Heeding the call of Dorismond's relatives, some 10,000 people joined a funeral procession through the streets of Brooklyn March 25 for Dorismond, a 26-year-old Black youth gunned down nine days earlier by a plainclothes city cop after he rebuffed the policeman's request to buy some marijuana from him.

Demonstrators waved a sea of Haitian flags and chanted in English and Creole "No justice, no peace" as they marched more than three miles along Flatbush Avenue. As the marchers approached Holy Cross church, where a mass was to be held, they were halted by metal police barricades set up in the middle of the street and a massive provocative presence of cops in the area. Scuffles ensued throughout the day in which 23 police officers were injured and 27 protesters arrested.

This protest is "a long overdue demonstration of force," stated Hubert Mompoint, a Haitian immigrant. "They have thousands of police officers," he continued, who were there "more to provoke."

The evening before, about 2,000 people packed a funeral home, overflowing onto the streets to pay their respects to Patrick Dorismond and demand that the cops involved in killing him be brought to justice. Speakers encouraged those in attendance to turn out in force for the march through the streets of Brooklyn the following day.

"Until we get justice for Patrick, we cannot say he's got peace," stated Vladimir Rodney of the Haitian-American Alliance, one of the groups that organized the march.

"I don't think Dorismond's death will be in vain," stated Abner Louima, who himself was brutally sodomized and tortured by Brooklyn police officers in August 1997. "We're not going to take any of the police brutality. No more."

As the wake ended, Marie Dorismond, Patrick's mother, told the protesters, "I want justice for my son. Without you all there will be no justice."

Dorismond's death came shortly after the verdict on February 25 in the Amadou Diallo case, where four plainclothes cops were acquitted of criminal charges after firing 41 shots at Diallo, an unarmed 22-year-old worker from Guinea. Five days after that verdict, Malcolm Ferguson, 23, also unarmed, was killed by plainclothes police in the Bronx, three blocks from where Diallo was shot. Last September the cops killed another unarmed Black man, Richard Watson, shooting him in the back.

New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani has taken the lead in defending the cop who killed Dorismond while continuing to promote a particularly vicious slander campaign against the character of the dead man in an effort to make a case that Dorismond had it coming.

"Mr. Dorismond spent a good deal of his adult life punching people," stated Giuliani, whose office released to the press information on a minor police complaint filed by his girlfriend a week before the shooting. The mayor described Dorismond as no "altar boy," suggesting that his "pattern of behavior" and his actions the night the undercover cops approached him had contributed to his death.

Immediately after Dorismond was shot, the city administration issued a statement attempting to depict the Black youth as being a hardened criminal. The cops' claimed that he had been previously charged with robbery, assault, and illegal possession of a weapon. Upon further investigation this turned out to be nothing more than a couple of disorderly conduct charges that resulted in a few days of community service by Dorismond in 1993 and 1996.

The mayor also authorized the release of Dorismond's juvenile police record dating back to when he was 13 years old, which included charges that had been dismissed and sealed by a court. Giuliani aggressively argued that the release of this record was justified as his right to privacy ended when he was shot to death.

Democratic party senatorial aspirant, Hillary Rodham Clinton, lamely described the mayor's actions as "a rush to judgement." She claimed that both she and the mayor "should wait and reserve judgement in this latest case, until all the facts come out."

Giuliani, for his part, intensified his campaign of slanders against those determined to take to the streets to continue protesting the cop killings. He defended the provocative actions of the cops at the March 25 action, denouncing the protesters for what he called an "orchestrated attack."

Glova Scott, a member of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, Marc Lichtman, and Jason Corley contributed to this article.  
 
 
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