Posted on 12/15/2006 7:56:43 PM PST by NormsRevenge
NEW YORK - The Rev. Al Sharpton and other community leaders plan to stage a silent march down Fifth Avenue Saturday "to shop for justice," in the police shooting incident that killed Sean Bell and wounded two of his friends on his wedding day last month.
Marchers will congregate at 59th Street at noon and walk south, said Sharpton said at a news conference Friday. He called the event a moral appeal to change city police practices.
"Many will be shopping for trinkets and toys. We will be shopping for justice," Sharpton said.
"The fact that we are going on probably the most visible street in the world tomorrow, you don't have to talk to be heard," he said. "You just got to show up."
He wouldn't say how many people were expected to attend, but compared the march to nonviolent protests led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
"This may be my last march," said Rev. Calvin Butts, President of the New York City Council of Churches, who joined Sharpton and other officials on the steps of City Hall. "We march too often to receive no results."
Butts said among the changes the group is seeking is a special prosecutor assigned to investigate police.
"This is not an indictment of the entire New York City police department," Butts said. "But there are police officers that must be dealt with that are culturally ignorant and racially insensitive."
Other participants who planned to march included Bell's fiancee and their 4-year-old daughter, and Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant who was sodomized with a broomstick in a bathroom by city police nine years ago. Trent Benefield, one of Bell's friends wounded in the Nov. 25 shooting, will be accompanying marchers in a wheelchair. Joseph Guzman, Bell's other friend who was wounded, was at a rehabilitation center for his injuries and was not expected to participate.
The three men were at a bachelor party for the 23-year-old Bell at a Queens strip club before five undercover officers fired 50 bullets at Bell's car, killing him and wounding Benefield and Guzman.
Police have said that the undercover officers were conducting a vice operation at the bar and believed the victims were going to retrieve a gun, but no weapons were found.
The victims were all black; the officers were white, Hispanic and black.
Sharpton and others say police used excessive force; police say Bell's car struck an officer and crashed into an unmarked police van. The officers believed at least one of the men was armed.
"What we want is to hear the criminal justice system talk tomorrow by saying it will be fair to all of us," Sharpton said.
Will it go past Freddy's Fashion Mart?
give that man a taco.please.
Liberalism makes people ugly. It's like the Dark Side of the Force.
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