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. 

**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.

** 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.