Murder, torture, and terror: immigrant life in New York

From the shadows of New York City, a modern Gomorrah if ever there was one, here’s the latest chapter in how the United States treats its immigrants.

It shoots them.

If you’d like to read a blood-chilling account of officialdom run amok in the states, dig out the Saipan Tribune’s February 10 issue. There, on page 14, is an AP story on the cold-blooded murder of West African immigrant Amadou Diallo, who was gunned down by four plainclothes cops. His offense: “gesturing with his hands.”

The cops pumped him with 19 rounds. 41 rounds, according to the story, were fired.
41 rounds? I doubt that the entire CNMI Department of Public Safety on all the islands added up over the course of a year, fires 41 rounds at people. And if the DPS ever shot an innocent immigrant 19 times, we’d quite justifiably have an uproar here. Even shooting an innocent person once would be enough to turn the DPS on its ear.

Mr. Diallo, who died on the scene, had the nerve, the audacity, the utter gall, to have perhaps looked like someone suspected of committing a crime in the area. The cops’ defense will ride on the fact that Mr. Diallo deserved to be executed because “gesturing with his hands” could have meant he was reaching for a gun. What gun?
Uh, yeah, well…he didn’t have a gun. He was unarmed. Innocent. An immigrant. And now a very dead immigrant at that.

But this shows just how far gone America really is. A lot of people will accept the officers’ defense. To the mind of the average American– the shopping mall sheep and the corporate drones–a few street side executions by secret police squads aren’t anything to get upset about. After all, anybody on the streets after 8:00 p.m. not watching Seinfeld on the television is bound to be a crook, right?

Mr. Diallo’s execution follows a 1997 incident in which a Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima, was tortured in a New York City police station. Tortured, tortured to the point of hospitalization, and the details are so gross I won’t bother to mention them here.

Well, that’s all in a days’ work for New York’s finest, I guess. But can you imagine what would happen if such an incident occurred here in the CNMI? Consider point #1: It would be headline stuff all over the United States.

Which brings me to point #2: It doesn’t happen here.

In the Commonwealth, the police are a trusted part of the community. In NYC, the police prey on the community, and murder and torture immigrants. And yet we’re the ones getting blasted for how we treat immigrants?

Go figure.

And where is the law firm of Milberg, Weiss, Bershad, Hynes, and Lerach, the guys who are throwing that frivolous billion dollar zinger our way over the treatment of our guest workers? Have they hit New York City with a big lawsuit over Mr. Louima’s case? How about Mr. Diallo’s case?

If there are any big lessons to be learned on how to police an immigrant community, then we’re the ones who should be doing the teaching. Maybe our DPS should hire itself out to U.S. agencies to teach our stateside counterparts that it’s possible to maintain the peace without using murder and torture as weapons of terror against innocent immigrants.