[Timothy Cardinal Dolan\NYPD]
Black Star News: “Cardinal Dolan, your comments are insensitive, at the very least. They are offensive to every Black New Yorker targeted, daily, by the institutional racism that is deeply embedded in the NYPD.”
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Cardinal Dolan is complaining about the criticism of NYPD–while saying very little about racist treatment of Blacks by NYPD.
This week, Timothy Cardinal Dolan complained about the “inaccurate criticism,” of police in the wake of the protests that have erupted after George Floyd’s murder.
As a supposed “man of the cloth,” Cardinal Dolan you should be ashamed. Excusing police violence and murder is a sin against truth.
Cardinal, this is beyond police brutality. We’re talking here about the routine police murders of Black people. Are you not troubled by the recent police murders of others besides George Floyd like: Rayshard Brooks, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery?
Cardinal Dolan, your comments are insensitive, at the very least. They are offensive to every Black New Yorker targeted, daily, by the institutional racism that is deeply embedded in the NYPD.
Apparently, because the feelings of police are being hurt by the ongoing necessary criticism, people like you are offended. But all the Black people being murdered by police just don’t seem to offend those making weak worn-out excuses for racist police misconduct.
In a ridiculously insensitive New York Post article entitled “For God’s sake, stop demonizing the NYPD,” Dolan writes as if the NYPD is the victim of something—and not all the people they have abused and killed. Apparently, Black murder by police doesn’t bother Dolan too much.
American policing deserved all the denunciations it is getting these days for their murderous crimes.
In the article, Cardinal Dolan says, “Our valiant police officers have one of the most perilous, stressful duties around, and from what I have seen in my nearly dozen years here, they do it with care, compassion and competence.”
Here we hear the tired “they have such a difficult job argument.” Are Black lives supposed to be so cheap that because cops have hard jobs, Blacks should willing be accepted up as sacrificial lambs for continual slaughter? Perhaps others who also have hard jobs, like doctors battling COVID-19, should use this as a defense when they commit criminal acts.
Dolan sounds just as clueless as Atlanta’s Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jane Barwick who released back-shooting killer-cop murderer Garrett Rolfe while saying Rolfe “is not a flight risk and I do not believe he is a danger to the community.”
Is Cardinal Dolan trying to say the NYPD operates with “care, compassion and competence” when they repeatedly brutalize and murder Black New Yorkers? Was it “care, compassion and competence” that lead to the deaths of: Amadou Diallo, Malcolm Ferguson, Timothy Stansbury, Kimani Gray, Akai Gurley, Ramarley Graham, Patrick Dorismond, Tamon Robinson, Ousmane Zongo, Delrawn Small, Dwayne Jeune, Saheed Vassell, Sean Bell, and Eric Garner, just to name a few?
Of course, Cardinal Dolan is talking about how police behave in white neighborhoods. He apparently needs some educating on how police behave in Black neighborhoods.
In his article, Dolan gives superficial passing lip-service to the murder of George Floyd—and insinuates that atrocity is an anomaly. We’re supposed to think George Floyd’s murder is just a one-off incident of “bad apple” policing and not part of a regular pattern of racial police abuse?
Cardinal Dolan also made the following disingenuous statement “The most stinging rebuke of that outrage in Minneapolis that I hear comes from — guess who? The cops I chat with on the sidewalks of New York.”
We should remind him Black New Yorkers had a George Floyd moment before George Floyd’s murder–when Eric Garner was strangled to death in a similar manner on Staten Island. And unlike the George Floyd case, Garner’s murderer Daniel Pantaleo is walking around free in New York. If these cops Dolan says he talked to are so outraged about George Floyd’s murder, why haven’t we heard from them about Garner’s murder?
In his piece, Dolan also made this incredulous claim “They, [police] and their department, realize criticism is called for. When it comes, they listen and undertake reform.”
Really? Where is the example of this? The police union in New York steadfastly fights against any move toward accountability of reform. The NYPD still won’t take responsibility for Eric Garner’s murder despite the fact it is captured on video.
Dolan pointed to increased numbers of minority NYPD officers as if this increase changes the culture of policing. It doesn’t. Has the diversity of those who make NYPD police policy changed? Aren’t white people still the ones, undemocratically, deciding policing policy for New York’s Black segregated communities?
Cardinal Dolan, you should be raising your voice to speak out against the state-sponsored murders of Black people, by police. We should not have to remind you of the Sixth Commandment’s saying of “Thou Shall Not Kill,”—especially, when it comes to murders committed by cops.
Does the Cardinal really not see why police murders of Black people must be denounced?
Moreover, Cardinal Dolan, you should be apologizing for the Church’s role in the enslavement of African and Indigenous peoples. You should be apologizing for the Papal Bulls of: 1452, 1454, 1481, 1493, and 1514. These Church decrees unleashed all the terrorism, massacres, rapes and looting that came with the coming of the criminal Christopher Columbus and other European enslavers of Africans and Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
Cardinal Dolan, this is 2020. Isn’t it time to tell the real truth? Isn’t it time to denounce all those who brutalize and harm any of God’s children? Are not Black people God’s children as well?
Thankfully, we have someone very important in the Church, unlike you, who is speaking truth against the police murders of Black people: Pope Francis.
