Sean Bell rests in peace

Above, the classic ghetto memorial wall to Sean Bell, the 23 year-old groom-to-be who was shot dead by police in Jamaica, Queens, hours before his wedding on November 25th. (The Museum of Biblical Art had an excellent recent exhibition on memorial walls around the city).

The Sean Bell incident, notorious because the cops fired a total of 50 bullets at unarmed Bell and his unarmed pals, prompted a surprisingly large protest on Fifth Avenue yesterday: as many as 40,000 people marched down Fifth according to the police, who normally low-ball public protests, especially if they are "kicking the cops' collective ass" protests. So there could have been as many as 60,000 or more...

New York City protests and Fifth Avenue are a minor interest of mine because the year I moved to NYC was an important one for the way in which the police here approached policing large groups of largely peaceful protests.

First of all, I have to point out that local newspapers here had quotes from tourists who were pissed off that the trifling, stupid protest about some dead kid yesterday, got in the way of their urgent need to shop unassailed by pesky police brutality nonsense. One woman from Maryland told the Times: "We just came here to go shopping at the American Girl store and go see the Rockettes. Now we can’t even cross the street to get our lunch." I hope she choked on her Xtra-Fat-Cheezee LardyBoy Obesityburger.

There were several large protests in the city in 1998, one of which I attended, the Matthew Shepard Rally of October 19th. Later, I wrote a very, very poor paper on the incident, a sort of badly-reported reconstruction. (More importantly, some of the attendees I interviewed for this piece ended up becoming reasonably good friends or at least acquaintances).

The Matthew Shephard Rally was refused a permit by the city, but protesters assembled anyway at the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Neither the organizers nor the cops expected over 5,000 people to show up, and in 'quelling' the illegal protest, cops on horseback
caused something of a near panic, and the protesters set off as one down Fifth Avenue in a great melee with horses and cops giving chase.

I believe 5,000 people showed up because the year 1998 was the year when suddenly a lot of people finally started using email and the Internet, or perhaps for the first time had email access at work. (I started using email in 1995/6? at St Andrews, at which time it was still considered a rather quaint gimmick). I can recall complaining to someone that I had received email notices about the protest maybe six or seven times that day, from people who were forwarding the notice of the rally to everyone in their address folders.

Before I arrived in the city on July 31st, there had been an earlier incident involving ironworkers on strike, who allegedly (all this is hearsay as told to me by several people reminiscing) held a protest after spending most of the day in various bars. Ironworkers are known for their tendency to not flee from danger, nor pass up the chance of a punch-up; several ironworkers were arrested for punching, not police officers, but police horses.

Then on September 5th, came the Million Youth March in Harlem, organized by Khalid Muhammed and the Nation of Islam. 6,500 demonstrators showed up to find an almost equal number of cops in riot gear, and helicopters buzzing so low overhead that many locals were terrified. As the 4pm closing time arrived,... well, here's the Associated Press report from the day:

At the end of the event billed as a black empowerment rally, organizer Khallid Abdul Muhammad called the police names and told participants to "beat the hell out of them with the railing if they so much as touch you."

"We have a right, a God given right, a constitutional right to defend ourselves against anyone who attacks us," said Muhammad, dismissed as an aide to Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan after a 1994 speech in which he referred to Jews as ``bloodsuckers" and insulted Pope John Paul II, homosexuals and whites.

I wasn't at this event, but some of my peers at journalism school were, and I can remember how vividly they described the crazy scene. Remarkably, only one person was arrested, but everybody was pissed off, including Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose baleful presence was to loom over the city like a great big ugly pus-filled cyst until the fateful day in September 2001, when in running away from the collapsing World Trade Center, Rudy was rehabilitated to the extent that he now thinks he could make a run for President; if he does, the New York Times editors will yawn, and reach for a folder marked "Scores to settle, volume I, Giuliani, Rudolph W., unreported scandals A-D."