Filed under: United States — Michael van der Galien on April 27, 2008 @ 2:30 pm CEST
That he doesn’t care as much about civil right as he cares about getting media attention.’Hundreds of angry people marched through Harlem on Saturday after the Rev. Al Sharpton promised to “close this city down” to protest the acquittals of three police detectives in the 50-shot barrage that killed a groom on his wedding day and wounded two friends.’
“We strategically know how to stop the city so people stand still and realize that you do not have the right to shoot down unarmed, innocent civilians,” Sharpton told an overflow crowd of several hundred people at his National Action Network office in the historically black Manhattan neighborhood. “This city is going to deal with the blood of Sean Bell.”
Sharpton was joined by the family of 23-year-old Sean Bell - a black man - and a friend of Bell who was wounded in the 2006 shooting outside a Queens strip club. Two of the three officers charged were also black.
The rally at Sharpton’s office was followed by a 20-block march down Malcolm X Boulevard and then across 125th Street, Harlem’s main business thoroughfare, where some bystanders yelled out “Kill the police!”
Now, obviously when a person gets killed by the police, while he didn’t do anything wrong, an investigation should be started and, if found that those officers did something wrong, they should be punished. But “kill the police”? “We will close this city down”?
But in this case, an investigation was conducted, and a judge found the police not guilty of any wrongdoings. In such a case, justice has had its way. When you don’t like a verdict, you can appeal, or something, but you’re not threatening to shut down the city, let alone to “kill the police” (which is something that tells us all we need to know about the ‘innocence’ of at least some of these protesters).
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