50 Shots and an Outrageous Verdict
Morning outrage: the police officers who shot (and killed) an unarmed young man on his wedding day got away with murder. They shot Sean Bell 50 times but were declared not guilty on all counts. Business as goddamn usual--the police get away with killing another young black man, on the excuse that they were "scared" and "confused" and "disorganized."
Here's my original cartoon about the case, and a much older cartoon on police brutality.
Labels: cwa, nyc, race and racism
4 Comments:
I will never get that. One unarmed black man against a bunch of weaponized cops. And he's the threat? WTF?
I'm surprised that there AREN'T riots in the streets of NYC right now, since there is certainly just cause...
The thing that really bothers me about the Sean Bell verdict is how little shock and outrage I'm feeling. Mostly, it's just a weary numbness, almost bordering on tedium. Kind of like an "Oh, yeah. This again." I remember the Rodney King trials. They were held just down the road from where I was living, and that verdict shocked me. I couldn't imagine how, even though Simi Valley was a bedroom community for the L.A.P.D., they could possibly look at that tape and call it anything less than obscenity. It shocked me and it outraged me, and it broke my heart. And I think I've lost something in me when I don't feel my heart breaking at these verdicts anymore. If we couldn't even nail the fuckers the one time we caught them on camera, what point is there in hoping that justice would be done without the camera?
Chris, I feel that so much. The story is always the same, over and over and over--cops shoot innocent unarmed black man X number of times, are acquitted of all charges, rinse and repeat. I had actually had some hope things would be different this time--for example, unlike Giuliani (who actually inspired the cops who brutally raped and tortured Abner Louima with a plunger while yelling "it's Giuliani time!") at least Bloomberg didn't blame Bell for his own death. But the verdict is the same, and we're back to square one, and another innocent black men is dead and his family and fiance and child are left without a son and a husband and father and...
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