Police Brutality: Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Position vs. Ice-T Tweets

New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and spoke with George Stephanopoulos about what he thinks needs to happen to change the way police deal with the community. The Mayor deflected Stephanopoulos’ prodding over whether he thought the Eric Garner grand jury decision was fair and the conversation turned to the criticisms leveled at him for comments he made about how he and his wife trained their biracial children to be very cautious in encounters with the police because they will be treated differently than white children.

On December 4th, actor Ice-T, who plays Detective Fin Tutuola on the long-running ripped from the headlines cop show, Law & Order: SVU, tweeted “With me.. It’s not about Black or White.. It’s about BRUTAL cops. It always has been.”

On John Catsimatidis’ radio show, Ed Mullins, head of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, was very angry at de Blasio’s lack of trust in New York’s Finest, saying: “He has a security detail of New York City police officers assigned to protect his family. And yet he’s making statements that his son shouldn’t feel safe with New York City cops.” Mullins said if the mayor “doesn’t have faith in his own son being protected by the NYPD, he may want to think about moving out of New York City completely. He just doesn’t belong here.” Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch accused the mayor of throwing cops “under the bus,” and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani called de Blasio’s remarks “racist.”

Ice-T (12/5/14) “If they can separate us on RACE. And make us argue about that.. We’ll miss the real issue.. Police brutality”.

There was a case a couple of years ago in Houston, TX, where a police officer, Matthew Marin, shot and killed a double amputee in a wheelchair at an assisted living center. The officer felt threatened by an object the 45-year-old man was holding that turned out to be a pen, so he shot him in the head. The Houston Chron article detailed how Marin was cleared by a grand jury in June of 2013.

A staff attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project in Houston said the grand jury’s action was par for the course. “The recent trend has always been, as far as I know, that police who shoot unarmed individuals claim some sort of credible threat and after some sort of investigation an overwhelming majority – more than 99 percent – have been exonerated,” Amin Alehashem said. It was not even the first time that the officer was cleared of excessive force charges.

Ray Hunt, president of the Houston Police Officers Union, said: “Officer Marin is relieved this is finally behind him,” Hunt said. “He’s very pleased his actions were shown to be justified as he knew they would be,” a pretty bold statement. Apparently, Marin wasn’t worried that anyone would think he could have subdued a wheelchair-bound, one-armed man with one leg without shooting to kill.

No wonder. In September 2013, The Texas Observer stated: “An eight-month Texas Observer investigation found that during the past six years, Houston civilians reported officers for “use of force”—- the department’s term for police brutality—- 588 times. The Internal Affairs division investigated each complaint and dismissed all but four.”

Ice-T from (12/4/14): “All cops ain’t bad.. But they MUST police themselves and cast OUT the bad apples… That’s WHY they are all taking the heat.”

Well, really, there has to be some other method to police the police. They have been doing a notoriously bad job of it.

Finally, here is a report entitled “Why White Privilege is No Protection Against Police Brutality.” If you read the whole report, you will realize that white police officers are not the only ones who engage in police brutality, which the author Nat Parry says may really be “more about power than it is about race.”

“What police despise more than anything,” Parry says, “is when their authority is challenged, whether it is by whites, blacks, Asians or Latinos. When they feel the need to establish authority is when they lash out, which can be either by throwing you in jail or through excessive force.”