You’ll Never See My Byline In The Times-Picayune

 

Asante, the eldest of five siblings, sent me an email early, early

this morning citing a photo of me and five comrades

striding out of city hall, fists upraised—we had taken over

the mayor’s office: Ernest Morial, the first black mayor.

 

Around our necks we wore signs, each with the name

of a person murdered by the police in the west bank neighborhood

known as Algiers (at least the colonialist are consistent,

they always kill some of us to try to discourage the rest of us).

 

I know we are in a post-racial state, I know today is not

as murderous as yesterday except if you understand

that black homicide is really genocide and is as high as a hawk

patrolling the sky. Anyway, the article gave no context—

 

we were just crazy, young niggers—overlook the white boy

with us (besides he was probably one of those Jewish radicals),

and that girl must have been the consort of one of us

otherwise why would a woman protest? I smiled

 

and called my daughter to thank her for passing the info on.

Asante said she remembered those days, she was maybe ten or eleven

but she remembered and she asked herself the right questions:

"what now?" "what am I doing for the greater good?" 

 

"when? will the imbalance between haves and have nots

ever be able to really change?" I smiled. Asante was part

of the reason we resorted to direct action. I wanted to give

her (and all other young people) something stronger, something

 

more than my name in the daily paper endorsing bullshit

cooperating with capitalism, suit&tied down, a negro

the white folks could be proud of. I wanted to be the question

mark in the eyes of the status quo: what in the world

 

do those negroes want? Don’t they have a black mayor?

Isn’t that enough/too much? How come they smiling,

looking so happy? Shouldn’t they have been arrested?

What is the world coming to? Can’t we bring back

 

the good old days when there was respect

for law and order? I know we should never forget

the law and order that brought us here, that

stole this land, killed off the native inhabitants

 

and fucked with our minds so much

that some of us would love to do nothing so much

as write our own obituaries—yes, I know

I sound extreme but that’s how I respond to murder.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

 

______________________________

 

Infamous Algiers 7 police brutality case of 1980 has parallels to today

Published: Sunday, November 07, 2010, 8:00 AM

Thirty years ago this week, a single gunshot changed New Orleans' relationship with its police force.

A young, white cop, Gregory Neupert, took a fatal bullet to the neck. In short order, four black citizens were killed in a hail of police gunfire. The chief of police was eventually forced out amid a racially tinged uproar. The mayor felt the wrath of an outraged citizenry.

The violent police response to Neupert's killing led to the federal indictment of seven officers in one of the earliest, wide-ranging civil rights probes of the New Orleans Police Department. Three of the so-called "Algiers Seven" were eventually convicted in an exhaustive trial that relied on the testimony of a fellow cop who broke ranks. Though four citizens were dead, the conviction centered on the beating and abuse of other citizens, but not on the killings.

This week, another dark chapter in the history of the NOPD begins, one with haunting parallels to the Neupert case. Starting Monday, a new group of officers will be tried in federal court for numerous alleged civil rights violations in Algiers. Prosecutors say that in the days after Hurricane Katrina, one officer shot Henry Glover, other officers burnt his body to bits of bones and beat his companions, and others helped cover the whole matter up.

The Glover killing, like that of Neupert, occurred in an environment of fear and anger. Stories of rampant violence and roving gangs had swept New Orleans. At least one of the tales was true: About 48 hours before Glover was shot, an NOPD officer was shot in the head in Algiers by an alleged looter.

In this week's trial, too, there will be finger-pointing, officers testifying against colleagues. Given that the five accused cops in the Glover are all white and their alleged victims all black, the trial will have strong racial overtones. While only five officers are being tried, the practices of the entire department will be under the microscope. The picture won't be flattering.

The Neupert case laid out a clear blueprint of what was wrong with the NOPD of 1980: a tolerance of corruption, a lax attitude toward use of force, failures in leadership. The cases now on the federal docket, including the Glover case and the Danziger Bridge case, make plain that those problems have not gone away.

Looking back, some of those involved in the Algiers Seven case see it as the wake-up call that was never answered.

'The lessons of Algiers'

For those the case touched, the emotions and passions of that period remain strong. All said the incident forever affected their views on life, on New Orleans, on justice. Many thought at the time that the incident would be the impetus for major reform in the police force.

It wasn't.

"I think we have forgotten the lessons of Algiers," said Morris Reed, a former NOPD cop who worked on the investigation as a federal prosecutor. "There's always been a knee-jerk reaction to incidents like this. Police try to contain it, defend it, deny it, rather than admit they made mistakes. We needed to have moved forward and taken steps to make sure it doesn't happen again."

Just in the past year, 20 New Orleans police officers have been charged with civil rights abuses and cover-ups. And like in 1980, the prosecutions are being led by the U.S. Department of Justice's civil rights division, working with the local U.S. attorney's office.

Mary Howell, a longtime local civil rights attorney, who represented abused citizens in the Algiers Seven case and has worked dozens of other police abuse cases, said the same problems keep surfacing because they've never been adequately addressed.

"I look at this like domestic violence, there are these repeated cycles of abuse," said Howell, who blames slippages in accountability and supervision. "There will be periods of lull, where everyone thinks things are all right now, but really it is just pushed beneath the surface. Then there is a terrible event and everyone thinks: 'Oh, how could this happen?'"

Michael Johnson, a career Justice Department prosecutor who recently retired, recalled that the NOPD already had a reputation when he signed on to the Algiers Seven case.

"Several things within the NOPD had put them on the radar screen before" the 1980 killings, said Johnson, then one of just 12 people on the Justice Department's civil rights squad that covered abuses across the country.

With such limited resources, the Justice Department at the time realized it couldn't go after every officer who committed a civil rights violation. The idea was to use prosecutions as a tool to stimulate the community to better police itself.

"The notion that 12 of us in the country are going to solve issues of civil rights and police misconduct -- that's like putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound," Johnson said. "Unless a local community stands up and demands something different, there isn't necessarily the resources on a federal level. It was a catalyst, whether the community used it that way or not."

A cop's death, a fatal raid

Long before a bullet tore through Neupert's neck, before the Algiers neighborhood became a battleground, tiny sparks of unrest acted as tinder.

In 1978, the city's first African-American mayor, Ernest "Dutch" Morial, took office and made strides to reform a police force widely viewed as corrupt.

Morial appointed Jim Parsons, a white Alabama native with a Ph.D. and a reputation as a thinking-man's police chief, to lead the NOPD. Within the next year, a majority-white police force angry about salary and benefits went on strike for weeks. Racial tensions on the force simmered.

Then, on the night of Nov. 9, 1980, an officer found Neupert, a well-liked novice cop, lying in a ditch alongside his police car in Algiers. He clutched a police radio in one hand and a flashlight in the other. The death hit the NOPD hard, its rank-and-file erupting in sorrow, and soon, anger.

Reports quickly emanated from the Fischer public housing complex that young black men were being beaten, marched around at gunpoint, forced to undergo aggressive interrogation bordering on torture, all at the hands of New Orleans police officers. There were tales of mock executions, bags over heads and hardbound city directories being slammed into faces.

Raymond Ferdinand, a 38-year-old Fischer resident and alleged police informant, was fatally shot during one of the roundups. Police said he drew a knife when officers tried to handcuff him. An officer shot him twice.

Five days after the Neupert killing, a group of homicide and robbery detectives joined members of the Felony Action Squad -- the agency's most proactive group of officers, a group not unlike the tactical unit under scrutiny in today's federal probes -- in conducting simultaneous raids on two Algiers homes. Two supposed witnesses had allegedly fingered James Billy Jr., 26, and Reginald Miles, 28.

In one house, police opened fire on Miles and Miles' girlfriend, Sherry Singleton, 26. Police said Miles drew a gun on them and that Singleton's gun jammed as she tried to fire. She was found naked in the bathtub with several gunshot wounds to her body. Blocks away, Billy died in a hail of bullets after he allegedly shot at police.

The neighborhood howled, the mayor demanded calm, and the NOPD higher-ups stood by the officers involved. But soon, the circumstances would unravel.

Initially, "we thought it was a good deal, that the NOPD had done the right thing and found the right people," recalls Cliff Anderson, an FBI agent who worked the case. But then the complaints started rolling in. Civil rights leaders cried foul, catching the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice. The FBI opened an investigation and Anderson and colleagues canvassed the housing development.

"There were many, many potential accounts of abuse we found," Anderson said. "Many of these people, they had backgrounds that might make them less credible. Nonetheless, we found that police went out there and conducted not just interrogations, but beatings."

When FBI agents confronted the cops involved, many had the same reaction: "A lot of them said they stood by the police report," Anderson said.

Anderson teamed up with Johnson and Reed. A break in the case came when a scared man, Oris Buckner, the lone black NOPD officer who was present at one of the fatal raids, spoke up.

"He said these people were murdered, that they didn't have guns," Reed recalled.

3 NOPD officers convicted

During the next three years, investigations probed the deaths and alleged beatings. Two young men, Johnny Brownlee and Robert "Pee Wee" Davis, came forward, saying that police beat them and coerced them into identifying Miles and Billy as Neupert's killers. Those accounts became the basis for the search warrant police used to conduct the raids.

A state grand jury eventually declined to indict officers in the deaths of Billy, Miles and Singleton. But a federal grand jury handed up a lengthy indictment for conspiracy to violate the civil rights of people police questioned in the Neupert investigation, including Brownlee and Davis. The indictment did not charge anyone in the deaths of Ferdinand, Singleton, Miles or Billy.

A local federal judge tossed out the charges against the officers on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct, but the government successfully appealed the ruling. The case had gotten so much publicity that, at the request of the defense, the trial was moved to Dallas, where it began in March 1983.

Lawyers in the Glover case, though they have griped about pretrial publicity, haven't sought a change of venue, likely because of the pro-law enforcement bent of jurors in the Eastern District of Louisiana. Another factor, attorneys and criminal justice observers say, is that a local jury will be more apt to cut the accused officers slack for the conditions they worked under post-Katrina.

A key figure in the Algiers Seven trial was Buckner, who admitted he took part in some civilian beatings at the behest of his colleagues. Buckner was granted immunity for his testimony.

At this juncture, it is not known if Buckner has a counterpart in the Glover case.

Buckner "owned up to what he had done and participated in," Johnson said. "In terms of the actual prosecution of the case, absent significant cooperation, we never could have secured convictions."

Homicide detectives Dale Bonura, John McKenzie and Stephen Farrar ended up in prison. Four other officers were acquitted. More than $2.8 million would be paid by the city in settlements with plaintiffs who claimed they were held against their will, brutalized or traumatized by violence done to their loved ones.

The case still resonates today

The case, especially the sight of an NOPD officer testifying against his colleagues, dealt a blow to police morale, recalls Gus Krinke, the former president of the local Fraternal Order of Police lodge, especially the sight of an NOPD officer testifying against his colleagues.

"It's an old cliche. This guy was grabbing the brass ring. You catch that ring, you get a free ride," Krinke said.

Krinke, who retired in 1996, noted that Buckner's testimony was a benchmark of sorts.

"The days of the thin blue line are no longer there," he said. He points to the current federal probes of the NOPD as evidence. "It's quite clear, especially in this latest investigation, the days of the code of silence are gone," he said.

Parsons, who resigned as police chief weeks after the Neupert killing amid political pressure, said that even in retirement, he still thinks about the case. He says now that he shouldn't have allowed a crew of his most aggressive cops to conduct raids in the wake of the Neupert killing. It was asking for trouble.

Parsons believes the police shot the right suspects, but he acknowledges he can't prove it. And one of the killings bothers him to this day: that of Sherry Singleton, who was shot by police while naked in the tub. "That one never sat right with me," he said.

Kem Landry, the mother of James Billy's child, said she has reconciled with the bloodshed of 30 years ago.

"You have to learn to love your neighbor," she said. "It's hard to do, but you must."

Landry, 52, who received a $50,000 settlement from the city and now lives in Houma, peppers her speech with bits of Scripture. Every once in a while, she'll dream of Billy, who tells her to stay strong.

"We as humans have a tendency to forget the past," she said. "I want people to remember, but I know we are all human."

Reed, the gung-ho federal prosecutor, later became a criminal court judge and now handles civil litigation. He remains proud of the federal case, but he regrets that charges were never brought against the officers who committed the killings. Though evidence was hard to come by, Reed believes a case could have been made.

Anderson, the retired FBI civil rights squad leader, acknowledges the verdicts weren't all in the government's favor, but he remains proud of the three convictions. He said the case shone a bright light on an incident of injustice at the NOPD.

"It allowed me to think we really accomplished something," Anderson said.

Michael Johnson too remains proud of a case that was a challenge from the start.

"It's reflective of our society, then and now, that we are very reticent to call what some police officers do improper," Johnson said. "These are incredibly difficult cases to win. The conviction of a police officer on wrongdoing is the exception, not the rule."

Others prefer not to talk of the events in Algiers. Johnny Brownlee is one of them. Oris Buckner, who was an outcast for years, working in the bowels of the NOPD after his testimony, is reluctant to talk. So are the indicted officers, many of whom did not return calls seeking comment.

Thirty years later, the investigation into the killing of Gregory Neupert, whose death was overshadowed by the ugly events that followed, remains open.

 

GO HERE TO VIEW VIDEO REPORT ON UPCOMING TRIAL

Brendan McCarthy can be reached at bmccarthy@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3301.

>via: http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2010/11/algiers_7_police_brutality_cas.html