Against and Beyond Police Brutality

Featuring:

-Interview with Lalit Clarkson from Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (NYC)-Audio from March 15 Demonstration Against Police Brutality (Toronto) -Interview with Bridget Tolley (Kitigan Zibi Algonquin First Nation in Quebec)

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A report released to Congress states that the New York Police Department stop and frisk tactics - arbitrary stops by police that do not require a warrant- have increased by 21 per cent in the last year. The report also shows that 88 percent of those stopped were Black and Latino. Lalit Clarkson of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement - a black radical formation that organizes in new york and throughout the united states- believes that the increased targeting of people of colour by stop and frisk is due to increased gentrification and racial profiling saying that “there is no, sort of, separation, for us, between high stop and frisk and high rates of gentrification or rates of moving people out of our communities. So, for us…we equate stop and frisk to illegal racial profiling.”A law prohibiting the storing of information- data-banking- of those stopped and frisked but not charged was recently signed in New York. The NYPD immediately issued an internal memo - leaked to the public- that suggested officers store the data on paper instead so as to work around the new law. Community organizers are not surprised by the NYPD reaction. They say they will continue working until the comprehensive social and institutional reforms needed to stop the discriminatory polices of the NYPD are in place. Luam, a member of both No One is Illegal and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, recently spoke with Lalit about the proactive work the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement is doing to eliminate police brutality.

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Bridget Tolley is a grandmother of five from the Kitigan Zibi Algonquin First Nation in Quebec. Her mother was struck and killed by a Quebec Police cruiser on their reserve on October 6th 2001. Since then Bridget has been calling for an independent investigation into the police killing of her mother. She has also worked on the Sisters In Spirit campaign, a project of the Native Women’s Association of Canada that was defunded by the Federal government in 2010. The project was designed to build a database for all missing and murdered Indigenous women across the country. Tolley and others assert that the government has cut the project because, as she says, “they are trying to forget.”