NYC Cops Gang-Rape Immigrant
"Why are you doing this to me? Why? Why?"
-- Abner Louima, Haitian immigrant
The vicious beating and gang-rape of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima by New York City cops is a brutal reminder that the forces of "law and order" are the State's frontline fighters in an ever-escalating war on immigrants, communities of color and the poor.
After his arrest for a minor altercation on Saturday, August 9th outside the Club Rendez-Vous, a Brooklyn nightclub, the 30-year-old immigrant was savagely beaten by two separate carloads of NYC's "finest" as he was being transported to the local cop-shop. To drive home their point the cops stopped not once, but twice to continue their pedagogical exercise camouflaged as a beating. In this way the cops were certain Louima (a "nigger" and an "alien" to boot) would begin "to learn to respect police officers." But Louima's nightmarish enrollment in the NYPD's "street university" was only beginning. He had reached his destination - Brooklyn's 70th Precinct.
"You niggers have to learn to respect police officers."
-- NYC cops to Louima as they tortured him
Upon arrival, Louima was forced to strip naked in front of the desk sergeant and then led to a bathroom a scant few feet from the precinct's nerve center. According to some reports, 20 cops were on-duty and present at the station house at the time of the assault. Once he was dragged inside the lavatory, now doubling as a torture chamber, Louima was thrown to the ground where he was beaten and kicked again by more cops. Four, five? The exact number is still uncertain. This much is known, however: once Louima was forcibly restrained face-down on the floor, officer Justin Volpe shoved a toilet plunger up the man's rectum causing critical injuries to his intestines and bladder. Then Volpe, in a fit of murderous rage, shoved the plunger into Abner Louima's mouth breaking several of his teeth. In place of the usual finery reserved for the graduate -- a tassled mortarboard and gown -- Louima was "awarded" a catheter and colostomy bag, courtesy of the City of New York.
Volpe and another cop, Charles Schwarz have been indicted by a grand jury and face up to 50 years imprisonment for their savage attack. Both cops had been suspended for racist brutality in the past, yet the system allowed them to return to their posts to brutalize again. Despite the vicious nature of the attack, the Patrolman's Benevolent Association, the so-called cop "union" had no comment on the incident other than to dismiss the allegations and defend Louima's torturers!
When criminals guard the roost anything and everything is possible -- and permitted. An investigator from the Brooklyn District Attorney's office told the New York Times that "there is a lot of pressure" on police from colleagues and union officials not to provide any information. The investigator said there were indications of an attempt to "cover tracks and clean things up." Indeed! The weapon used by the police torturers has mysteriously "disappeared." The investigator said: "We're not going to find it. It was gotten rid of quickly."
And what of the powers that be, what was their response; after all, this is an election year? NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir have vowed to "rid the department" of the supposedly "few rotten apples" who occupy minority and working class communities. Yet despite glib promises "to clean things up," only made because of intense community outrage and media scrutiny, they continue to describe the incident as an "isolated matter"! Haven't we heard this before?
The hypocrisy of statements such as these are underscored by the virtual open-season that Giuliani and Safir declared on minority and working class neighborhoods throughout New York. In "unfashionable" districts such as Flatbush, Harlem, Hell's Kitchen, Washington Heights and the South Bronx, largely populated by black, brown, yellow and poor white families struggling to survive capitalism's "free-market miracle," daily incidents of police violence are duly reported with numbing regularity -- to no avail; hardly a blip on the media screen.
Our criticism of the police must be properly framed, however; after all, a pedagogy of power is designed so that the poor will "learn to respect police officers" -- and more importantly, those who command capital's praetorian guard. Daily lessons for the poor, the marginalized and above all, for "youthful predators" include: wide-spread drug-dealing and corruption; savage beatings; sexual assaults; frame-ups; racist taunts and when all else fails, murder and systematic cover-up. One must never forget one's "station" nor assume that citizens have any rights that police need to respect. After all, police are "teachers" guiding us through the intricacies of race, class and the global market.
But lessons such as those taught to Abner Louima are exceptional only to the degree they are exposed. As an entire generation is deemed "lost" by the capitalist ruling class, those duly marginalized can and are considered "fair game" by killer cops who dish out their unique brand of "tough love" in defense of a seemingly immutable "order of things." The "thin blue line:" a serviceable metaphor for a prison-industrial complex in process of transforming the whole society into a vast, gray, terrifying penitentiary where all hopes fade, wither and die.
What does this incident teach us about the nature and role of repressive state agencies? What lessons will anti-racists glean from an episode such as this? Do the police "defend" Blacks, Latinos, Jews, immigrants and queers from attack by the resurgent forces of fascism in our midst? While "liberal watchdog" groups urge anti-racists to rely on the police to "fight fascism," the worst of this bunch -- the more well-heeled who derive their raison d'etre from generous corporate grants -- continue to ignore and cover-up systematic police brutality and violence. Even more alarming, many so-called "anti-racist watchdogs" routinely conduct training sessions for police intelligence units and collaborate with the FBI. COINTELPRO with a happy face :) updated with 1990s "diversity-training" jargon!
Anti-racists are well-advised to examine the ideological origins of so-called "community policing" schemes and other ruling class occupation strategies. You might be surprised. "Low- intensity conflict" practices, including PSYWAR techniques borrowed from the Pentagon, are designed to destroy any and all opposition to regressive economic and social policies instituted by ruling elites. Once reserved for Third World nations during the Cold War, the implementation of the military's counter- insurgency doctrine to "fight crime" has become a permanent feature of life in the imperialist heartland itself.
The system of course, will attempt to defuse the firestorm of protest that resulted from this incident. But jailing sadistic cop torturers is not enough. If it would preserve their monopoly of violence, the State would toss Volpe and Schwarz into a tank filled with piranhas on prime-time TV! No amount of "diversity
training" will change the nature or role of these savage armies of repression. An army of occupation whose mission is to "teach niggers to respect police officers" -- and more importantly, teach us all to fear the masters who hold the leash.
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