On June 12, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance defended the police’s raid of two housing developments in Harlem that resulted in over 100 arrests. The next day, community activists and family members of those arrested gathered at the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building on 125th St. in Harlem to denounce the police tactics in carrying out the raid.
According to witnesses, the police burst into homes unannounced and brutally attacked the young men after they were already in handcuffs. The video interview below, taken by activist Josmar Trujillo of New Yorkers Against Bratton, one Harlem resident recounts how the police treated her son during the raid.
Police Commissioner William Bratton heralded the early morning raid as effective. Bratton is infamously known as an architect of Stop & Frisk-style racist police tactics that targeted young men of color in NYC. He was brought to the City to help rebrand the department and repair its media image.
While many in the Harlem community had been requesting preventive measures to combat gang violence, the police instead responded with a violent crackdown, as if making the youth disappear into the prison system would make the larger problems of unemployment, poverty, rising rents and the privatization of education go away.
Oppressed people cannot rely on the politicians, beholden to the profit motive of the city’s elite ruling class, to tackle these issues head on. It is up to us to fight for the changes we want to see. This means developing strong youth who have access to all the resources they need to reach their full potential and join the struggle for a better society!
