NCJ Number
188328
Date Published
2001
Length
17 pages
Annotation
This paper chronicles how the mothers and family members of police-brutality victims in New York City have become leaders of a citywide movement.
Abstract
These victims of police violence have quietly built and sustained organizations in the Bronx and Brooklyn, organizing multiracial demonstrations in Manhattan and Queens as well as producing publications that track police victims and bad cops. Years of meetings and marches have propelled several into exceptional political engagements, yet their movement has remained rooted in street-level community organizing, producing at least temporary alliances with an unlikely array of social forces, e.g., youth groups, gay and lesbian organizations, and even street gangs. Indeed, just as the police brutality controversy reached its peak in public consciousness following the shooting of Amadou Diallo and the weeks of mass protests that followed it, the mothers and their grassroots allies found themselves and their activist agenda pushed to the side by politicians, celebrities, and leading liberal establishment figures eager to bask in the media spotlight. The mostly poor women who have been victimized by police violence have been lucky to find allies among some of the city's ablest radical community organizers. That collaboration has built arguably the city's most enduring grassroots protest movement of the last decade, a movement that has helped keep direct-action politics alive while helping to make police brutality one of the defining political issues of our time. 17 notes