AN OPEN LETTER TO NYC'S POLICE COMMISSIONER BRATTON

AN OPEN LETTER TO NYC'S POLICE COMMISSIONER BRATTON
(From the Daily Challenge Weekend Edition Noveember 10-12, 1995)
By Carol Taylor R.N.

"I write in the name of all of the Black African mothers of Black African sons in the city. How dare you, our public servant, send a message to our sons that their lives are less valuable than a damn dog's?

This is the obvious inference anyone with half a brain could draw when you fire two (Latino, non-white, I might note) cops for beating a damn dog to death, and squat in your seat at One Police Plaza, inactively, refusing to fire Nassu County-Westchester and Orange County-living rampaging racist/colorist cops who routinely beat and murder our Black African males!

How dare you continue to suppress 90 per cent of the substantiated cases of police brutality against our people, when the "Civilian" Complaint Review Board tries to deal with the corruption we call racist/colorist police brutality? ('Police Accountability Would Stop the Brutality' NY Times newspaper letter to the Editor: Rev. Reuben Diaz, 4/29/95). It is obvious that the Director of the Board, Hector Soto, is leaving because he, at least, has a conscience: he can't continue to be a part of a "buffer" Board which protects killer racist/colorist cops from criminal prosecution.

How dare you, our public servant, paid by our tax dollars (taxation without representation) desecrate, in my opinion, the office of the Commissioner of Police by making a mockery of just law in this city by overreacting to the death of a damn dog? I truly believe that you should resign and get the psychiatric care which such inappropriate behavior demands.

And where is your boss, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, in all of this tragic-comedy? Ominously silent.

I did not hear that you had fired the out-of-control cops who fired 50 shots at Abe Richardson, a Black male slain a few weeks ago; I did not see you fire the out-of-cotrol cops who killed Anthony Baez, a Black Spanish-speaking male; I did not see you fire the cops who, just this year alone, killed Ernest Sayon, Shu'Aib Abdul Latif, Michael Clarke, Morris Duncan, Randy Brewer, Don Taylor, Eric Pitt, Shawn Bennett, Joseph Rickets, Raymond Murray, Kathurima Mwaria, Anibal Carrasquillo, Enee Moldovan, Bernard Gardner, Hilton Vega, Anthony Rosario, Julio Nunez, Joseph Orlando, Yung Xin Huang, among far too many others (most, if not all of them, non-white).

And you, this city's "Top Cop," are more worried about a damn dog than you are about the lives of the humans you're paid to protect! For sanity's sake, Commissioner, go to hell back to racist Boston!"