Page 1 only copied due to awkwardness of getting the rest; 8 pages in all. wrote:NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit
Police blew off the story of a young black woman who vanished. She was tortured and murdered. Now, a court ruling has reopened the case on bias grounds.
by Sean Gardiner
May 6th, 2008 12:00 AM
Elle Carmichael: She searched hard for her daughter. Police didn't.
Tina Zimmer
Shortly before 7 p.m. on a spring evening in 2003, 21-year-old Romona Moore told her mother that she was going to the Burger King down the street in their Canarsie neighborhood and would be right back.
After a few hours passed and Romona still hadn't returned home, her mother, Elle Carmichael, was worried.
Romona, you see, was a nerd. Despite her age, this child of a Guyanese immigrant was still living a sheltered life. A Hunter College student, she worked part-time as a receptionist and otherwise hung out in the local library, dreaming of a career in research. Shy and introverted away from her family, she never partied and, as far as her mother knew, had never had a real boyfriend. She didn't have a cell phone, but she always called her mother to tell her where she was and what she was doing.
Romona's mother spent a sleepless night waiting for her to return: "A girl at 21, you never know when she's going to do her first time of sleeping out," Carmichael recalls. "But even if she did—and it would have been the first time in her life—I figured she would have been home by six or seven in the morning."
By 9 a.m. that morning, April 25, it was too much worry for the mother to stand. She called 911, and 30 minutes later, two officers from the 67th Precinct arrived at her Remsen Avenue home. As she remembers it, they told her: "She's 21. We're not supposed to take the report." She begged them, and (out of pity, she believes) the officers took complaint No. 2003-067-65609.
They told Carmichael that if Romona still hadn't returned by seven that night, marking her gone for 24 hours, she should call the precinct. At seven on the dot, Carmichael called the precinct. A detective told her: "Lady, why are you calling here? Your daughter is 21. These officers should not have taken the report in the first place." The next day, April 26, the complaint was marked "closed."
This sort of racism is of course the most blatant in the United States, the systematic refusal to grant the black community its own distinct recognition and at least provide it with the enforcement mechanisms that it requires within itself. But it reflects more, too, a fundamental disinterest in the concerns of a substantial body of citizens by the majority. It is regardless disgusting, and shows at heart the fundamental difference between Republicans and civilized people--the willingness to dismiss the problems of the black community as being their own fault and refusal to aid in what has become the intractable problem of 21st century America.
Doubtless we may say that black people have contributed to their own present position extensively; doubtless, they are in no doubt to some degree at fault. But at the same time we also bear the burden of the programmes which destroyed their families and created the preconditions for this, and more importantly, for the kind of systematic racism which allows a case such as this to happen.
The young lady by all accounts could have been a poster in good standing here, much appreciated by our community--a nerdy girl who happened to live in a poor neighbourhood of New York City, and who was just trying to get by in life and never once had any connection with crime. The savages who took her are certainly of our society's creation, but I am less concerned with them; with luck, they're damned to some place rather worse than the Judeo-Christian Hell.
The lack of response, suitably met by this lawsuit, is nonetheless at the crux of the matter. It shows, and lays bare, what has often been commented upon, the obsessive media response to the kidnapping of white women and the total ignorance when the same happens to blacks. Worse, too, for in this case the death was utterly preventable; the police had five days to act. With most of the noted cases, the woman was dead before the search started.
Remember this; it's a sign of the systematic bankruptcy of America, a country which in every aspect has more claim to the Biblical title of Mystery Babylon the Great, than any other country in the history of the world, something which is always amusing and informative to point out to American Christians. Now, we may admit the title to be a certain amount of hyperbole, for Americans bow down and worship at the altar of Mammon rather than holding racism as their fundamental belief, but it is close enough.
The inescapable fact of American society is that it has failed black people systematically, and substantial parts of this society plan to attribute this failure, and actively do, on black people themselves. In doing so, they mask the irrelevancy of their own comments: It does matter who is at fault. We try to save even idiots who go swimming in raging torrents of rivers, or who crash cars at a hundred miles an hour; the point is that whether by inaction or systematic malice, we've failed, and we've chosen to stand by and continue to fail, while sanctimoniously dressing up our racist cruelties in the guise of high-minded, self-sufficient idealism.
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- PeZook