The New York Police Department has reportedly been giving young adults free tickets to screenings of “Selma,” and last month, on Martin Luther King Day, officers with the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood even drove a group of local teens to see the film, which depicts the historic march for voting rights. At the same time, however, the NYPD has sought to thwart, criminalize and defame the current incarnation of civil rights activism underway in New York, treating the Black Lives Matter movement as a threat on par with terrorism.
On Feb. 10, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton asked lawmakers in Albany to elevate resisting arrest from a misdemeanor to a felony. Arrestees going limp and forcing officers to carry them off to jail was a common tactic of the civil rights movement — which has continued to this day — and is considered resisting arrest by the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies. At the end of January, Bratton announced he is arming a new unit called the Strategic Response Group with machine guns that will “assist us in dealing with demonstrations.” Speaking at a breakfast organized by the Police Foundation, Bratton explained that the unit “is designed for dealing with events like our recent protests, or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in Paris.”
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