BROOKLYN, NY, March 11 — Hundreds of mainly black youth gathered on the corner of Church Avenue and E 55th street tonight, angered over the murder of their friend Kimani Gray by the racist NYPD.  It hasn’t even been a year since Shantel Davis was shot down in cold blood by Phillip Atkins, a plainclothes officer operating out of the KKKlavern, otherwise known as the 67th precinct.
The cops claimed, as usual, that Kimani had a gun but one woman at a window declared he was unarmed and his friends said the cops never identified themselves. The cops put eleven bullets into this 16-year-old, who lay face down on the ground pleading for his life.
Tonight Kimani’s friends were having none of the cops’ lies. At the vigil, two people spoke on a bullhorn, setting the tone. A black woman, who boldly confronted Police Commissioner Ray Kelly at an open forum in the fall, angrily denounced the cops as racist and demanded they stop killing black youth. Shantel Davis’s sister urged the youth to get involved in the fight for justice against racist police murder and recounted her numerous marches to the 67th precinct since June. She has since appeared on local radio and invited the whole community to her next planning meeting, this coming Monday night.
Then, dozens of enraged youth took to the streets down Snyder Avenue. When it was proposed to march down Church Avenue, the major thoroughfare, the youth shouted yes! We going to Church!
Hundreds poured into the streets chanting “NYPD! KKK!” They surged across the streets and sidewalks. Cars and buses were forced to stop. The goal was the 67th station house itself, which the young rebels pelted with rocks and bottles. This same band of youth beat an effective retreat back to their memorial to Kimani, having suffered only one arrest. The NYPD was caught flat-footed. The city bus commandeered to dispatch officers to the scene was pummeled by youth on its way to the precinct.
When two cops were surrounded by about 36 youth, an NYPD van pulled up nearby. The officers inside assessed the situation and moved on. The two surrounded cops were heard later on that night exchanging stunned and angry words about how they had been potentially hung out to dry by their fellow cops.
Cops Serve Bankers
The rage of these young rebels was somewhat disorganized. Fruits they lifted were joined by garbage cans that were pelted at every cop car across a mile-long stretch of this major thoroughfare. A Rite Aid pharmacy surveillance video was used to make arrests of youth. A bank window was shattered, but the youth’s consciousness hasn’t yet tied the role of the banks as the rulers of the system to the racist cops’ role as the bankers’ servants. That’s PLP’s job.
In the following day’s Daily News, an article “reporting” on the rebellion smeared Kimani as a criminal misfit. This is similar to the bosses’ media attacks on Shantel in Brooklyn, Ramarley Graham and Reynaldo Cuevas in the Bronx, Vincent Smith, Jr. in Indiana, Albert Purnelli in Philadelphia, Manuel Díaz and Joel Acevedo in California, Damaël in Haiti, and millions of children murdered by the bosses’ guns and drones worldwide.
There is no mention of how thugs like billionaire Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly force our youth from school to prison or the military everyday. According to the NYPD’s own reports, 9 out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been completely innocent. Our youth have been stop-and-frisked over four million times since 2002, over 95 percent of them black or Latino. The cops use their stop-and-frisk policy to build up a record against hundreds of thousands of innocent youth to be dragged out as “fact” in future incidents.
Young black and Latino workers and students worldwide are considered cannon fodder for the bosses’ wars and at the point of racist cops’ guns from New York City to Port-au-Prince and beyond. This struggle is part of an international one against racist police brutality in a decaying capitalist system. It will surely lay the foundation to spoil the bosses’ plans for continued imperialist wars.
The militant youth displayed the proper reaction to racist police murder. The old action taken by Kimani’s friends points the way to the kind of fight-back the whole working class needs to defeat capitalism and its racist cops.