A Harlem Grandmother is killed with a hand grenade by New York Police Department
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by A.Faye Hicks/Po' Poet Laureate Harlem Harms Oh, Say Can you See, The Bombs Bursting In Air Childish memories from grade school Harlem Harms From Sea To Shining Sea…? *************************** Grenade kills Harlem Grandmother The letters N Y P D may as well stand for Now Your People Die. Whether it’s being shot 41 times as you enter your home or homicide by hand grenade, New York City still is not a safe place to be if your skin is black. With Al Sharpton off busily campaigning and debating other Democratic presidential hopefuls, it looks as though the death of Alberta Spruill won’t register more than a blip on the outrage meter. But African-Americans should not need the inspiration of a Reverend Al to march on City Hall after yet another senseless killing of an innocent black person by racist cops. Everybody should have been automatically up in arms all on their own, demanding answers. And until adequate assurances arrive that it won’t happen again, the city should have been shut down. Afterall, Spruill, a 57 year-old church-going grandmother with a heart condition, died when a dozen police officers, in a pre-dawn raid on May 16, broke down the door to her sixth-floor apartment and tossed a flash grenade inside. The explosion was powerful enough to rattle the apartment, shattering a glass top table and sending the poor sister into cardiac arrest. Then the terroristic task force handcuffed her, denying any medical attention until it was too late. Miss Alberta, as she was referred to by everyone in her neighborhood, was a much beloved member of the Convent Avenue Baptist Church. So, what had she done to bring the wrath of NYPD down upon her head? Absolutely nothing. As the cops later explained it, they had operated on an erroneous tip from a confidential informant that a man was barricated inside with drugs, pit bulls and a cache of weapons. As if turns out, that suspect, Melvin Boswell, 35, lived on the ninth, not the sixth, floor of the building. He was arrested three days later. Curiously, the break-in to Alberta’s home was conducted by officers from the 25th Precinct, even though her apartment building, located at 310 West 143rd Street, is situated in the 32nd Precinct. Prior to the raid, police investigators made a routine check which suggested that Ms. Spruill was the apartment’s sole tenant. They went ahead anyway and compounded their first mistake with the decision to stun any occupants with a flash grenade. Munitions experts will tell you that this allegedly non-lethal device can cause death in certain circumstances. It’s the type of item best used outdoors for crowd control, for instance to keep an advancing army of angry, bottle-tossing demonstrators at bay. Being confronted by a flash grenade in the street is one thing; being awakened by one exploding in your apartment quite another. This offensive tool delivers far more than a mere flash, as it is designed to provide cover by way of a conclusive explosion combined with a temporarily blinding cloud of smoke. The employment of such a potentially destructive device in Harlem in this case is proof positive that black people simply do not have equal protection under the law. For there is no way the police would ever even think of igniting such a grenade so recklessly in the Upper East Side or any other white enclave. While trillions are wasted looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, pockets of police resistance – cops armed to the teeth and already embedded among us – are far more inclined to terrorize the African-American community. |