Apr 28, 2008 7:23 pm US/Eastern
Threats Of Civil Disobedience Increase In NYC
Congressman Conyers Joins Growing Group Of Public Officials Protesting Controversial Sean Bell Verdict
Reporting
Jay Dow
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
Shockwaves from the Sean Bell verdict which reverberated throughout New York City this weekend are now rolling across the country, and Congress has taken notice.
Congressman John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, traveled to Queens on Monday to meet with Bell's family. He is joining a growing number of voices calling for massive demonstrations of civil disobedience to protest Friday's verdict, and a federal investigation into the case.
"I'm talking with the Attorney General of the United States. The Judiciary Committee plans its own hearings and we're going to struggle to end all police brutality anywhere!" Conyers said.
"And what I wanted to do was make sure that we continue under non-violent protest for a better system in this country."
Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, also planned to visit the location near Club Kalua in Jamaica, Queens where Bell was killed; the same location where Bell's father is still fuming over a judge's decision to clear three NYPD detectives who fired 50 shots at Bell and two of his friends.
"I promised him that. He's got to get justice. I mean that," William Bell said.
Conyers' visit came a day after national and local civil rights leaders and elected officials repeated calls for the U.S. Department of Justice to bring federal charges against the three officers.
Signs that this is now a bandwagon gaining momentum: take a look at the politicians who joined Rep. Conyers: fellow senior Congressman Charles Rangel, but also Rep. Joe Crowley; Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Queens Borough President Helen Marshall, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion, City Comptroller William Thompson … and more.
On Sunday, other critics of the acquittal proposed a permanent state-level special prosecutor to investigate police misconduct and brutality cases.
Civil rights leaders and local elected officials spoke Sunday before about 200 people and a bevy of reporters and television cameras at The Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network headquarters in Harlem.
The speakers expressed outrage and disappointment over Queens State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Cooperman's verdict Friday clearing the three undercover officers in the Nov. 26, 2006, shooting near a nightclub where Bell had just left his bachelor party.
The officers said they believed Bell and his friends had a gun and feared for their lives; Bell and his friends were unarmed.
Sharpton, who criticized state elected officials who haven't spoken publicly about the verdict, said he and others were organizing a response to the verdict but didn't elaborate.
Sharpton, National Urban League President Marc Morial and others said they planned to write U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey and his assistant for civil rights to request a meeting.
Some at Sunday's meeting noted that Bell was only one on a long list of victims of police shootings across the country in recent years.
"The scales of justice are out of balance," one man said to applause as some in the audience hissed that the scales were never balanced to begin with. "We will not see another generation of African-American men being shot down without there being justice. We will be focused like a laser until justice rains down."
Other speakers said the officers' acquittal gave urgency to the need for younger generations to pick up the mantle of civil rights advocacy.
"This is our lunch-counter moment for the 21st century," the Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., president of the Hip Hop Caucus in Washington, D.C., said of police misconduct.
"Their Emmit Till is now our Sean Bell," he said of the 14-year-old black Chicago boy who was brutally murdered in 1955 by white men in Mississippi for supposedly whistling at a white woman. "We must rise up now."
Steele said he was "sick and tired of being sick and tired of injustices in our society."
"We can't sit idly by and let this inhumane treatment continue," Steele said. "You still must march and raise hell and go to jail. You can't expect this country that enslaved you to save you."
Bell's fiancee, Nicole Paultre Bell, and father, William Bell, also attended the meeting.
Earlier Sunday, former New York Civil Liberties Union head Norman Siegel and the co-founders of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, proposed a permanent state-level special prosecutor with the power to investigate allegations of police misconduct, brutality and corruption.
Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown, whose office prosecuted the Bell shooting case, had said there was no basis for the appointment of a special prosecutor.
The advocates also said the NYPD's 13-member Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent agency that investigates allegations against police officers, needed a massive overhaul.
In order to become more effective, they said, department attorneys should be replaced with the board's own legal unit and the statute of limitations on its probes should be extended from 18 months to three years, the same time frame for federal civil rights cases.
They said they expected Gov. David Paterson to support their proposals. A spokeswoman for Paterson said Sunday that the governor recently learned of the recommendations through press reports and would review them carefully.
CBS 2 HD's Pablo Guzman contributed to this report.
(© 2008 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
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