Brooklyn, NY – On July 10 community organizers hosted a speak-out in Brooklyn to demand justice for Jayland Walker and other victims of police crimes while raising the demand for community control over the NYPD.

The speak-out was organized by the New York Community Action Project (NYCAP) and took place in Herbert Von King Park, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. The speakers discussed the recent police murder of Jayland Walker, in Ohio, and also raised awareness about local victims of police violence in New York, such as Sofia Gomez, Ronald Anthony Smith and Allan Feliz.

“Although the police are already attempting to smear Jayland and cast him as deserving of such horrific violence, we condemn this as just another of the tactics that the police employ to justify their brutality,” said Briony Morgan, a member of NYCAP.

“Some of you may have heard about Ronald Anthony Smith, an African American man who was killed this April by an NYPD officer recklessly driving a police van in Crown Heights, hitting him by driving over a median. In 2020, a similar case happened, when NYPD officers in the Bronx sped through a red light, killing Sofia Gomez Aguilon, who had just moved here from Guatemala. In another instance in the Bronx in 2019, Allan Feliz was shot at point blank range during what should have been a routine traffic stop. Why is the NYPD so negligent and outright abusive toward people? It’s because their job isn’t to serve and protect the people, but to keep us scared of their power through intimidation and murder,” added another NYCAP member, Jessica Schwartz.

The organizers handed out flyers explaining their ongoing campaign for community control over the police, and highlighting the failures of police accountability in NYC.

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