Zero Tolerance: Quality of Life and the New Police Brutality in New York City

Mothers of Invention: The Families of Police-Brutality Victims and the Movement They’ve Built

7 Mothers of Invention The Families of Police-BrutalityVictims and the MovementThey’ve Built Andrew Hsiao ONE CHILLY EVENING last year, some twenty people crowded into the cramped, downtown Manhattan office of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights to share a mutual heartbreak. Each member of the group—mostly Latinas, though two young Asian women and a middleaged African American couple were among them—had lost a son or brother to police violence, but the discussion was at once gruesome and remarkably practical. One mother spoke matter-of-factly about the “three kinds of strangulation.” Another laid out time limits and deadlines for civil suits. Still another recounted a meeting she had just had with a private pathologist: “The doctor said my son did have a slow death. I don’t know what he meant by that, but it’s been bothering me ever since.”1 Like a New York version of the Argentinian mothers of the disappeared , mothers and sisters of police brutality victims have become a ubiquitous and heart-wrenching presence at protests, rallies, and teachins across the city. Their extraordinary public role has seemingly been welcomed by both the movement and the media—a New York Times pro- file of Kadiadou Diallo, the mother of the Guinean immigrant who was killed by a hail of police bullets in the spring of 1999, described her as a “telegenic celebrity,” and meditated on her “potential” as a “national icon,” “figurehead,” and “symbol.”2 But even as the iconography of the police-brutality controversy has increasingly accommodated images of grieving mothers—humanizing 179 brutality for many and helping to contest police narratives of black and Latino male criminality—the more fundamental roles of these women have been largely ignored. Behind the scenes, mothers and family members of police-brutality victims have become leaders of a citywide movement, quietly building and sustaining organizations in the Bronx and Brooklyn, organizing multiracial demonstrations in Manhattan and Queens, producing publications that track police victims and bad cops. Years of meetings and marches have propelled several into exceptional political engagements, yet their movement has remained rooted in street-level community organizing, producing at least temporary alliances with an unlikely array of social forces—youth groups, gay and lesbian organizations, even street gangs. Indeed, just as the police brutality controversy reached its apogee in public consciousness following the shooting of Amadou Diallo and the weeks of mass protests that followed it, the mothers and their grassroots allies found themselves and their activist agenda pushed to the side by politicians, celebrities, and leading liberal establishment figures suddenly eager to bask in the media spotlight. Meanwhile, these mostly poor women have battled resistance in their own communities—and within their families—as well as political inexperience and the ever-present enemy of debilitating grief. They have been lucky to find allies among some of the city’s ablest radical community organizers. That collaboration has built arguably the city’s most enduring grassroots protest movement of the last decade, a movement that has helped keep direct-action politics alive while helping to make police brutality one of the defining political issues of our time. Iris Baez considers herself the unlikeliest of activists. Looking back on the decades during which she raised eleven children—five of them adopted—in a small brick house while her Bronx neighborhood slowly declined, she says, “We never went to meetings, other than church meetings.” She and her husband, Ramon, who were born in Puerto Rico, are widely known in their University Heights neighborhood as leaders of the nearby Second Christian Church. For years, police cruisers used to park on the Baez’s tiny block, where their only neighbors are a vacant lot and a gas station. Drug dealers and prostitutes occasionally ply their trades beneath the Jerome Avenue subway, across the street from the Baez house. “We always had wonderful relations with the 180 ANDREW HSIAO cops,” says Baez. “They used to use the bathroom when they were on coffee break.” All of which makes her odyssey since December 22, 1994, she adds, “so ironic.” That night, her twenty-nine-year-old son, Anthony, and three of his brothers were playing a game of touch football outside their home when a stray ball hit a parked police car. At the wheel was officer Francis Livoti. The officer ordered the Baez brothers home, and when the youngest, seventeen-year...