent investigations of police precincts in Harlem and the Bronx. It
was revealed that false testimony in court was so commonplace that cops cynically
would refer to it among themselves as "testi-lying". Far from having diminished ,
after the publication of the Mollen Commission Report, police brutality has risen
spectacularly. The September 20, 1995 issue of the City Sun, a New York Black
weekly newspaper, states that a report of the Civilian Complaints Review Board,
which is under the jurisdiction of the Police Department, will show a 90 percent
increase in the number of complaints of police brutality in the first half of
1995 over those in the first six months of 1993. A board spokesperson confirmed
that preliminary data show that there were 2854 complaints in the first six
months of the year as against 1501 complaints in the first part of 1993.<P>

The racist behavior of the NYPD was manifested recently in a melee at a
Pentecostal church meeting in South Jamaica, Queens. On last August 20th, a
retired police officer intruded upon an estranged companion at a tent revival, an
altercation ensued, and he was forcibly ejected by church ushers. He returned
with other cops. Eventually, about 100 cops in riot gear and hundreds of
churchgoers engage in a mixed battle that resulted in injuries to to 28
churchgoers and six cops. The churchgoers charged that the cops pepper-sprayed
and beat them indiscriminately. Police officials replied that it was the
churchgoers who started the fracas by themselves using pepper-spray and throwing
bottles. The police version of the incident would presume that the churchgoers
came to worship armed with canisters of pepper spray and bottles in the
eventuality of a fight they had no reason to expect.<P>

But the police had previously been involved in at least two attacks on Nation of
Islam worshippers. Following protests by Black and white ministers after the
first attack, guidelines for police behavior in dealing with places of worship
had supposedly been laid down by departmental headquarters, but the police seem
to have been unable to heed them. The explanation for the police's nervous
propensity to violence in the face of large congregations of African Americans
was given by James Baldwin in his 1954 essay: "Any street meeting, sacred or
secular, which he and his colleagues uneasily cover has as its explicit or
implicit burden the cruelty and injustice of the white domination." Finally,
Mumia Abu Jamal, in his 1993 essay, puts it in more practical terms: "The police,
tools of white state capitalist power, are a force for creating chaos in the
community, not peace. They have created more crime, more disruption, more loss of
property, life, and peace than any group of criminal in the nation."<P>
</BODY>
</HTML>
	<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
	<HTML>
	<BODY BGCOLOR=#FFFFFF TEXT=#000000 LINK=#FF1614 VLINK=#0F000F>
	<HEAD>
	<TITLE>Hacked LAPD</TITLE>
	<META name="description" content="The Los Angeles Police Department is really a
	death squad who's mission it is to discriminate against, beat, rape, murder
	and prosecute innocent citizens, especially niggers.">
	<META Name="keywords" Content="LAPD, Death Squad, Discriminate, Beat, Rape,
	Murder, Prosecute, Innocent, Niggers, We Are Better Than You, Suck Our White
	Dicks, Porno Rules">
	</HEAD>

	<B>New Light Shed On Nationwide Police<BR>
	Brutality Toward Blacks.<P>
	Article by Paul Siegel<BR>
	Staff Writer, Socialist Action newsmagazine</B><P>

	The Mark Furhman tapes played during the O.J. Simpson trial have dramatically
	revealed the hate-filled racism, brutality, and corruption that pervades the Los
	Angeles police force. Furhman described in the tapes how cops routinely arrest
	[black] people without reason, destroy evidence that would exonerate defendants,
	plant evidence against them, beat confessions out of them, and give false
	testimony. Los Angeles politicians and police union officials have attempted to
	portray Furhman as an aberration, but there is no gainsaying the depth of the
	corruption and brutality not only of the Los Angeles police, but of the police in
	the Black communities of Philadelphia, New York, and other major cities of the
	United States: New Orleans, Atlanta, Jersey City, and Chicago; have recently had
	their own scandals.<P>

	The pattern is the same everywhere-widespread brutality that eventually becomes
	publicized through a few glaring atrocities, investigations, promises of reform,
	and a continuance of the same practices. The underlying reason for this state of
	affairs was given by the African-American novelist James Baldwin more than 40
	years ago. "The only way to police a ghetto", he wrote, "...is to be oppressive."
	The police "represent the force of the white world, and that world's intentions
	are, simply, for that world's criminal profit and ease, to keep the Black man
	corralled. The policeman, therefore, moves through the Black community "like an
	occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country". This statement remains
	basically true, although a more accurate formulation would substitute for "the
	white world" the phrase phrase "the capitalist class's white power structure".<P>

	<B>LAPD: An Occupying Army.</B><P>

	As a Los Angeles Black police officer, Bob Grant, recently said, "A lot of people
	[in the black community] describe us an an occupying force, and in many we we are
	an occupying force. People not only don't trust us, but they hate the things we
	do to other people". The LAPD was long led by chiefs of police who encouraged
	racist attitudes [and racist crimes]. Chief Parker, who led it from 1950 to 1966,
	would not even permit patrol cars to be integrated until the early 1960's. He
	said of Mexican Americans, "some of them aren't far removed from the wild tribes
	of Mexico." During the 1965 Watts uprising, he warned: "It is estimated that by
	1970, 45 percent of the metropolitan area of Los Angeles will be Negro. if you
	want any protection for your home and family...you're going to have to get in and
	support a strong police department. If you don't, come 1970, God help you!"<P>

	His successor, Ed Davis, fought fiercely against the increased hiring of women
	and minorities. Darryl Gates, who was police chief from 1978 until forced to
	resign after the 1992 uprisings that followed the initial exoneration of the cops
	seen beating Rodney King on television, once said that the reason a number of
	African Americans died when being held in police chokeholds was "that in some
	Blacks...the veins and arteries do not open up as fast as they do in normal
	people." The present chief, Willie Williams, is an African American who was
	appointed to defect the tremendous agitation resulting from the Rodney King
	incident. Constance L. Rice, a lawyer and regional director for the NAACP Legal
	Defense Fund, told The New York Times (August 31, 1995) that "the hiring of Mr.
	Williams had only hardened the resistance to change among many veteran police
	officers. It's gotten worse since Chief Williams came on."<P>

	Bob Grant, who moved from street patrols to a desk job after he complained about
	bias in the department, said of Williams, "He's just window dressing. He isn't
	there as a problem-solver. He's there to pacify people asking for change back
	then. Black police officers in Los Angeles generally learn that in order to get
	along in the department they have to go along. They come to accept the police
	culture, just as Black cops of the apartheid culture of South Africa did.
	However, some Black officers have now formed the Bryant Foundation, a 500-member
	organization. It has file a lawsuit against the 7700-member Police Protective
	League, the police officers union, charging it with being a "bastion of white
	supremacy" and with having spent millions of dollars in membership funds in
	defense legal fees.<P>

	<B>Philadelphia's "Reign of Terror".</B><P>

	The same pattern as in Los Angeles is present in Philadelphia and New
	York--shocking revelations, an intransigent police union, and a city
	administration that vows to root out corruption but denies that the corruption is
	systemic. The Philadelphia Inquirer stated of a current federal investigation of
	police corruption in that city: "Officers conducted a virtual reign of terror in
	poor Black neighborhoods for years, stopping suspects at will, stealing money,
	searching homes with phony warrants, and sometimes even planting drugs ...Working
	with virtual impunity, these officers were driven by the opportunity to steal
	money and drugs from street dealers and earn overtime pay for court appearances."
	The Philadelphia cops in their "war on drugs" became themselves criminals and
	drug dealers, and even got extra pay for lying in court. Nearly 50 drug cases
	have already been overturned, and at least 1400 other cases are expected to be
	reviewed.<P>

	The city may lose millions of dollars in lawsuits, money that Mayor Edward G.
	Rendell laments: "we desperately need for human needs and basic services". He did
	not, however, show any particular concern in the past for these human needs and
	basic services, any more that he showed concern for the neighborhoods that were
	the prey of the crooked cops. So, too, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia
	Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) has lamented that the expectation of more arrests
	of police is "killing morale" in the department. This is the same police
	organization that has been orchestrating a campaign for the execution of Mumia
	Abu Jamal, who was sentenced in a travesty of a trial for allegedly killing a
	policeman. Indicative of the bloodlust of its members are the mocking chants of
	out-of-uniform police counter-demonstrators, chanting "Adieu, Abu" and "Burn,
	Baby, Burn!", in response to demonstrations for Mumia's freedom.<p>

	It's easy to see why the Philadelphia police harbor a special hatred for Mumia
	Abu Jamal. In his death row-authored book, "Live from Death Row", Mumia documents
	in a 1993 essay--Rodney wasn't the only one"--the systematic terror campaign of
	police in Black and Latino communities. Citing a study by University of Florida
	sociology professor Joseph Feagin, who studied 130 regional reports of police
	brutality over a two-year period, Mumia writes:."The Feagin study showed that
	African Americans or Latinos were victims of police brutality in 97 percent of
	such cases, and white cops were centrally involved in over 93 percent of the
	beatings". Mumia goes on to write about an astonishing report broadcast on the TV
	show 'Justice Files'. "From 1981 to 1991, more than 79,000 cases of police
	brutality, coast to coast occurred. If accurate, Mumia states, "These numbers
	mean more than 7900 assaults by police a year in America. A civilian is
	brutalized by police, on average, more than 638 times a month, more than 164
	times a week!" Certainly we can describe this as an epidemic of police brutality.<P>

	<B>New York Police Department: Corruption in New York.</B><P>

	New York had its scandal and investigations earlier. The Mollen Commission issued
	its report on police corruption in July 1994. This damning indictment was borne
	out by subsequent investigations of police precincts in Harlem and the Bronx. It
	was revealed that false testimony in court was so commonplace that cops cynically
	would refer to it among themselves as "testi-lying". Far from having diminished ,
	after the publication of the Mollen Commission Report, police brutality has risen
	spectacularly. The September 20, 1995 issue of the City Sun, a New York Black
	weekly newspaper, states that a report of the Civilian Complaints Review Board,
	which is under the jurisdiction of the Police Department, will show a 90 percent
	increase in the number of complaints of police brutality in the first half of
	1995 over those in the first six months of 1993. A board spokesperson confirmed
	that preliminary data show that there were 2854 complaints in the first six
	months of the year as against 1501 complaints in the first part of 1993.<P>

	The racist behavior of the NYPD was manifested recently in a melee at a
	Pentecostal church meeting in South Jamaica, Queens. On last August 20th, a
	retired police officer intruded upon an estranged companion at a tent revival, an
	altercation ensued, and he was forcibly ejected by church ushers. He returned
	with other cops. Eventually, about 100 cops in riot gear and hundreds of
	churchgoers engage in a mixed battle that resulted in injuries to to 28
	churchgoers and six cops. The churchgoers charged that the cops pepper-sprayed
	and beat them indiscriminately. Police officials replied that it was the
	churchgoers who started the fracas by themselves using pepper-spray and throwing
	bottles. The police version of the incident would presume that the churchgoers
	came to worship armed with canisters of pepper spray and bottles in the
	eventuality of a fight they had no reason to expect.<P>

	But the police had previously been involved in at least two attacks on Nation of
	Islam worshippers. Following protests by Black and white ministers after the
	first attack, guidelines for police behavior in dealing with places of worship
	had supposedly been laid down by departmental headquarters, but the police seem
	to have been unable to heed them. The explanation for the police's nervous
	propensity to violence in the face of large congregations of African Americans
	was given by James Baldwin in his 1954 essay: "Any street meeting, sacred or
	secular, which he and his colleagues uneasily cover has as its explicit or
	implicit burden the cruelty and injustice of the white domination." Finally,
	Mumia Abu Jamal, in his 1993 essay, puts it in more practical terms: "The police,
	tools of white state capitalist power, are a force for creating chaos in the
	community, not peace. They have created more crime, more disruption, more loss of
	property, life, and peace than any group of criminal in the nation."<P>
	</BODY>
	</HTML>