By Tawana Prunty
Columnist

In his prophetic 1959 book The Measure of Man, Dr. Martin Luther King wrote: “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me.”

Like our ancestors, we also want to trust the law, and hope it will protect us from racism and police brutality. I’m sure that if Dr. King were alive, he would be dismayed at the shortcomings of justice when it comes to needless killings by the NYPD.

Fermin Arzu, 41, was a  Honduran immigrant shot and killed on May 18 by NYPD transit officer Raphael Lora. Arzu—a father of six children—had crashed his Nissan minivan into parked cars on the Longwood Street where Lora resides.

Lora rushed out of his house, with his off-duty gun but without his uniform, to investigate the incident. According to police, Lora then approached Arzu from the driver’s side and asked for his driving documents. Police say that Arzu reached inside the glove compartment to retrieve them, but then suddenly slammed the door, trapping Lora as he began to drive away. Lora says he partially freed himself, tried to keep up with the car, but lost his footing and began to fire.

Witnesses claim, however, that the officer never identified himself and that the van was moving slowly when Lora fired his revolver five times at Arzu who crashed, ironically, into a church.

Because the Sean Bell shooting is fresh in our minds, it is easy to identify cover- ups. The police initially attempted to blame Arzu’s death on a fire in his vehicle caused by the crash, but the autopsy report confirmed the cause of death was a bullet wound. The NYPD also tried to vilify Arzu after toxicology reports revealed he was intoxicated at the time of his death. Even if true, this is no excuse; Arzu should not have been killed. 
Here’s what we know for sure: the gun Arzu was supposedly reaching for was never found, just as no gun was ever found near Sean Bell or Amadou Diallo.

Enough is enough. 

The idea that police brutality could be solved by stationing Black and Hispanic police officers in minority neighborhoods holds less merit than it used to. Now, in a sign of the times, minority officers are killing minorities.  Still,  police profile and harass us because of our race and economic status: Why are there never incidents in affluent neighborhoods where police say, “The officer thought he saw a gun?”

 In 1984,  Highbridge’s own Eleanor Bumpers was shot dead by a police officer who claimed  Bumpers tried to stab him. Bumpers was in her late sixties, weighed 300 pounds, and suffered from diabetes and arthritis. The officer was eventually acquitted of murder. To this day, our own Ms. Eleanor Bumpers is still thought of as a symbol of police brutality.

When will it stop?