The fiancee of a man who was fatally gunned down by police says he will be remembered when people walk down the street named in his honor. Nicole Paultre Bell told Mayor Michael Bloomberg that having the street named after her fiance, Sean Bell, is a small symbol of justice for her family. She spoke at a bill-signing ceremony Monday. Bloomberg signed the bill that renames three blocks of a street in Queens after Bell. It also renames other blocks and corners after more than 60 other people. The City Council passed the bill last week. Bell was killed outside a strip club in 2006 while leaving his bachelor party on what would have been his wedding day. A judge acquitted three police officers in 2008.

-”The BklynBandette.” Mr. Hollywood’s Co-Defendant.

A Queens city council has opted to name a street after Sean Bell, the unarmed man shot and killed by police with 50 bullets.

As previously reported, the council was considering renaming a section of Liverpool Street, ‘Sean Bell Way’ and with today’s vote, three blocks of Liverpool Street in Queens, where he was shot and killed on his wedding day, will don the name.

The action was approved despite protest from people like the president of the detectives union, Michael Palladino, who called the proposal “disgraceful.”

“It’s a recognition of his life and what his life meant. We have no idea what that young man could have become.” -New York City Queens Councilman Thomas White (D, Queens) on why a street should be named for Sean Bell.

Some of the facts:

Sean Bell was shot and killed by New York City Police Officers on November 25, 2006. At the time of the incident, Bell was behind the wheel of his vehicle, was legally intoxicated, refused a lawful order by the police and attempted to run the officers down while trying to get away.

Bell had been arrested three times in the past for dealing drugs and possessing an illegal firearm.

The two men with Bell that night had been arrested a total of nine times in the past for crimes including armed robbery and possessing an illegal firearm.

All the police officers involved were brought to trial and acquitted on all charges.

In recognition of his life and what his life meant? What he could have become?

Obviously, it may not have amounted to much as demonstrated by his actions that night.

QUEENS STREET NAME “SEAN BELL WAY”

The New York City Council will consider naming a street after Sean Bell who was fatally gunned down by police officers on his wedding day.

A council committee voted Thursday to send the bill to the full council for a vote next week.

Stan Brooks reports

The legislation would rename a stretch of Liverpool Street in Queens “Sean Bell Way.” The 23-year-old was killed outside a strip club in 2006 as he left his bachelor party.

A judge acquitted three police officers of the shooting in 2008.

The bill includes more than 60 other renamings, including Sugar Ray Robinson Way in Manhattan. A street in Brooklyn and another in the Bronx would be named after people who died in the 2001 World Trade Center attack.

Michael Palladino, the president of the detectives union says he is against the renaming. He says Bell was drunk and used his car as a deadly weapon in a failed attempt to kill police officers.

The infamous and untimely death of Sean Bell may soon be commemorated on a street in Queens. Members of the Queens city council are considering naming a street after Bell in remembrance of him. They will vote on renaming a section of Liverpool Street, ‘Sean Bell Way.’

Sean Bell was the unarmed man that was shot 50 times by police in 2006.

Three detectives were acquitted of all charges last year in the case. Michael Palladino, the president of the detectives union, is calling the proposal to rename the street for Bell “disgraceful.”

Michael Palladino is disgusting.

I really hope this street does get renamed.

After the widespread criticism and public outcry following the shooting and killing of Mr. Sean Bell, NYPD Commissioner established a committee to review the Internal Affairs Bureau (which is in place to investigate police misconduct. Though I must say, the stories my clients tell me seem to indicate plenty of police misconduct goes unnoticed). One of the recommendations established by the committee was that Officers who through firing their weapon injure or kill (whether on or off duty) must submit to a breathalyzer test. This recommendation was implemented under J.A. 50, Interim Order 52.

This increased accountability (albeit moderate in my view) prompted Union representatives of NYPD officers to bring a law suit challenging the constitutionality of requiring submission to such tests. Most recently, NYPD officers sought to enjoin the enforcement of the breathalyzer tests pending the case. This claim was unsuccessful in District Court and the decision affirmed on Friday Dec 11, 2009 by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. Read the complete opinion here. Good Job 2nd Circuit. Keep up the good work. If police officers are to be authorized to maim, shoot and kill to protect us, we citizens should trust in their sobriety while operating “machinery”!

Members of the NYPD shot and killed a teenager in Queens, Saturday after shooting him 11 times.

18-year-old Dashawn Vasconcellos, died of gunshot wounds to the torso, neck and extremities. According to chief NYPD spokesman Paul J. Browne, police fired a total of 14 times with 11 of those bullets hitting the teen.

The boy and two of his friends were leaving Bayswater Park in Far Rockaway around 11:30 p.m. when they were spotted by police. When police approached the boys to question them, Vasconcellos ran and was pursued by three officers. He then turned and pointed a 9mm semiautomatic pistol at them and was shot and killed after being told to drop the gun.

He was taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center where he was pronounced dead.

Why did it take 11 bullets to get the boy to drop the gun? That’s ridiculous, unnecessary force strikes again!

How reminiscent of Oscar Grant and Sean Bell….smh.

The New York Civil Liberties Union sued the NYPD last week to obtain more information and facts about police shootings. The organization is seeking access to two internal police reports: one prepared immediately after a shooting of a civilian, and the other, a more detailed report completed within a few months of the incident.

The NYCLU has filed multiple Freedom of Information Law requests over the last three years—since police shot and killed an unarmed Sean Bell in Queens in November 2006—seeking annual statistical reports about shootings since 1996, as well as data on the race of the victim. The police department produced the reports, but stopped releasing information about race after the 1998 report, at about the time officers shot and killed an unarmed Amadou Diallo in the Bronx in February 1999. Nearly nine out of ten shooting victims in 1996 and 1997 were black or Latino.

Also last week, The New York Times reported that the NYPD released a report showing police officers fired their guns about 16 percent less last year than the previous year. The police report also said that 97 percent of the shooting victims in 2008 were black or Latino.

Despite the year-to-year drop in police gunfire, over the weekend, three officers fatally shot a teenager in Queens 11 times. Police said they spotted 18-year-old Dashawn Vasconcellos and two others leave a city park after hours and a chase ensued. The officers fired 14 rounds after they said Vasconcellos pointed a 9mm semiautomatic pistol at them.

Meanwhile, the NYCLU also says that the NYPD is on track to stop a record number of New Yorkers this year, according to new stop-and-frisk data. The organization says if the current pace continues, 535,000 innocent New Yorkers will have been stopped and interrogated by police by the year’s end.

M1 of dead prez on Six-City Speaking Tour on Gaza

By Aaris A. Schroeder
Editor-In-Chief

M1, one part of political hip-hop duo dead prez has been on a speaking tour, “From the Ghetto to Gaza;” in an effort to educate Americans about his experience and the reality of what is going on in the region, Sept. 23-29, ‘09 throughout Northern-CA visiting Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Cruz and Sonoma County, starting off in Sacramento at the Capitol Garage, a café-style venue that is known for hip-hop and reggae events. 

The cost to hear M1 speak was only $5 at the door and benefited local Hip-Hop Congress Community Chapter for Sacramento as well as S.F. Bay View Newspaper and BlockReportRadio.com.  M1’s goals are to stop the war that is at hand in the Middle-East and help the poor and oppressed people of the world, he says. 

Photo Courtesy of M1

Photo Courtesy of M1

“The main purpose of the tour is to politically educate our community about what is happening on a international scale. The Block Report, the Bay View and dead prez have international world views,” says [Prison of Conscious Community] P.O.C.C. Minister of Information JR.

M1 was to meet up with others to begin a caravan in Cairo through the Gaza strip to provide resources to people who had been held under an Israeli embargo.  Once the caravan arrived at their hotel, there were Egyptian government agents who were told to “follow and document every word and action taken by the Viva Palestina group” according to M1. 

According to M1 the government wasn’t making it easy for his group, which included British Parliamentarian George Galloway, organizer of the mission, Green Party presidential nominee who ran against Barak Obama; Cynthia McKinney who was previously arrested and jailed by the Israeli government for seven days and freed by the Lebanese; Charles Barron, former Black Panther and emcees S.O.U.L. Purpose of the U.S. and Iran and Lowkey of Britain to obtain entrance to Palestine.  The agents made it nearly impossible for the group to leave the hotel room and also, according to M1 relieved them of “thousands of dollars and pounds” of humanitarian aid, including mattresses, medical supplies, school supplies, books and more without the caravan’s knowledge.  Finally, the group was allotted only 24 hours to be in and out of Gaza and told not to bring supplies. 

Palestinians were not allowed to leave Cairo nor could they have access from the Gaza Strip on the other side.  M1 explained how it made him feel, seeing families at the border’s checkpoint, trying to cross the border.  “Cairo is one of the dirtiest cities you have ever seen in your entire life,” says M1.

Photo By Kendaru Photography

“Hip-hop is strong in the Middle-East.  They don’t encourage hip-hop to be said or done, it just happens,” says M1 who explains that the government doesn’t control hip-hop so it is a true underground movement.

 “Hip-hop is the right wing of the state [in the U.S.], including hip-hop media – except for Hip-Hop Congress,” says M1 who tells Hip-Hop Congress that they can help out by creating events in an effort to spread knowledge about what is going down in Palestine. 

“A lot of people think they know what is going on,” says M1 who also reports that a lot of hip-hop artists want to make songs about what is going on but it is hard to when they haven’t experienced it first hand.  He gave the example of Sean Bell being gunned down in Queens, NY and not understanding the dynamic of the secret police force. 

Photo By Kendaru Photography

M1 and others realized they were only there to do public relations for the Gaza Government.  He also states that their government was to parade around English and American citizens in a media effort.  M1 believes that the government that runs Gaza is not the best government for Palestine. 

“I found that Hamas was very aggressive [and] uses fear [to control its people],” according to M1.

“I thought to myself [that we were] giving goods and services to the people, in reality, we were giving it to the government,” says M1 who didn’t want to parade around helping Palestine and then to have U.S. media report that they helped a terrorist country.  

In the end, the group was able to drop off the supplies to the people of Gaza and then returned home. 

“I want to be able to tell the truth from a revolutionary perspective,” says M1. 

Want to get involved?  Contact www.blockreportradio.com, www.deadprez.com or www.sfbayview.com.

By Kieran K. Meadows

A Dutch communications scholar is conducting research on the way the city’s police department and its critics get their messages out in the public sphere. Based on the work she’s done so far, she believes that the two groups both feel victimized by the other, and what they say in public sometimes exacerbates the problem.

Michelle Knight, a doctoral candidate at the University of Groeningen in the Netherlands, is in New York working on her dissertation. She has already written the first part—a historical look at the police department and its critics from the 1850s to the present. Now she is specifically examining the Sean Bell shooting and its aftermath as a case study.

“People are always surprised that I am studying this,” Knight said. “I have a passion for the New York City Police Department. I have a passion for New York history.”

“And I have a passion for polarized communication,” she said.

Knight was a master’s student of American Studies on an exchange program at the University of North Carolina in 1999 when Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, died in a hail of 41 police bullets while he stood in his home’s vestibule.

Knight didn’t understand how it was possible for something like that to happen, so she closely followed the case and the ensuing debate. She went to New York and arranged meetings with police union and community leaders, and became fascinated they held such a different reality on the events that had taken place. She eventually wrote her master’s thesis on the history of the police department, which became the first chapter of her dissertation.

In 2006, Knight was back in Holland when she heard about the police shooting of Sean Bell, who was also unarmed, and killed the night before his wedding. This time, police had fired 50 bullets. Again, she followed the aftermath online, through the indictments of the officers involved, their trial and subsequent acquittal. As methodology, she chose to examine every utterance of a stakeholder in the New York Times’ reports.

“Everybody watches the NYPD and the various claims-makers interact in the press, on the stage of the metropolis,” said Greg Donaldson, a professor of communications at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. “But nobody has really studied it in a scholarly way.”

This week, Knight plans to interview City Councilman Charles Barron, Michael Palladino, the president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, and Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. She hopes she can soon secure interviews with the Rev. Al Sharpton and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

It is clear that not being a New Yorker, and more so, being Dutch, a complete outsider, has helped her gain access to people who are normally reluctant to speak.

“There’s no question she’s gotten into a lot of places that I assume if I were trying to do it, I would have a lot of difficulty getting in,” said Dr. Delores Jones-Brown, the director of John Jay’s Center on Race, Crime and Justice. Jones-Brown said that because international police agencies have looked to the NYPD as a model based on its crime reduction success, it was important for a conversation to continue, to better understand what needs to be changed in order to prevent shootings, like Diallo’s and Bell’s, from happening again.

“It shows how important this topic and this particular incident is in the big picture of police-community relations,” said Jones-Brown.

Knight, meanwhile, says her goal in the end is simply to make a difference.

“I hope my findings can help bring people to better understand each other’s reality,” she said.

Arrested, for what?

Often times we  hear how the black man is imprisoned at disproportiante numbers and rates in relation to other ethnic groups.  We begin to draw conclusions about their behavior and value system.  We begin to conclude that black men must be bad people and possess a greater disposition toward criminality.  How is this fallacious conclusion drawn?

Black men are being arrested at greater numbers at the discretion of police officers.  Police are merely arresting more black men.  It does not mean that white, korean or chinese men posses greater values and a greater moral fortitude than our brothers.  It simply means that the officers perfoming the arrests possess a racist intent and/or exhibit a complete faliure at exercising appropriate judgement of who is to be arrested and who is to be freed.

View this video for an addition to the growing body of evidence illustrating a pattern of racialized police misconduct.  Ask yourselves, when have police ever stopped brutalizing black men? …Not too along ago, when my father was my age, it wasn’t even taboo.  And most importantly, who benefits economically from this social malady?

As you all know Plaxico Burress will be doing two years in jail very soon. Burress was charged  after shooting him self in a New York Night club. You would have thought he shot somebody else the way New York came down on him even Bloomberg came down on him. If he was a regular person like myself they would not have cared if he shot his self  as long as he didnt shoot anybody. Thats what happens when your in the Spotlight  every thing you do is blown up by 100. So all the people who say Famous people get off easy they havent seen Mike Vick, TI and OJ go to jail. The thing we need to be looking at is why didnt the cops who killed Sean Bell even get any type of jail time …………..

“An aspiring rapper will serve two years in state prison after a song he posted on MySpace caught the attention of law enforcement. Antavio Johnson pleaded no contest to two charges related to threatening a public servant. The charges stem from a song entitled “Kill Me A Cop” that he posted on MySpace under the pseudonym T.O. In the song, Johnson makes specific references to fallen officers. The lyrics includes lines like “Call me crazy, but I think I fell in love with the sound of hearing the dispatcher say, ‘Officer down.’” Under Florida law, it’s illegal to threaten harm against any public servant. Johnson was arrested after a Polk County detective heard about the song. At the time of the arrest, he was already in the Polk County Jail for violating his probation on drug charges. He was sentenced to two years in state prison, but he could have received up to a 15-year sentence.

FOR VIDEO OF THIS BULLSHIT CLICK HERE> BULLSHIT!

courtesy of hoodintellegence bc

Last week I took the time to watch Black in America. And even though I found it to be worth a watch. It still was missing something. True content. Don’t get me wrong Malaak Rock has done a wonderful job of changing the lives of those kids and trust me the principle of his own private school was nothing less than inspiring but what about the cold reality of police brutality? Or how many African-American celebrities have fallen victim of racism? Let alone, police brutality? Just last year, R & B singer Tank was a victim of police brutality and arrested while in New Orleans. Or let’s go back a few years and revisit Rodney King? Or maybe the man while in Birmingham, Al who was ejected from a speeding van, knocked unconscious to be beat by officers? Was he resisting arrest while unconscious? Fast forward to Dr. Henry Louis, Jr. A Harvard professor who had locked himself out of his house. Doing what most people would do, he broke into his own home. Is that a crime America? Or is it a crime to be black in a predominately white neighborhood and decided to break into your own home? Hmmm…If this doesn’t raise a few eyebrows then you are indefinitely apart of the group of naive America. I’m no calculator but uh…Harvard=money. May I please go even further? Okay,lets go back to 2006. Remember Sean Bell? In case you don’t, this young man was shot a total of 50 times. Hmmm… sounds funny? It should but guess what. I don’t blame America for this problem. I blame us for not finding the little bits of unity we possess to come together for something other than Happy Hour or Bird flu Fridays… why am I being harsh? Well because the Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and etc. Fight hard and long for their rights. Where exactly is our Forty acres and that stankin’ mule? I want it. I know exactly what I can do with it. The Native Americans got an reserve, the Jews reparations and the Spanish live wealthy off of my tax money. But me? I get a swift kick up the rear for Officer Jones!?!

If people have been wondering what the youth has to say about issues of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and inequality they have finally spoken and are now being heard. Russell Simmons presents a series on HBO called Brave New Voices, it follows teams across the United States hoping to make it to the annual national slam poetry competition. Slam poetry differs from regular spoken word; it is used in gauging a judges score of a performance and produce a winner.

The Twin Cities is also thriving in spoken word, I got to attend the first Urban Griots Award Show this past April and I was opened up to a new world right here in our great city. Minnesota’s youth slam team, Quest for the Voice is also on their way to Brave New Voices in Chicago, IL next month.

Check out some of my favorite performances from BNV 2008:

“Ugly Sunset” by Mike Gerbino

“Sean Bell” by Josh Bennet, Hasan Malik, and Alysia Harris

Written by Rachel Summers

rachel.dustbowl@gmail.com

]]> http://kennethgsmith.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/the-sean-bell-aftermath/ Fri, 29 May 2009 17:35:12 +0000 kennethgsmith http://kennethgsmith.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/the-sean-bell-aftermath/

Hip-Hop is known for beef. You can be sure that when an artist is preparing for an album release that there will be a fight, a diss record, an arrest or a shoot-out aimed at another artist. The radio buzzes about it, blogs and message forums fight about it and youtube videos are made because of it. But what happens when Hip-Hop’s community has beef with its biggest enemy of all, the Police? Besides a few inspirational and empowering songs, not too much.

On April 25, the three police offers charged with the 51 shots that killed unarmed husband-to-be Sean Bell 12 months ago were acquitted of all charges. Since then, much has been said about the disappointing verdict –what it says about law enforcement and the justice system’s treatment of the black community – but much is not being done about it.

Instead of the petty bickering between rival artist and labels, a collective effort should be made by Hip-Hop to inform and aware its people about what they can do about this case. Instead of the recent youtubing, photoshopping and case-pending rap beefs used to create controversy amongst ourselves, there’s a serious controversy being forced upon us that requires a similar approach.

Although rap beef is widely recognized as a strong selling tool, these events call for Hip-Hop as a whole to come together and stand-up for us as a teaching tool, knowing that a system ordered to protect us will not. The same energy used to further ridicule, disrespect and blatantly violate each other through rap beefs can be used to cohesively spearhead a movement against those who do these things to us already.

Where are groups like Public Enemy? N.W.A? Artist like Nas, Ice Cube and 2pac? Hip-Hop has the power and the resources to make a significant change, because if any change is going to happen it has to happen from within. Hip-Hop, we need you to answer the call.