I am quite pro-police. In fact, coming from California, I tend to think the cops should in general be more rigorous in enforcing laws. I have railed against Bloomberg for dicking around our cops during contract disputes and, as far as I am aware, the cops still don't have a current contract. During some protests I have carried a sign urging Bloomberg to give the NYPD and FDNY better pay. I was never raised anti-cop.

But when an unarmed man gets shot 50 times by the police, something is wrong.

Today was the March for Justice against excessive use of force by the NYPD against black men, most particularly Sean Bell.

Joy and I had aimed to join up with either the Democracy for NYC or the Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats contingents, but arrived somewhat late and never met up with either. Instead we moved in at 59th St. and 5th Ave. where we could muscle our way in. We wound up just in front of the NAACP contingent.

Protesting with a small child is completely different than doing so alone. Most of my experience of the march was doing my best to avoid running into the people in front of me, preventing others from bumping into the stroller, feeding Jacob lunch and happily noticing when he fell asleep and how long he napped. So my experience was not typical.

From what I could tell, though, it was a large crowd. Not as large as the some half million who participated in the biggest protest against the Republican Convention in 2004, but more than were at the union protest against the Republican convention in 2004. As you can tell, I haven't been to too many protests since the Republican convention! For awhile we were the only white faces in my range of vision, which was a somewhat odd experience, particularly as many around us started chanting "black power." I found it amusing to be quietly wheeling Jacob along in a crowd yelling "black power." But later I noticed a more mixed group racially.

Mostly, despite the fact that it was the first protest I have been to where whites were in the minority, it felt exactly like most other large protests I'd been at. So I found it more interesting watching the cops and bystanders as we went by. Generally, white cops we passed had either expressions of suppressed rage or a stony, stoic expression of hurt pride, as if they felt they our anger was unjustified. None looked on sympathetically. In general the black cops couldn't look the protesters in the eye and shuffled uncomfortably, as if they felt they were on the wrong side of the barrier. Honestly, I think it wasn't easy on any of the cops (see below for my take on police brutality in general) and all seemed to be walking on eggshells. I think, had things been a little different, the situation could have been explosive, and both the cops and the march organizers knew that and took effectives steps to keep everything calm. Kudos to both sides.

Watching tourists was interesting as well. By far the vast majority of them gleefully snapped pictures of what they seemed to see as just another exotic NYC experience. Many looked sympathetic. And some, all of whom appeared particularly pale and conservative, looked hostile. Some of the hostile reactions looked on in disbelief as if to say, "how dare these people complain!" Others quite honestly looked scared! I saw some particularly round and pink tourists where the men were rapidly taking their womenfolk out of harms way while the women had looks of terror on their face. Welcome to New York, folks.

We found most striking that as we came to the end of the march, the organizers were clapping and saying, "thanks for coming out today." The very last person was saying to the marchers "thanks for marching and have a happy holidays." Everyone then quietly dispersed and went about their business, all neat, polite and organized. Again, welcome to New York, folks. Tensions may run high but we handle them well.

Many of the protesters were very pissed. To understand that anger I think people have to realize that the Sean Bell shooting did not happen in isolation, but is just one more in a whole series of black men being met with overwhelming force. I saw the riots in Los Angeles when "No Justice, No Peace" was a threat that was really carried out when justice failed. Before that, I remember a similar incident in San Diego. NYC has its own litany of such incidents. The vast majority of such incidents involve police beating or shooting to death black men. There is a racial imbalance as well as a gender imbalance and whatever the cause of that, the message is clear: black men are not valued in our society. Some men in the march were wearing shirts that said, simply, "I am a man." Coincidentally, I had just bought my wife a cute shirt from No Sweat Apparel that simply says "Human" above a bar code. She realized it would precisely match the message of the march, but sadly the shirt didn't fit. But the point is this: black men are made to feel less than human in our society. They are expendable.

That is a problem and that is why I marched today. Sometimes the people who are victims of excessive force by the police are indeed scum. Rodney King was not a particularly good citizen. But that does not justify police brutality. A very conservative teacher once said to me, "If you don't defend the rights of people you find distasteful, someday you will have to defend your own rights." His point was you don't wait until the rights of the law abiding citizen are at risk. You defend the rights of drug dealers, Nazis and anarchists because it is those difficult cases that define rights. If you wait until you are defending the rights of June Cleaver and Cliff Huxtable then you have already lost your rights. EVERY CITIZEN in America starts with the same rights and the ONLY WAY the Constitution allows the legal withholding of that full array of rights is through due process.

Police brutality is not due process.

Police brutality hurts the entirety of society, possible the police most of all. It poisons the relationship between police and citizen in the very communities where that relationship is most important. Furthermore, lets never forget that the vast majority of cops are good cops. I don't remember the scope of the study or who conducted it, but I remember a study done around the time of the Rodney King beatings that found that 90% of brutality complaints were leveled against about 10% of the police force. The same cops were getting complained about over and over again...but the entire police force was taking the blame and having to suffer from the poisoned relationship with the community. Only of those 10% of the cops who are responsible for 90% of the complaints are dealt with by the police force will the problem start to be solved. It is vital for both the community and the cops for relations to be respectful and healthy. Under those conditions, both the community and the cops have it easier. But when the relationship is predominantly hostile, dominated by fear and loathing, the criminals become the heroes and the community and the cops suffer.

That is what the march was about for me. Trying to emphasize that police brutality hurts the entirety of society, cops included and emphasizing that every member of society is equally protected by the Constitution.

Another thing to remember about the Sean Bell shooting was that the way it was carried out could not be considered appropriate even by police standards. Not only was an unarmed man shot 50 times, itself a huge red flag, but, according to surveillance video aired in an exclusive by Democracy Now, two cops and at least one civilian bystander on an Airtrain platform half a block away were nearly hit by stray bullets. This indicates to me some degree of panic on the part of the cops at the scene. Cops are humans. I understand that the pressure must be huge under those circumstances. But when there is that kind of panic over an unarmed man, something has gone wrong and the police need to figure out what went wrong and fix it!

Of course there are many, many issues that surround the shooting and the anger felt by the black community. I have written about some of those issues before in the context of elections. I won't revisit them. But I will say that if a group of people are made to feel that they have no stake in society, that their lives don't matter, that they will be left to die in the wake of a hurricane, shot to death even if unarmed, given substandard health care and education and in every other way told from cradle to grave that they are unwanted by society, then there is no reason for those people to be a positive part of society. I would argue that the overwhelming message given to blacks, particularly black men, in America today is that they have no positive place in American society today. THAT is a huge problem.

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