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Obama cracks down on abuses by big-city police departments
Latest News
Tuesday, 31 May 2011

In shift from Bush, Obama's DOJ is aggressively investigating police departments accused of civil rights violations

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/05/30/justice_department_civil_rights_police/index.html

By Justin Elliott

Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, center, talks about a federal investigation of the Newark Police Department during a May 9 news conference with Newark Mayor Cory Booker, far left.In a marked shift from the Bush administration, President Obama's Justice Department is aggressively investigating several big urban police departments for systematic civil rights abuses such as harassment of racial minorities, false arrests, and excessive use of force.In interviews, activists and attorneys on the ground in several cities where the DOJ has dispatched civil rights investigators welcomed the shift. To progressives disappointed by Eric Holder's Justice Department on key issues like the failure to investigate Bush-era torture and the prosecution of whistle-blowers, recent actions by the DOJ's Civil Rights Division are a bright spot. 
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PJ Statement In Solidarity with CAAAV
Latest News
Tuesday, 17 May 2011

PJ Solidarity Statement for CAAAV and Chinatown

May 16, 2011

The following is Peoples’ Justice member org, CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities’, descriptionan NYPD of beating and arrest of a man in Chinatown:

 

On Mother’s Day last Sunday, Yi Zhuo Wu, a Chinese immigrant, was pinned down by four NYPD police officers who beat him bloody and then handcuffed him in Chinatown’s Columbus Park. Wu, a musician, is a member of the Street Musical Club, a group that has played music regularly in Columbus Park for more thanfour years. Aggravating the situation even further, as the community was watching Mr. Wu being arrested and calling for him to be released, a police officer threatened to mace people who did not move back.

 

According to the police, the Street Musical Club did not have a sound permit. In a statement to reporters, the NYPD has characterized this as a misunderstanding, that this would not have happened if people in the community knew that they needed a sound permit to play instruments in the park. Their solution is to hold a community information session to let people know what procedures they should follow. 

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Colorlines Article on Chinatown Police Violence
Latest News
Friday, 13 May 2011

NYPD Filmed in Bloody Arrest of Elderly Chinese Musician

Link to article

by Channing KennedyWednesday,May 11 2011, 11:34 AM EST

On Sunday in Columbus Park in NYC’s Chinatown, several NYPD officers were filmed in a violent-looking arrest of an elderly Chinese musician. So far, the community is divided over whether the police behaved appropriately. Our Chinatown’s Shirley Wu spoke with a witness who says:

[…] the police officers came into the park where the seniors were performing their music. There was one Chinese-speaking officer who spoke to Wu Yizuo, a 64-year-old organizer from Street Musical Club and told him there was a complaint about the music level.

The Chinese-speaking officer proceeded to ask Wu for a performance permit to use a microphone/amplifier but Wu did not have one. He was only able to produce a permit to not cause any obstruction in the park. He also started shouting and pointing and flailing his arms at the Chinese-speaing officer when the officer told him that his permit was unacceptable.

[…] The witness said the Chinese-speaking officer advised Wu not to use the microphone so that the noise level would not be an issue. Wu responded by saying that the park is full of hearing impaired seniors so the microphone is necessary.

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Police Beat and Arrest Elderly Man in Chinatown
Latest News
Thursday, 12 May 2011

**CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities is a member organization of Peoples' Justice.  This is their statement about a recent bloody arrest in Chinatown. PJ is helping them organize a know your rights training on May 22nd (details below.)

CAAAV Statement on Police Violence in Columbus Park 

On Mother’s Day last Sunday, Yi Zhuo Wu, a Chinese immigrant, was pinned down by four NYPD police officers who beat him bloody and then handcuffed him in Chinatown’s Columbus Park. Wu, a musician, is a member of the Street Musical Club, a group that has played music regularly in Columbus Park for more than four years. Aggravating the situation even further, as the community was watching Mr. Wu being arrested and calling for him to be released, a police officer threatened to mace people who did not move back.

According to the police, the Street Musical Club did not have a sound permit. In a statement to reporters, the NYPD has characterized this as a misunderstanding, that this would not have happened if people in the community knew that they needed a sound permit to play instruments in the park. Their solution is to hold a community information session to let people know what procedures they should follow.

Read more...
 
Widespread Mistrust of NYPD Among Youth
Latest News
Friday, 06 May 2011

** hi-lights added by Peoples' Justice 

News Brief: City Youth and the NYPD

BY Abigail kramer

May 5, 2011—Amid the flood of analysis that followed the NYPD's release of data on its use of "stop, question and frisk" policing tactics, researchers recently released a survey showing widespread mistrust of police among 1,100 New Yorkers between the ages of 14 and 21.

The survey was conducted by the Polling for Justice project at the City University of New York, a collective of youth and adult researchers who developed the questions and distributed them through their own networks and those of community organizations. The participants were not as demographically representative of the city as a random sample would have been—nearly two-thirds of respondents were female and just 9 percent were white (whites accounted for 22 percent of the city's young people in the 2010 census).

Nevertheless, researchers set out to have a pool that reflected the racial, ethnic and socioeconomic differences among city public high school students and for the most part they did. Survey participants were geographically dispersed across all of the city's boroughs except for Staten Island.

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