[Onthebarricades] US: Militant march over Sean Bell verdict - reflections

Sat Jun 7 02:46:40 PDT 2008

      Lessons From A Sean Bell Verdict Protest
      Submitted by Elliott on Sat, 05/31/2008 - 04:09.

      Last month, three NYPD officers who were on trial for killing Sean Bell and wounding his two friends in a hail of 50 bullets were acquitted amid mass outcry. The verdict brought to a close the officers' juryless bench trial, and effectively sanctioned the NYPD's most recent murder of an unarmed black man. The acquittal set in motion a string of protests that continue to unfold, and on the day of the verdict, it prompted a particularly militant demonstration in the streets of Jamaica, Queens.

      When the verdict was announced, protesters gathered in Queens with the People's Justice Coalition to demand justice for Sean Bell and an end to police violence in communities of color. (I was with the crowd that day with others from the Anarchist People of Color network.) The coalition led a spirited march through downtown Jamaica that elicited cheers from pedestrians and commuters, before coming to a close near the site of Sean Bell's murder--and as soon as the official mobilization ended, a separate breakaway march erupted that would continue snaking through Queens until almost 11:30 at night. 

      The breakaway demonstration was characterized by improvisation and militancy, and lead to confrontations with the police and exchanges between political tendencies I've rarely seen interact at other New York protests. Like many people in attendance that night, I was struck by the uniqueness of the mobilization, and I think it carries important lessons about organizing against the police state in NYC. 

      What Happened?

      When a crew of protesters walked away from the close of the People's Justice march shouting "let's take it to the hood," I didn't know whether to fish or cut bait. Some around me followed the contingent down the street, while others stood confused and march marshals urged people to get home safely and clear the area. 

      Non-committal discussions broke out among anarchists at the march: did the people leading the breakaway march live in the neighborhood? Were they members of a front group for the Revolutionary Communist Party? Was this an opportunity to interact with oppressed communities in Jamaica, and/or an attempt by some vanguardist group to co-opt popular discontent as fuel for its own agenda?

      I didn't have to work on Saturday, so I decided to see what developed. The breakaway contingent was nearing the Baisley Park and South Jamaica Houses (also known as "40 Projects") when I caught up with it, a few blocks away. Folks were traveling at a speedy pace, and had picked up enthusiastic pedestrians and a few cars as it went. Helicopters wheeled overhead when the march streamed into a public housing complex and took over a playground area as an impromptu stage. People came out of their homes to see what all the fuss was about, and many were visibly elated at what they found. 

      For the next half hour, folks took turns stepping to the top of the playground's kiddie slide to denounce the brutality of the NYPD by megaphone. Spotlights swept the area from above, and a crowd of kids who gathered in front took turns holding a big, weird anarchist flag. The rally brought together an assortment of anti-imperialist Marxists, black nationalists and anarchists with people from around Jamaica who were furious at the police violence visited upon their neighborhood. Organizers rapped about the need for revolution, men from the crowd yelled about fighting back against the police, and at least one woman did too after shouts of "let a sister speak!"

      When it seemed the speechifying had gone on long enough and people were getting anxious, the contingent took off again. It snaked out of the projects, and if my google-mapping is correct, it crossed the county line into Long Island to drop police pursuits. Each time the march passed people on their stoops or outside businesses, some onlookers would leap up to join the demonstration for a few blocks. Others would join for good and text their friends to come and meet them (one brother boasted to me that he'd personally brought out "twenty soldiers" with a single phone call.) 

      Eventually the demonstration re-entered Jamaica and made a bee line for the 103rd Precinct, where it met a line of helmeted, baton-wielding police officers. Facing the possibility of some serious repression, the impromptu marshals--tough-looking young men with bullhorns, who'd directed the march with help of a police scanner supposedly--encouraged people to line up in front of the cops and speak their mind. At one point they tried to separate the crowd by gender, but cut it out after being met with cries of "fuck the patriarchy!" 

      With a mass of protesters lined up in front of the police, the bullhorn-ers then encouraged folks to to "look the pig in the eye, don't be afraid, look the pig in the eye and tell him what you think of him!" The sight made me think of Frantz Fanon urging colonized people to make the psychological leap and oppose their oppressor. Eye-to-eye with cops who harass their community on a daily basis, the crowd starting slinging epithets and outrage at a fever pitch, interrupted by the occasional count-off to 50.

      Of course, the speakout-cum-staring-contest couldn't go on indefinitely. After a bottle was thrown in the face of one riot cop and tensions continued to mount, the marshals decided to make a dignified exit. They called on people to disperse toward the Jamaica Center subway station, and the crowd obliged in a very loose manner. People spilled into downtown Jamaica, most of which was closed for the night, filling the four-lane streets and moving with less and less group cohesion. That's when things started breaking. 

      As the breakaway march devolved into a crowd of angry people headed to the subway, many of the youth who had joined earlier in the night started knocking over trash cans and newspaper boxes, and flinging bottles into the street. The dudes on the bullhorns tried to reign in the fiery youth, telling them to stop trashing their own hood and bringing cops down on everyone, but the situation was beyond any one group's control. It felt less like a march at this point, and more like a mini-riot.

      The NYPD soon showed up with a line of squad cars two blocks long, and cleared the area with baton-wielding riot cops marching in lockstep. As I hovered near the subway, trying to see what would happen, the last remaining youth booked it down a side street, pursued on foot by police. I learned later that one youth and one incredibly dedicated legal observer were arrested. Everyone else made it out safe and sound. 

      What Can We Learn From It?

      The breakaway march on April 25th was remarkable in many respects, not least of which was its relationship to the area through which it traveled. Most of the protests I've attended in NYC have moved at a nail's pace through midtown Manhattan, drawing befuddled stares from passersby. In Jamaica the situation was totally different: everywhere we went, cars and busses honked their horns in support, people hung out their windows and cheered, and would-be spectators leapt up from where they stood to join in. 

      The murder of Sean Bell--and more broadly, the brutality unleashed by the NYPD upon communities of color--is such a prominent issue in areas like Jamaica that the march was immediately recognizable and relevant to the people who encountered it. No fancy analysis or political lingo was needed to explain the situation: it was simply part of people's lived reality. 

      Typical protests may deal with some aspect of public policy or the oppression of a vast group or class, but the Sean Bell march addressed all these through a single, concrete event that hit people on a personal level. Typical protests may address distant issues and are easy to relate to as a spectator, but the breakaway march prompted people to engage as participants in something related to their own lives.

      And what participants. Some of the most militant, confrontational behavior at the breakaway march came not from the tried-and-true activist crowd, but from locals and youth who joined the march on its path through Jamaica. People unaffiliated with any explicit ideology or organization took up the even most inflammatory chants with ease ("No pigs, no prisons! Burn down the whole damn system!") and were often the most vocal advocates of self-defense against police violence. 

      This put the self-identified anarchist crowd at the breakaway march in an interesting position: instead of playing our usual role as the incendiary element at a scripted rally, we found ourselves nervous advisers to a militant, unscripted mobilization. Throughout the march, seasoned activists tried to advise and shape the militancy that blossomed all around them, and angry folks took action against the police on their own terms regardless.

      At one point, a group of radical women of color scolded some local youth for picking up rocks while mothers with strollers were marching beside them. Later, I explained to a group of skittish youth that police often film demonstrations for future court cases, and they probably didn't need to worry about cops filming from the roof of the precinct unless they wanted to do something illegal. Keeping the group together, anticipating and explaining the behavior of the police, engendering a sense of calm and safety, and generally sharing and disseminating the niche knowledge of street demonstrations became a useful task for activist-y folk. 

      Interestingly, this wasn't the same as activists "leading" the march. Yes, the route of the march itself was determined by a small crew of organizers who initiated the breakaway in the first place. Yes, many folks seemed to join us with a sense of being "along for the ride." But many people were so incensed at NYPD impunity that they were willing to take their resistance into their own hands, from escalating situations to weaving in and out of the march with friends. Combined with the impromptu nature of the march itself, this made the demonstration feel less stage-managed and more collectively determined. 

      Pursued by helicopters, without a clear plan, and bolstered by several hundred people who wanted to express their outrage collectively, a sense of "we're all in this together" was in the air. Trust was built very quickly as the crowd twisted through Jamaica, and the usual boundaries between anarchist, Marxist and nationalist, as well as between "activist" and "non-activist," began to dissolve. During the march I shared water, conversations and urgent tactical discussions with members of radical groups I'd never met before, and talked at length with folks from the area for the first time. People who would've staked out distinct blocs at a typical protest found themselves in a situation where few cared about political labels.

      And finally, the breakaway march felt very different physically than many other demonstrations I've been at. In Manhattan, protests meander down gridded streets controlled by a phalanx of police and barricades, often in the heart of vapid commercial centers. In Queens, the cops kept their distance. This was partly due to timing--a mass arrest on the eve of the Sean Bell verdict wouldn't have played well on NY1--but it was also due to the areas through which the contingent traveled. 

      The breakaway march purposely snaked through residential neighborhoods and housing projects, areas full of onlookers, open doors, alleys and front yards, all of which were a powder keg of anti-NYPD sentiment. Not only did these areas feed the march with their numbers and enthusiasm; they also provided cover for it, since repressing the demonstration in that context would've been like kicking a hornet's nest. (Or, say, trying to conduct an unplanned raid in an occupied territory.)

      Where Are We Now?

      In terms of airtime, the breakaway march on the 25th was largely overshadowed by the Manhattan-wide "slowdown" sponsored by Al Sharpton's National Action Network the following week. Strings of smaller protests have taken place in Harlem, El Barrio, Jamaica, Fort Greene and the South Bronx, but none of them have recreated the spontaneity and militancy of the breakaway march on April 25th, and a more sustained campaign or series of actions has yet to emerge. I think it's safe to say that, thus far, popular mobilization around the Sean Bell verdict has failed to translate into broader movement for self-determination in communities of color. 

      Some of this can be attributed to a lack of follow-through and in communities that have demonstrated against NYPD impunity, particularly in a way that furthers self-organization. From my perspective, organizing after the verdict has unfolded along typically authoritarian lines: groups harness the currency of a particular issue to get people to come to their actions, at which they steadily introduce a tailored set of predetermined demands ("revolution" or "a special prosecutor"), expecting people to cozy up to their political line and support or join their organization. Instead, this often helps broad groundswells of resistance to fracture into increasingly disparate, ideologically distinct groups that promote separate events and campaigns. As marches draw fewer and fewer people, the issue recedes from the headlines. 

      At the breakaway march, the radicals in the crowd may have sometimes been viewed as leaders, but they were never puppeteers. Even the dudes with bullhorns were never able to definitively set the goals, structure and limits of the protest according their own desires. At their best, "activists" that night were merely people with specialized knowledge for a particular context, who strove to share skills and further spaces of encounter and revolt. Beyond street demonstrations, these these same methods could easily nurture local projects and assemblies through which people determine the direction of their own struggle.

      This kind of movement-building is exactly the place that anarchists could be of great help. Part of me thinks we missed the T-ball this time around, but another part knows the simmering embers of social conflict are never extinguished in a society as systemically violent as our own. Popular discontent can always be rekindled into rebellion, and I think helping bring about mobilizations like the breakaway march, and translating them into structures of popular power, is a great place to start. 

      Breaking with sectarian habits and building connections with others who organized after the Sean Bell verdict will be important to this project. So will planning fewer attention-grabbing mobilizations in fortress Manhattan, and more in (and with) communities directly affected by state violence. So will sharing skills and experience--not just fancy ideas--with the people we encounter, and constantly spreading the tools of revolt. And so will taking to heart the words of the Zapatistas: to build movement from below, you gotta "lead by obeying" and "propose not impose."

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL8i1zMVIXc

      Elliott Liu is a NYC-based writer,
      activist and media-maker currently
      galavanting across North America in
      search of radical social movement.

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