Black Lives Matter, Palestine, and a Police Killing

A strangely overlooked case in New York

Photo: Facebook

Last Wednesday, NYPD officers fatally shot a 19-year-old man in his own home. There is a strong possibility that this man, who was in mental distress and had called 911, was shot and killed while his mother held him. The officers said they unloaded their bullets in self-defense: the man, named Win Rozario, had threatened them with a pair of scissors.

There is body camera footage and we will know far more if or when the police release it. (The footage is covered under the state’s Freedom of Information law and could be forced into public view.) For now, there are two conflicting accounts of what happened. According to police, officers tried to take Rozario into custody and he pulled out a pair of scissors from a drawer and “came toward” them. Two officers fired their Tasers at Rozario and appeared to have him subdued.

“But a mother, being a mother, came to the aid of her son to help him, but in doing so she accidentally knocked the Tasers out of his body,” John Chell, the NYPD’s chief of patrol, told reporters. Rozario picked up the scissors and came at the officers again, the chief said. He wouldn’t say how exactly the police managed to escalate the confrontation.

“They had no choice but to defend themselves, discharging their firearms,” Chell said.

Chell didn’t say how many times Rozario was shot. His family claimed six times. His 17-year-old brother, Ushto, directly contradicted police accounts, telling reporters his mother had been holding his brother in her arms throughout the encounter.

“As my mother was still hugging him, they shot him with the Taser,” Ushto Rozario said. “So they shot him with the Tasers, and my brother didn’t really go down. So one of the cops pulled out a gun and shot him as my mother was still hugging him.”

“First of all, it was two police officers against him,” he said. “And my mother was already holding him, so he couldn’t really do anything.”

In either scenario, armed police killed a teenager who brandished a pair of scissors at them. If Ushto Rozario is to be believed—again, camera footage should bear our what exactly happened—police quite literally opened fire at a teen holding scissors as his mother held him. They could have, with one errant shot, killed her as well. The episode already has unsettling echoes of Deborah Danner.

In the days since, I have wondered why this police killing has not provoked more furor. Various Democratic elected officials in New York City have released statements criticizing the conduct of the NYPD while lamenting that mental health professionals weren’t dispatched to Rozario’s Queens home to help him. In 2021, under Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city created pilot program pairing mental health professionals and emergency medical workers to respond to certain 911 calls that involve someone experiencing mental distress. The program has seen some success so far and is expanding; it does not yet exist, however, in the 102nd Precinct, where Rozario was killed.

A vigil was held for the teen and the family remains outraged. What seems missing, though, is any of the greater fury that accompanied police killings in the 2010s and 2020. Black Lives Matter, the Democratic Socialists of America, and other social justice organizations haven’t yet staged any mass marches to protest the killing of Rozario. It’s the Bangladeshi community, for now, spearheading the protests, which are not blocking any highways and bridges, nor flooding any busy avenues.

Where is the activist left? Why has this latest police killing failed to galvanize New York City, let alone the rest of America?

There is no single answer; when zeitgeist shifts occur, they can initially be imperceptible. It does seem, at the very minimum, no protest movement will ever match what came after George Floyd’s death in 2020. The pandemic, in part, fueled that uprising, as millions were eager to take to the streets after months of living in isolation. It was also a time that was, in character, of the 2010s, when most police killings received enormous amounts of activist attention and media coverage. Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, nearly 10 years ago, can be thought of as one bookend of this era and Floyd, perhaps, is the other. Unlike Brown or the fatal chokehold of Eric Garner in New York, Floyd’s death spurred the defund the police movement, which was rapidly mainstreamed after operating on the fringes of activism and academia for decades. Defund the police burned bright until it didn’t, prompting backlash from the right-wing and eventually many Democrats. Cutting funding to police departments, once the summer of 2020 faded, just wasn’t popular enough to sustain a mass movement.

A more discomfiting reality of the Rozario case is that it has not prompted cross-racial solidarity. Rozario was Bangladeshi, not Black. Like Jordan Neely, he died experiencing mental distress; unlike Neely, his case has not attracted the full-throated support of Rev. Al Sharpton. It’s plausible, in time, Sharpton will gravitate to the Rozarios, but for now his formidable National Action Network has not been involved. Sharpton, like Donald Trump, is an indelible New York character—his past, in its own way, is quite checkered—and it’s to his credit that NAN remains functioning. The bureaucracy of Black Lives Matter has imploded and there are no Sharpton equivalents among the younger generation of activists. Alicia Garza, Tamika Mallory, and DeRay Mckesson could not sustain themselves as consequential public figures. Mckesson, in particular, was a pale Sharpton imitation, down to his own curious corporate hustling. If there is one indictment of BLM, above all others, that can be leveled today, it’s the utter lack of an institutional legacy: no NAN, no CORE, no SNCC. And nothing, really, like even DSA, which retains robust mailing lists and organizers decentralized chapters that can be activated for large protests.

What will DSA and other allied organizations show up for in 2024? The answer, for now, is Palestine. Pro-Palestinian protests are tremendous draws. They are frequent enough to be hardly noticed, and yet they can’t be said to not matter; hear Chuck Schumer, check a Gallup poll, and witness the freefall of Israel’s standing among the American body politic. Another troubling question for the activist left—can BLM and pro-Palestine coexist? Can energy be summoned for two causes simultaneously? Had Neely, pinned down by the white vigilante Daniel Penny, died after Oct. 7, this question could be readily answered, but the subway confrontation happened last May. Were Rozario Black, there would also be more clarity.

The social justice era introduced the term BIPOC; while the abbreviation was supposed to engineer solidarity across marginalized groups, it implied a sort of social justice hierarchy, with two groups—Blacks and indigenous—singled out and others elided into a nebulous POC category. Latinos and Asians hadn’t earned standalone status. The Asian category itself presented complications. What, culturally, did a Chinese immigrant have in common with an Indian or a Bangladeshi? On one hand, they were all supposed to be allied against white supremacy. On the other, particular policies seemed design to uplift certain groups at the expense of others. It all, very quickly, got muddy. But in the spirit of BIPOC, it’s odd so few have protested for the Rozarios. Other than a contentious interview of Mayor Eric Adams on the Breakfast Club—Adam is Black, but he is an ex-transit cop who is resolutely pro-police—the social justice left has not mobilized for the NYPD killing of a South Asian teenager in Queens. For what’s left of BLM, this is damning. In theory, there should be enough activist energy left to protest the treatment of Gazans and the shooting of Rozario. But as this era of hyper-politics fades, the reality, for activism writ large, is more disconcerting: one cause at a time, if that.

The other countervailing factor might be the death of Jonathan Diller, an NYPD officer. Diller, like Rozario, was killed in Queens, shot at a routine traffic stop on March 25. Diller, 31, had pulled up to a car parked illegally in a bus stop and asked the man in the passenger seat, 34-year-old Guy Rivera, to get out. Rivera refused, pulled out a gun, and shot Diller just below his protective vest. Diller still managed to disarm Rivera, but the wound was too deep and he was pronounced dead at Jamaica Hospital. Diller’s death has not dominated headlines in the manner of the execution-style killings of NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu at the end of 2014—these might be most remembered now for the officers who turned their backs on de Blasio, then a liberal first year mayor attempting to gradually reform the department, at the funerals—but it has, for now, overshadowed Rozario’s. The narrative of the Diller shooting, shaped aggressively by law enforcement and sympathetic media outlets, is that all of it would have been preventable if progressive Democrats hadn’t reformed New York’s criminal justice laws in 2019. “How many more police officers and how many families need to make the ultimate sacrifice before we start protecting them?” asked Diller’s widow, Stephanie, at his funeral.

The argument is a winning one in the public square because it’s devastatingly straightforward. After 2019, crime rose in New York. Democrats partially eliminated cash bail—not fully, and the current governor, Kathy Hochul, has continually added more bail-eligible offenses, which include all violent felonies—and reformed the state’s discovery laws to force the prosecution to share evidence with the defense in a timely manner. Rivera, Diller’s killer, is a supposed beneficiary of liberal naivete, though it’s unclear what law change would have altered the outcome of the shooting. The media has fixated on Rivera’s 21 prior arrests and nine felonies. Adams, unsurprisingly, has blamed criminal justice reform for Diller’s death. Rivera, though, was not out on bail after being charged with a crime. He had been released from prison in 2021, serving nearly five years for criminal sale of a controlled substance. His driver, Lindy Jones, had 14 prior arrests, including second-degree criminal possession of a weapon one year ago. He was out on $75,000 bail. He previously served 10 years in prison on attempted murder and robbery charges and was released in November 2013.

As cathartic as it might be to bray for the end of criminal justice reform in New York, there is no universe where pre-2019 discovery or bail laws save the life of Diller. Tragically, officers have been shot and killed in New York for decades. Perhaps, in a fit of law-and-order mania, one could argue no prison sentence is long enough: to cut on down recidivism, jail every inmate for life. Or, better yet, solve America’s gun problem. Handgun murders aren’t an epidemic in Europe or Asia because guns are far harder to acquire. There’s no Second Amendment there. In 2023, London had 103 homicides. In New York, which is still, relative for its size, one of America’s safest cities, 386 people were killed.

But it’s no more realistic to suggest life sentences for everyone as it is to imagine a world where Congress gets serious about gun crime and makes it illegal for most Americans to possess firearms. A greater argument could be made for prisons as a genuine vehicle for reform—the well-funded Scandinavian prisons offer a viable model—and not what they’ve long been in the United States, cages for inmates to molder inside before they are ejected back into the country with little or no support. Recidivism is a problem because the life of crime is always going to be a temptation for someone without a college degree and few avenues for regular work. Why not feel powerful among your old buddies when the world itself wants nothing to do with you? Adding bail to every offense imaginable is not going to make all the guns disappear, nor the disgruntled men who hold them.

On the question of politics, the left is beginning to lose. The high over Palestine—more Americans growing sympathetic to Gaza—masks how the cause of criminal justice reform has continually backslid since the 2010s. As the law-and-order set seized on the killing of Diller to call for a reversion to the old ways, the progressive and activist left was mostly mute. Bail reform has yet to find an articulate defender in the media. And few seemed willing, in the days after Rozario’s death, to make his cause anywhere on the scale of Diller’s. The release of body camera footage could change this. Until then, aggrieved Bangladeshis will have few allies anywhere else.