How does a mother handle the truth of knowing that her son was murdered at the hands of the very people whose job it is to protect and defend her family? Iris Baez, Kadiatou Diallo and Doris Busch Boskey come from different neighborhoods and are of different races, but all three have had to suffer this same tragedy.
Every Mother’s Son is a documentary that focuses on three mothers, who’ve lost their sons to the policing practices that Mayor Giuliani’s administration publicized as an effective deterrent against crime during the 1990s. Three women—a Latina, a West African and a Jew—tell their stories about how they lost their unarmed sons to Street Crimes Unit policemen. The film shows each woman’s journey from coping with individual trauma to taking collective action against aggressive policing of neighborhoods. These women have been pivotal in reinstating laws, which give people greater power to oversee community-police activity.
Tami Gold is a documentary filmmaker and professor of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College. In honor of Women’s History Month, her film Every Mother’s Son will be screened on March 22, in room S370, at 2 pm. A discussion with Gold will follow at 3 pm. The event is open to the entire BMCC community.
“I began working on this film after the Amadou Diallo shooting in 1999,” Gold said. “That tragedy made me feel like I had to do something, to show the reality of the impact of aggressive policing. When I went to the mosque for his funeral, I saw so many mothers worrying for their sons. I wanted to give these mothers a voice.”
Anthony Baez was asphyxiated to death from a chokehold, after a football he was throwing around with his brothers bounced off one of two cop cars parked in the area. Amadou Diallo was fired upon 41 times after he pulled out a wallet, which the four, white plainclothes policemen mistook for a gun. Gary “Gidone” Busch was pepper-sprayed and then shot dead after the police came to hia Hasidic neighborhood in response to a noise complaint. A religious instrument in his hand was perceived to be a weapon.
“It’s not enough to fire these out-of-control policemen. They need to be imprisoned. But as you see in the film, these policemen are often protected at the highest levels and are acquitted in court,” said Gold.
Why such harsh tactics and no consequences for wrongdoing? According to law enforcement, the ends justify the means.
“It’s The Broken Window Theory,” said Gold. “If you have a broken window in a community, people believe it’ll create a slum. This is a fabricated historical narrative. This is not what happened in the South Bronx, where crime is high. When people became homeless in the ‘80s, that’s where they went. Poverty, racism and racial injustice cause a slum. This is a way of blaming people not a system based on inequity.”
It would be easy to say that Giuliani is no longer in office and the racial profiling and police violence has subsided, but that wouldn’t be the truth.
“The Street-Crimes Unit is gone, but that’s just in name,” Gold asserted. “There are still predominantly white plainclothes policemen obstructing civil liberties. The real issue here is, How do we look at security and safety,” Gold said. “What is it that creates safety or the illusion of safety? Some would willingly give up civil liberties to be safe, but isn’t that kind of security just illusion? Does it work? Crime went down in the ‘90s but for many reasons, not only because of the policing. Crime went down in Boston then too, but in that city, there was community policing, not frisking without reason and without warrants.”
In order to create an illusion of security in neighborhoods, harassment of individuals is often the reality that comes with severe policing. The police can’t police themselves when communities lose the right to oversee how law enforcement handles the problem of gun-control in high-crime areas. It’s often innocent poor people and people of color who suffer the consequences, while the justice system protects cops who are negligent with their power and firearms.
“With Amadou Diallo, it was classical racial profiling,” said Gold. “The cops went searching–no, hunting. They saw a black man and he looked suspicious. They followed no procedure. With Gary Busch, it’s just clear that for a noise complaint, there was no reason for there to be aggressive tactics.”
A combination of mob mentality and the law are at work as well, in explaining why a man would be shot so many times by a group of policemen. All officers at the scene of a crime are trained to shoot at once, so it’s often impossible to hold one officer responsible.
Policing issues relate to global problems we now face, as well. Tami Gold’s documentary film and the grieving mothers therein beg the question (as does Tami), “Does the war on terror make us safe? Or is that, too, just an illusion?”
This event is sponsored by the Women’s Studies Project Committee
Conveners: Cheryl Fish (English), Micelle Rief (Ethnic Studies) & Betsy Wissinger (Social Science)
