Partial Readings: Kimani Gray and Police Violence
Partial Readings: Kimani Gray and Police Violence
Last Saturday, two undercover police officers in an unmarked car approached a teenager walking down the street in his Brooklyn neighborhood of East Flatbush after he broke off from a group of friends. According to police reports, Kimani Gray, sixteen, pulled a .38-caliber revolver on the undercover cops, who proceeded to shoot eleven rounds at Gray, hitting him seven times. A number of parallel reports have suggested that Gray was merely pulling up his waistband when the officers—who were reportedly black and Hispanic but remain unidentified—opened fire. Gray was declared dead on arrival at a nearby hospital.
In the days since the shooting, community members and activists have staged nightly protests and vigils between the scene of the shooting and the NYPD’s 67th Precinct, which have been rowdy and even violent at times. Controversy over the explosion of the hashtag #BrooklynRiot on the first night of protests quickly caused Twitter users to downgrade to the more anodyne #BrooklynProtest.
Throughout the week, news sources have struggled to keep up. Of the limited media outlets covering the protests in detail, the Russian news site RT has been among the most consistent: see nights one, two, three, and four. Like other outlets—including major TV stations—they have derived most of their coverage from Twitter users and livestreamers on the scene.
Meanwhile, the NYPD and local witnesses are disputing the details surrounding Gray’s death, with a key witness claiming to be “certain” that Gray was unarmed. The NYPD has since raised allegations that, in addition to four past arrests, Gray was involved in gang activity—allegations that may be legitimate, given the lasting presence of gangs in East Flatbush and the corresponding gun violence rate, one of the highest in New York.
This being said, the notion that these factors might justify Gray’s shooting–advanced by NYPD spokesmen, with a flood of online commenters all too eager to back them up–is appalling. To call the official reaction callous would be an understatement. “There’s nothing to indicate that this shooting, at this time, was outside the guidelines,” Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters in a clash with city council member Jumaane Williams, who has a legacy of challenging discriminatory policing and was violently arrested at Occupy Wall Street in 2011. “Under the reported circumstances, it appears to be a good shooting,” agreed John Cerar, the former commander for firearms training at the police department.
Council member Williams was not arrested during this week’s protests, as the Twitterati initially reported, but his Twitter feed has been the site of relentless updates and debate over the shooting since Monday. His spar with Occupy activists over “outside agitators” aggravating tensions in Flatbush began as soon as Monday night’s protest was first dubbed #BrooklynRiot. “Please stay the HELL out of our community if will only agitate our kids. It’s dangerous and counterproductive. Be responsible or STAY away!” he wrote on Wednesday. He also discussed the situation in longer installments with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer.
Kimani Gray’s death marks the latest in a slew of NYPD killings in the past year, beginning with the murder of eighteen-year-old Ramarley Graham in February 2012. Gray was killed only blocks from where Shantel Davis, an unarmed twenty-three-year-old black woman, was killed by police last June.
In each case, the NYPD has been resolutely unapologetic. Why? Wouldn’t it be easier for Ray Kelly to blame the killings on a few bad apples and clear up the PR debacle with at least symbolic punishment? Does he feel that apologizing for these crimes would betray the department’s routine racism and violence and undermine central NYPD strategies like stop and frisk? Or does he simply suspect that civilian oversight will never be a serious enough threat at 1 Police Plaza to require even feigned sympathy and contrition?
Kelly’s unflagging defense of his officers’ license to kill civilians under the slightest pretext is indicative of an approach to governing that is “Against Law, For Order,” as Mike Konczal put it in Jacobin last year. He wrote,
The “War on Terror” has made government agents, from presidents to CIA interrogators, into actors who aren’t concerned with rules-based governance but instead improvise against disorder and the courts that would try to limit their abilities. This mirrors the police officers fighting against broken windows.
For more on the “shoot-first” tendency at home and abroad, read on.
The Center for Constitutional Rights is putting the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices on trial beginning Monday, March 18, as the number of frisks conducted under Bloomberg passes five million. In the buildup to the case, the CCR has compiled an incredible database breaking down stop-and-frisk statistics for the five boroughs, according to which officers in East Flatbush’s 67th Precinct conducted an average of thirty-six stops per day in 2011. Meanwhile, the NYCLU has created an app to help citizens document the practice.
A coalition of civil liberties groups has released an extensive new report on NYPD surveillance of Muslims.
Twenty-six states now have some version of Florida’s “shoot-first” law. New York Mayor Bloomberg disapproves of such laws but isn’t curbing his personal “army”’s right to exercise similar force.
The Obama administration has amended its justifications for assassinating American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and his sixteen-year-old son in drone strikes in 2010.
The “legal equivalent of outer space”: Jill Lepore offers a refresher on Guantanamo and its legal precedents in the New Yorker (subscribers only) as some 100 Guantanamo detainees enter the fifth week of a hunger strike.
The United Nations finds that U.S. drone strikes violate Pakistani sovereignty.
A new book by James Smith examines the messy efforts of MI5, the British intelligence agency, to spy on writers and intellectuals from the 1930s into the Cold War period.
Cyclists are on trial in London over participation in an anti-Olympics Critical Mass ride.
Earlier this year, Katrina Forrester detailed how the state and private spying companies have collaborated to keep tabs on environmental groups including Greenpeace.
Protests over a proposed steel plant in the eastern Indian state of Orissa resulted in the deaths of four activists earlier this month. This week, women stripped naked in a further protest, only to be met with policemen’s lathis (canes). A new UNDP report on gender equality lists India below Pakistan and five spots below post-war Iraq.
On the London Review of Books blog, Tariq Ali issues a reminder about the ongoing bloodshed in Kashmir.
Also in the London Review, Dissent contributor Hazem Kandil examines the nuances of Muslim Brotherhood rule and ongoing protests in Egypt.
