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NEW YORK – Daniel Prude walks out of his brother Joe’s house naked in his madness on a frigid March night, as a light snow falls. Joe calls 911, the emergency number, for help, which a patrol sends out. We are in Rochester, in the state of New York: a democratic city of a democratic state. The mayor, Lovely Warren, African American as the prude. The chief of police is also black. But the agents are not psychiatrists. They handcuff the man waiting for the ambulance and force him to lie down. Then, as he is furious, they put on him a kind of helmet that police officers use, in America and also in other countries, who want to protect themselves from spitting: on March 23, even America has just plunged into the coronavirus emergency and the agents ask. to Daniel if he is HIV positive.
Nobody threatens, nobody draws weapons, but nobody cares not even Prude, who seems to be breathing heavily. When the ambulance arrives, she passes out. Dying a week later in the hospital. The case cannot be compared to other cases of police brutality. Racism? This time it seems more an oversight, a lack of compassion for what appears only as a human wreck for these street life-hardened men. The agents are only interested, like any other official, in returning home unharmed. And it does not matter if to avoid risks they have to mistreat the detainees. But in times of racial tension, the case is not irrelevant, especially since the county coroner conducting the autopsy speaks of murder by suffocation. And when the impressive video comes out of one of the body cameras of the agents, the Prude family denounces the case at a press conference.
Black Lives Matter immediately goes to the field to ask for the dismissal and agent processing. Lovely Warren, the mayor, defends herself against the accusations by placing all responsibility on New York State. In a press conference she explains: I have known since March, but I could not do anything due to a 2015 rule by Governor Andrew Cuomo that requires all cases of citizens who die while in the hands of the State Attorney General’s Office. from the police. The blame game doesn’t save her from the BLM feud, with city hall riots and arrests. Meanwhile, the case also affects the Attorney General, head of the Prosecutor’s Office.
A role attributed two years ago by New York State voters to Letitia James, an African-American star of the Democratic Party: someone who could become something of a Kamala Harris from the East Coast. But the Prude case generates great shame: in a statement she speaks of the tragedy, offers condolences to the family, says that her offices are already investigating, promises transparency. But Daniel died more than 5 months ago and so far there has only been silence, despite the videos that allow us to reconstruct the case very clearly. A tragedy that this time could excite, more than the progressive media, those of the right, eager to highlight the contradictions and shame of a case in which there are democratic and African-American protagonists on both fronts. And in fact, the first to go crazy was Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post.
September 3, 2020 (change September 3, 2020 | 07:30)
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