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New York’s epic white backlash: How a horrid 1960s relic is still with us today

SHAFAQNA – I grew up in New York in the 1960s and 70s saying a prayer whenever I heard a siren – a prayer for whomever the siren wailed, and a prayer for the men behind the siren, the policemen and firemen risking their lives every day, my uncles (and later cousins) among them. That’s what my mother taught me. I still find myself doing it sometimes.

As I got older, I learned the police weren’t seen as protectors, especially in black communities. They were sometimes viewed as predators, in New York, and across the country. My first national news story, as an adult, profiled the 1981 Milwaukee protest movement that emerged when a young black man, Ernie Lacy, died in police custody after a cop pinned him to the ground with a knee to the neck. It was a case similar to Eric Garner’s – in front of witnesses, but before the days of cell phone cameras. (Five officers were eventually convicted not of killing Lacy but of failing to provide first aid.) So I have struggled to reconcile those contradictory views of police – heroes or brutes – my entire adult life.

Now I live in New York again, for the first time since the 1970s, and again New York is in turmoil over the police –  not just over the killings of Garner and other unarmed black men, but over the murders of two police officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, in Brooklyn on Dec. 20.  White New Yorkers fear a return to the bad old days of riots, escalating crime and attacks on police. In the 1970s, 46 officers were killed in the line of duty, according to the New York Times, and 41 more in the 1980s. Before these latest murders, the last police killing was in 2011.

Black New Yorkers say the bad old days — of police abuse — never ended. The loudest voices are on the extremes, shouting down those who are trying to find common ground.

And as I listen to the loudest voice of all, that of Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association chief Pat Lynch, claiming Mayor Bill de Blasio has “blood on his hands” for expressing sympathy with New Yorkers protesting Garner’s death, I’m reminded that I grew up at what might have been the epicenter of the northern white backlash: Nassau County, New York in the 1960s and 1970s. The tensions of that time and place haunted us, maybe like never before, in 2014.



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    Source:  : http://www.salon.com/2014/12/29/new_yorks_epic_white_backlash_how_a_horrid_1960s_relic_is_still_with_us_today/

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