Earlier this year, 16 Black and Latino youths from the Bushwick section of Brooklyn won $257,000 collectively in damages from the city of New York for being wrongfully arrested almost two years earlier. Another 16 have either had their charges dropped or are currently seeking damages from the city, with the exception of one youth who accepted a plea bargain.
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So what were the objective factors that shaped the unlikely victory of these 32 youths? How were these young people able to not only escape the jaws of the racist criminal justice system, but also fight back and demand reparations for the injustices they endured?
The answer is simple: training and organization. They were educated and versed in their rights, and they had the support of an active community throughout their struggle.
Their story, as told by the July 28 Village Voice , began May 21, 2007. Students from Bushwick Community High School, joined by parents and students from other neighborhood schools, gathered on Putnam Avenue to travel to the funeral of Donnell McFarland, a student who had been lost to gun violence just days earlier. Many of the Bushwick Community students had permission slips to be off campus because students Asher Callender and Kenneth Frederick had organized the procession as a school trip. T-shirts in memory of McFarland had been made for the mourners.
However, this peaceful and organized procession was interpreted by the New York Police Department as a threat of gang violence and unlawful assembly. In a military-like operation, with helicopters overhead, the NYPD stopped the procession, backed several of the youth into walls or cars and frisked and arrested them. Frederick offered to show his school permission slip, but the officer was not interested. Callender quickly began shouting directions to his peers, advising them to remain calm and compliant, fully aware that any resistance could lead to an escalation or be twisted against them by the police.
Students organize a fight-back movement
Callender was prepared take on this leadership role because he had been trained in his rights by teacher Brian Favors. In recent years, Favors, a special education and social studies teacher, had been connecting Bushwick Community students to know-your-rights workshops and other resources. “We learned that the police stopping and frisking you all the time isn’t a normal thing,” Callender told the Village Voice. “Most of us feel like we’re used to that. It’s just part of our daily lives.”
The students were arrested, and a few spent a day in jail—but they were able to turn the incident into an organizing tool, bringing their community together to combat racial profiling and police brutality. Demonstrations were called, meetings were held, and just a few months after the arrests, the Bushwick Community High School students founded the Student Coalition Against Racial Profiling.
SCARP combined with members of the Bushwick community and other grassroots organizations to form a coalition, the Ujima Alliance, that continues to work on issues of racist police brutality by collecting testimony, conducting workshops and mobilizing communities.
A year and half later, all but one of the 32 students have had the criminal charges dropped. In an interview on WNYC Radio, Jesus Gonzalez, an alumni of Bushwick Community High School and an activist with Make the Road by Walking, one of the organizations in the Ujima alliance, explained why SCARP was founded: “The students that got picked up happened to have supportive teachers from Bushwick Community High School, happened to know, I happened to be an alumni from there, and also am down with Make the Road by Walking, and we really decided to tackle this issue and put it out there that this is wrong, they should not get away with this, and the police should be held accountable. If not, it would have just been another case of young people from the community getting harassed, and the police officers getting away with it.”
While 16 of the 32 defendants have won from $9,000 to $23,000 individually in damages from the city, these young people recognize that the dropped charges and settlement were neither to the credit of the “justice system” or good fortune. The Bushwick 32 won justice because they were organized and won over the active support the community. Their case was not isolated, but rather part of a systemic pattern of racist police brutality that can—and must—be combated and defeated.
