From: nyt%nyxfer%igc.apc.org@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu (NY Transfer News)
Subject: NEWS:Detroit Shocked by Police Killing/ww
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: The NY Transfer News Service
Resent-From: "Rich Winkel" <MATHRICH@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 23:48:32 GMT



Via The NY Transfer News Service * All the News that Doesn't Fit


                DETROIT SHOCKED BY POLICE KILLING

                        By Cheryl LaBash
                             Detroit

Malice Wayne Green, a 35-year-old African American worker, was
beaten to death on Nov. 5 by white Detroit police. The next day,
all seven cops involved were suspended without pay.

A tearful Police Chief Stanley Knox said criminal charges are
pending. Mayor Coleman Young assured Detroiters that the
perpetrators would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the
law. The city administration moved swiftly to deplore the racist
bloody murder.

Lineups so witnesses could identify the killers were held over
the weekend to speed the indictments of those who actually
participated in the beating and departmental disciplinary action
against those police who watched without intervening to save
Malice Green. While indictments of police take weeks or months in
other cities, in Detroit they are expected in less than a week.

At the same time, however, police patrols were stepped up in the
west Warren Avenue neighborhood to quell any demonstrations of
outrage.

On Nov. 8, demonstrators at a previously planned march against
violence eagerly grabbed up signs saying, "Jail killer cops!"
Members of the Green family attended.

NOT LOS ANGELES, BUT ...

In the national and local media, this murder is being compared to
the vicious video-taped police beating of Rodney King in Los
Angeles. When King's attackers were acquitted by a suburban white
jury, rebellions broke out in Los Angeles and many other cities.

But this is Detroit, a city where Mayor Coleman Young's first
election in 1973 followed a mass movement against police
brutality and racism. He was Detroit's first African American
mayor elected without the endorsement or support of the
Democratic Party. He disbanded a police hit squad known as STRESS
and instituted an affirmative action program in the Detroit
police department.

The City of Detroit has a civilian board of commissioners,
appointed by the mayor, that includes Detroit NAACP President
Arthur Johnson.

BRUTALITY COMPLAINTS UP

Yet police brutality and racist repression have not been
eliminated. In 1989, 254 brutality complaints were filed against
Detroit police; only nine were upheld. By 1990, Detroit paid out
$12.1 million in settlements of police assault lawsuits. In the
same year Los Angeles, with three and a half times the
population, paid only $9 million.

Detroit attorney William Goodman, who has about a dozen brutality
cases pending against the city police department, says, "When two
cops beat up a guy in the presence of five other officers and no
one tries to intervene, then you've got a situation that is the
rule rather than the exception."

The media are pleading with the people of Detroit to rely on the
city administration to get justice for Malice Green. However, the
Movement for a Peoples Assembly has issued a call for community
control of the police. It says an independent commission drawn
from the community is urgently needed to investigate the Malice
Green murder and the reemergence of police brutality in Detroit.

Such a community-based investigation "will be a stimulus to
rebuilding the kind of movement that will end police brutality
once and for all in Detroit," says an MPA flyer. The objective is
community control of the police, including the right to hire and
fire, so the police are held accountable to the workers and
community, not the capitalist establishment.

The struggle for justice for Malice Green is just beginning. The
next question is one of venue: the trial must stay in Detroit if
the voice of the people is to be heard--not through the courts
but in the street. For more information, call the Movement for a
Peoples Assembly, (313) 965-0074.


(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted
if source is cited. For more info contact Workers World, 46 W. 21
St., New York, NY 10010; "workers" on PeaceNet; on Internet:
"workers@mcimail.com".)



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