BY MICHAEL BAUMANN
TRENTON, New Jersey - More than 300 people turned out June 5 at a meeting at Shiloh Baptist Church here to protest a recent incident of cop brutality.

Four Black and Latino students, on their way to a basketball camp in North Carolina, were stopped by two state troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike April 23 for "speeding." Within minutes the cops had fired a hail of bullets into their vehicle at point-blank range, wounding three of the students, two seriously. Denny Reyes, 20, was shot six times; Leroy Grant, 23, four times; Rayhawn Brown, 20, twice.

The attack, witnessed by at least two passing motorists who have come forward to challenge the cops' claim of "self- defense," has brought to a boil long-simmering anger over the notorious police practice known as "profiling." For years cops along the turnpike, one of most heavily traveled north-south routes in the United States, have routinely stopped as many as five Blacks workers and youth for every white motorist they haul over to the side of the road.

Many at the meeting here had come because either they or someone in their family or friends had personally experienced racist treatment by highway cops.

Catharine Graham, a retired state worker who is a vice president of the Trenton NAACP, told the Militant how she herself had been stopped early one morning on the grounds that her lights were "too bright." People do get stopped because of the color of their skin, she said. "It does happen. And there's got to be something done about it."

Victoria Sanderson, a 38-year-old lab technician, came because as a teenager she had been stopped for "speeding," ended up facing two cops with drawn rifles, and then found herself in front of a judge, charged with "resisting arrest." The incident has dogged her ever since, she said, most recently costing her a job in Texas that called for a review of her police record.

Speakers at the event included Trenton mayor Douglas Palmer and Alfred Sharpton, a Democratic party politician from New York. Sharpton spoke out, as he often does, against the individual incident of police brutality while defending cops as an institution. Like other Democratic and Republican politicians, he also promoted the "anticrime" campaign.

"We're fighting for police accountability," Sharpton said. But "we're not antipolice. We're against our children being shot in cold blood. But we're also against crime. We're against sick and savage behavior.... We're for proper police behavior."

Also prominent in the meeting and among its sponsors were members of Black Cops against Brutality, an organization that seeks to portray police abuse of working people as a problem attributable to a handful of misguided individuals.

No one was given a chance to speak from the floor. Interest in actually doing something about police abuse and its connection with broader social and political issues was reflected in the response to the Militant. Seventeen copies and one subscription were sold at the meeting.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home