By Steve Halpern
On August 14 Eddie Irizarry was driving his car in the Kennington neighborhood of Philadelphia. Police Officers Mark Dial and Michael Morris believed that Irizarry was driving "erratically," and followed his car. Irizarry then drove the wrong way on a one-way street and parked his car, apparently waiting for a police interrogation.
Then Officers Dial and Morris pulled their police car alongside of Irizarry's vehicle. Both Officers exited their car, immediately pulled out their guns, aimed their guns at Irizarry, and in about six seconds Officer Dial discharged his weapon six times at Irizarry. Immediately after firing his weapon Officer Dial reported on his radio that "shots were fired." Irizarry died as a result of those gunshot wounds.
Initially the police reported that Irizarry "lunged" at Officer Dial. According to that account, Dial would have shot Irizarry in self defense. What the police might have not known was that there were security cameras that had recorded the entire scene of the murder of Irizarry. Those videos showed that Irizarry never left his vehicle and the windows in his car were closed during the time that Dial murdered him.
We now know that Officer Dial was wearing a body cam video recorder. The police had access to that recorder and eventually released that recording to the press. In other words, when the police made the statement that Irizarry "lunged" at Dial, they lied.
The community protests the murder
I participated in a demonstration of about 200 people protesting the murder of Irizarry. We held a rally at the cultural center the Taller Puertorriqueño. Then we marched to the family home of Irizarry, and then for about two miles to the Police Station. At the Police Station, we were met by about thirty police officers who were lined up. Apparently they were attempting to defend the station from some of the people who pay the taxes that create the funds for their salaries.
Demonstrations and rebellions protesting murders and brutality of the police are nothing new. Elizabeth Hinton wrote her book America On Fire—The untold history of police violence and Black Rebellion since the 1960s. At the end of her book, Hinton gives a list 75 pages long of the the rebellions against police brutality and discrimination between the years 1964 and 1989. Hinton gave the following summary of what was happening.
“Between May 1968 and December 1972, some 960 segregated Black communities across the United States witnessed 1,949 separate uprisings—the vast majority in mid-sized and smaller cities that journalists at the time and scholars have tended to overlook.” “Over these four years, nearly 40,000 people were arrested, more than 10,000 were injured, and at least 220 people were killed.”
These numbers do not include prison rebellions, including the one at Attica, and the murder of George Jackson during this same period. Today the United States has the largest prison population in the world. Black and Latino prisoners are grossly over-represented in that population.
Then there was the 2023 article in the Guardian newspaper by Lois Beckett with the headline, One in 20 US homicides are committed by police—and the numbers aren't falling. This article reported that in the year 2022 the police in this country murdered 1,192 people. This was an increase from 2021 when there were 1,100 murders by the police. The article went on to report that since 1980 the police murdered 32,000 people in this country.
We might also consider that today there is a memorial museum in Montgomery, Alabama of 4,400 lynchings that took place in the United States. The federal government refused to prosecute the overwhelming majority of those murders and, in effect, became accomplices with those murderers.
In the year 2020, I participated in another demonstration that began in front of the Philadelphia Art Museum. About 100,000 people came out to protest the police murder of George Floyd and many others. This demonstration was one of many, consisting of millions of people held around the world protesting murders by the police.
These demonstrations created an atmosphere where Police Officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd. He is now serving a 21 year prison sentence. However, the above information is clear evidence of how the case against former officer Chauvin is the exception and not the rule. It is vary rare for police officers to go to prison when they murder tax payers in this country.
The verdict
The District Attorney's office headed by Larry Krasner, charged Mark Dial with First Degree Murder, along with several other charges. Before Dial would face a jury on those charges, he faced Common Pleas Court Judge Wendy L. Pew.
Judge Pew had access to the videos the public had already seen. Yet Judge Pew argued that Officer Dial was justified when he shot Irizarry. As a result all charges against Dial were dropped and he was free to go. Apparently Judge Pew felt the tree videos of the murder and the fact that Dial lied about what happened was insufficient evidence for this case to go to trial.
One of the arguments made by the lawyer who defended Dial was that Irizarry had a knife in his car. The lawyer argued that this knife looked like a gun. Well, I know of elementary school students who can tell the difference between a knife and a gun. Apparently Judge Pew doesn't have that same insight as those elementary school students.
We might place this verdict in the context of the above history of police violence in this country.
The District Attorney's office will appeal Judge Pew's decision.
Rebellions in Philadelphia
After Judge Pew's decision, several stores in the downtown area were looted. The next day more stores were looted in the NorthEast area of the city. These so-called "lootings" were similar to the rebellions reported by Elizabeth Hinton in her book America on Fire.
Jenice Armstrong wrote a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer titled, Philly looting, riots are wrong. But so is ignoring what is driving the behavior.
While Armstrong made it clear that she opposed the looting of stores, she also had this to say. "But here's the thing. It's possible to condemn the looters' behavior while also understanding where their rage comes from. They are fed up—with the city, with its politics as usual, with its soul-crushing poverty. Even if many of the looters weren't aware of Irizarry, they feel the effects of police brutality, they see that the promises made in 2020 have gone unfulfilled. They're fed up with watching a company like Apple make $400 billion in 2022, while they work all day but can't afford a new iPhone."
Conclusion
Thinking about the murder of Eddie Irizarry, as well as the murders of thousands of people by the police, I thought about the definition of the word lynch. This is the definition of the word in my dictionary.
"What are lynchings? A lynching is the public killing of an individual who has not received any due process. These executions were often carried out by lawless mobs, though police officers did participate, under the pretext of justice."
Then, I thought of Nikole Hanna-Jones book The 1919 Project. This is what she had to say, “The effort of Black Americans to seek freedom through resistance and rebellion against violations of their rights have always been one of this nation’s defining traditions.”
We might consider that the United States was created as a result of a political revolution. Another bloody war took place to free this country from the rule of slave owners. As Jenice Armstrong argued, people are "fed up." Sooner or later the rage people are feeling will express itself in a political movement that works to bring about fundamental change.
I will conclude with the word of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
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