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20 Geo. J. on Poverty L. & Pol'y 161 (2012-2013)
Our Duty in Light of the Law's Irrelevance: Police Brutality and Civilian Recordings

handle is hein.journals/geojpovlp20 and id is 169 raw text is: Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy Volume XX, Number 1, Fall 2012 Our Duty in Light of the Law's Irrelevance: Police Brutality and Civilian Recordings Andrew Rosado Shaw* INTRODUCTION In the 1960s, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense sent armed and uniformed citizen patrols through the ghettos of Oakland, California.' These brazen young men, belts of bullets across their chests and shotguns in hand, marched to end the brutal abuse of the poor and minorities by the Oakland police.2 The same call to action was heard across the nation. Civil rights activists protested police brutality throughout the United States, demanding an end to hundreds of years of police culture that had willfully ignored, and even encouraged, widespread abuse. Despite these protests, police violence persists. Decades later, in August of 1997, Haitian immigrant Abner Louima was brutally beaten and sodomized in the restroom of a Brooklyn police station by officers of the NYPD.4 He was hospitalized with numerous injuries, including a punctured bladder and severed colon.' Shortly afterward, the perpetrating officer paraded through the station with the blood- and feces-stained instrument of his abuse, bragging of how he took a man down tonight.6 In blatant disregard for these inhuman acts, fellow officers not only failed to report the incident for weeks afterward, but only eventually did so under the pressure of a highly publicized investigation. * J.D. Candidate, Georgetown University Law Center (2013); B.A., Rutgers University (2010). The author would like to thank his younger brother, whose victimization by the police inspired this Note; his grandfather, Rev. Dr. Josu6 Rosado, who spent much of his life combating similar abuses as a pastor of the United Methodist Church in the Bronx and Spanish Harlem; and the members of the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy, whose tireless efforts contributed enormously to this Note and allowed for its publication. @ 2012, Andrew Rosado Shaw. 1. James A. Tyner, Defend the Ghetto: Space and the Urban Politics of the Black Panther Party, 96 ANNALS Ass'N OF AM. GEOGRAPHERS 105, 111 (2006). 2. History of the Black Panther Party, BLACK PANTHER RES. PROJECT, http://www.stanford.edu/group/ blackpanthers/index.shtml (last visited Oct. 7, 2012). 3. See infra Part I.A; MARILYNN S. JOHNSON, STREET JUSTICE: A HISTORY OF POLICE VIOLENCE IN NEW YORK CITY 13 (2003) (stating that citizens complained of violence since the founding of the NYPD in the 1840s). 4. Marie Brenner, Incident in the 70th Precinct, VANITY FAR (Dec. 1997), available at http://www. vanityfair.com/magazine/archive/1997/12/louimal99712. 5. Id. 6. Jack E. White, The White Wall of Silence, TIME MAG. (June 6, 1999), http://www.time.com/time/ magazine/article/0,9171,26382,00.html. 7. Id. 161

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