Street Justice

People were looking for justice on the streets of New York yesterday. They looked uptown and downtown and in Brooklyn and around Yankee Stadium, too.

They were trying to bring attention to the acquittal of three New York City Police Department detectives who were charged in the shooting that killed Sean Bell and wounded Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield.

It’s always the same story in neighborhoods like Jamaica and Crown Heights and Harlem and Mott Haven: The police keep shooting and innocent people keep dying and the Mayor and the Police Commissioner and too many New Yorkers don’t seem to care.

Al Sharpton – the only leader who stands up for everyone – led the protests.

“If you are not going to lock up the guilty in this town, then I guess you’ll have to lock up the innocent,” he said.

The NYPD has no trouble locking up the innocent just like they have no trouble intimidating the innocent and beating the innocent and shooting the innocent.

Over 100 people were arrested for trying to bring a measure of justice to this city.

“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just person is also a prison,” Henry David Thoreau once wrote.

There was no justice on the streets yesterday, but the police locked up a lot of just people.

That’s business as usual for the NYPD.