Million Youth March :: essays research papers

Authorities on riot control said Sunday that the Police Department appeared to have moved too swiftly to end a rally of black youths in Harlem on Saturday, and seemed to have forgotten some of the lessons learned from disturbances over the last 30 years. Though one expert defended the police action as a way to prevent matters from getting out of hand, others said the haste in shutting down the rally, known as the Million Youth March, was a sharp break from the past practice of the department, which is known for its smooth handling of massive demonstrations. As Saturday's ralliers began to disband, a police helicopter began making passes over the crowd and officers in riot helmets stormed the stage from behind. Soon bottles, barricades and trash baskets were flying, leaving one person in the crowd and about 15 officers injured. "From the beginning, it seemed clear the mayor and police wanted to make a point," said David Bayley, dean of the School of Criminal Justice at the State University of New York at Albany. "This looks more like politics than tactics." Anthony Bouza, who was the department's commander in Harlem in the early 1970s, said he was shocked by the swift police surge and believes that the police "owe the black community an apology." "You're dealing with people -- not terrorists," said Bouza, who is retired and lives on Cape Cod, Mass. "This confirms the black community's sense that the police are an army of occupation in the ghetto. It's nuts." Bouza recalled that as a police intelligence officer, he spent nearly every Saturday afternoon from 1957 to 1965 listening to Malcolm X and other black nationalists speak on 125th Street. "The one thing that we learned from all the riots of the 1960s was the need to negotiate, to mediate, to be patient," he said. But Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said the police had acted commendably at what "promised to be a much worse event, a really violent event." He said the rally's chief organizer, Khallid Abdul Muhammad, deliberately began his speech just before the rally's court-ordered ending at 4 p.m. "He wanted to create a disturbance," the mayor said. "The police kept that to a minimum, and they did something for which we should be very proud of them." The mayor had repeatedly vowed that at 4, the police would begin treating the gathering as an illegal demonstration.