As the grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri was calculating how to avoid
bringing killer cop Darren Wilson to trial, another ignominious homicide
took place in the Louis H. Pink Housing Project in Brooklyn, NY. The New
York Times reported on how a rookie cop named Peter Liang killed a young
Black man named Akai Gurley:
Two police officers prepared to enter the pitch-black eighth-floor
stairwell of a building in a Brooklyn housing project, one of them with
his sidearm drawn. At the same time, a man and his girlfriend,
frustrated by a long wait for an elevator, entered the seventh-floor
stairwell, 14 steps below. In the darkness, a shot rang out from the
officer’s gun, and the 28-year-old man below was struck in the chest
and, soon after, fell dead.
The shooting, at 11:15 p.m. on Thursday, invited immediate comparison
to the fatal shooting of an unarmed man in Ferguson, Mo. But 12 hours
later, just after noon on Friday, the New York police commissioner,
William J. Bratton, announced that the shooting was accidental and that
the victim, Akai Gurley, had done nothing to provoke a confrontation
with the officers.
A follow-up article detailed how such an “accident” might have taken place:
From different corners of Brooklyn, the lives of Mr. Gurley and Officer
Liang, two young men separated in age by a single year, collided amid
the faint shadows of the stairwell inside 2724 Linden Blvd., one of the
buildings in the vast the Louis H. Pink housing project.
For Mr. Gurley, the stairs, even in their sorry state, offered the best
alternative to chronically malfunctioning project elevators. For Officer
Liang, their darkness presented a threat.
Often the department’s least experienced officers are sent.
“This is a result of poor in-street field training; you literally had
the blind leading the blind out there,” said another high-ranking police
official.
Both police officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the
shooting investigation is still unfolding.
Most of the reporting centers on the cop’s inexperience as if a way to
ward off interpretations that he was acting out of a KKK mentality so
prevalent in the St. Louis police department. Since Chinese-Americans
don’t tend to be seen as vicious racists, it is more difficult to mount
Ferguson type protests over the killing. But in a very real sense,
Brooklyn = Ferguson. It was the poverty and neglect of East New York
that created the conditions for just such an accident.
Furthermore, a look at housing projects in general and the Louis H. Pink
project in particular will demonstrate that we are dealing with
institutions just barely distinguishable from South African shantytowns,
even though they were at one time a staple of New Deal reform.
Louis Heaton Pink was an advocate of public housing in the 1930s who
became the director of the New York Housing Authority, the city agency
responsible for projects all across the city now in various states of
disrepair. He was first appointed to a state housing agency by Al Smith,
the governor of New York who despite having a solid record as a reformer
got on FDR’s wrong side after running against him in the 1932
presidential primary.
full:
http://louisproyect.org/2014/11/25/the-accidental-killing-of-akai-gurley-was-no-accident/
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