Response to NYPD Subway Shooting Shows Deep Black and Palestinian Solidarity

Part of the Series

Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

Hundreds of protesters wearing keffiyehs flooded Brooklyn’s DeKalb Avenue station last month, dodging police in riot gear to hop the turnstiles en masse. Their collective refusal on September 20 to pay the $2.90 fee required to ride the subway was an act of protest: Just days before, on September 15, a New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer shot haphazardly onto a train platform in pursuit of an alleged fare evader named Derrell Mickles.

For many of the protesters, the issue of police violence was personal — for the past year, the NYPD has been brutalizing pro-Palestine protesters in the streets and at student encampments, ripping off protesters’ hijabs, arresting minors and sending dozens of people to the hospital.

The shooting, which took place in Brownsville, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Brooklyn, left Mickles with a gunshot wound to the stomach, a 26-year-old bystander with a bullet lodged in her leg and a 49-year-old bystander with a bullet wound to his head that required brain surgery.

Among the protesters’ demands was for Democratic Mayor Eric Adams — a cop-turned-politician who claimed that the officer responsible for the shooting showed “a great level of restraint” — to resign.

“They want to convince you that hopping a turnstile is violent and lawless, but firing bullets into bodies and spilling blood in our communities is not,” wrote Fatima Mohammed of Within Our Lifetime, a community organization for Palestinian liberation that planned the September 20 protest in conjunction with Black organizers.

For years, New Yorkers have waved flags reading “Black Lives for Palestine” during uprisings sparked by NYPD killings. State violence in the U.S. and Israel’s massacres in Palestine and Lebanon are inherently connected, organizers say. These connections are especially glaring in New York City, where cops have shot and killed 12 people in 2024 alone and often exchange tactics of oppression with the Israeli military.

“I’ve lived under genocide and apartheid my whole life,” Imani Henry, a second-generation Jamaican organizer who has been in the Palestine movement for over 30 years, told Truthout. “For African American and Caribbean people, all of us fought against slavery. All of us fought for independence. We all have a colonial life, a colonial story. This is our existence. So supporting Palestine — we never had to bring it to a vote. Our people are like, ‘oh, those people are occupied? We understand occupation.’”

Henry is the lead organizer of Equality for Flatbush, an abolitionist group that has fought gentrification and police violence in Brooklyn since 2013.

Days after the NYPD shooting, the group staged a protest at the Brownsville station where the shooting took place. There, speakers made connections between the fight against police violence in the U.S. and liberation struggles in Palestine, the Congo, Sudan and Tigray — before being maced, hit and thrown to the ground by cops.

“I had to be there,” Mamou François, a Haitian American who has lived in the city for five years, told Truthout. “I take the subway every day — and it’s just this tiresome cycle of always having to show up for Black and Brown people’s lives, which are not being taken seriously and not being honored.”

François has previously volunteered with the New York City Department for the Aging. Witnessing the city’s elders fight for critical resources cemented the obscenity of the NYPD’s budget, she said.

“Instead of that money going to the subway or making commuters’ lives easier, especially when they have disabilities or are older, they’re using it to make it this hostile place, this fascist place,” she said. “The NYPD’s presence is felt in the most terrorizing of ways.”

“From New York to Palestine, Occupation Is a Crime”

In fiscal year 2024, the NYPD was granted a $10.8 billion budget. That’s not including the money the city has spent on deploying 750 National Guard soldiers to perform arbitrary bag checks at subway stations across New York City, a move that Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul justified by citing right-wing talking points about rising crime rates. This rhetoric, activists say, likely contributed to the killing of Jordan Neely, a Black, unhoused subway artist who was strangled to death by an ex-U.S. marine on the subway last year.

This budget also doesn’t include the $53 million in overtime the NYPD spent on repressing pro-Palestine demonstrations between October 2023 and May 2024 alone — or the millions New Yorkers will likely have to pay out if protestors who have been brutalized by cops sue for mistreatment.

“All that the NYPD repression accomplishes is cementing in the minds of New Yorkers and the world the truth that they already know: the NYPD is a violent, repressive force that exists to protect the ruling class and property over anything else,” Within Our Lifetime wrote in a January report on police crackdowns against the Palestinian liberation movement.

We’re fighting gentrification, displacement and police violence in Brooklyn the same way people in Palestine — and all over the world — are fighting colonial occupation and fighting for their homes.

The NYPD and the Israeli military don’t just trade tactics of counterinsurgency, Black and Palestinian organizers have pointed out: They also share the very machinery of occupation. In September, organizers launched an effort to demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard, an industrial complex that is home to a winery, rooftop farm and hundreds of businesses — including companies that facilitate and profit off Israel’s genocide.

One such company is Easy Aerial, a drone manufacturer that was founded by a former Israeli soldier and also has an office in Tel Aviv. In their February newsletter, Easy Aerial boasted on LinkedIn that its drones support “war efforts both domestically in the US and abroad, including in conflict zones like Gaza.”

Small, self-piloting drones, like those produced by Easy Aerial, have long been used by the Israeli military for surveillance, issuing displacement orders and instilling a sense of terror in civilians. In recent months, Israeli forces have also used such drones to drop bombs and “shoot to kill” Palestinians, according to a report by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.

Notably, Easy Aerial has lobbied the Eric Adams administration to expand the NYPD’s use of drones. In the aftermath of Adams’s meeting with the company in 2022 — and a 2023 meeting about drone technology with Israeli police — the NYPD tripled its use of drones in just one year.

In December of 2023, it was reported that the NYPD had deployed drones to surveil dozens of pro-Palestine protests and make hundreds of arrests. Just months later, cops also used drones to spy on barbecues in predominantly Black neighborhoods during the West Indian Day Parade.

Over the past month, the movement to demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard has staged numerous noise demos to disrupt board meetings at the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation — at least one of which was surveilled by NYPD drones.

Organizers have called for a boycott of all companies at the complex and for the termination of Easy Aerial’s lease. They have also been doing weekly outreach to workers who are employed by the many businesses at the yard, where they have received an “overwhelmingly positive response.”

“More than 11,000 people work at Brooklyn Navy Yard, and many of them have been shocked and disgusted to learn that they work alongside war criminals,” organizers wrote. “Now we are asking workers across Brooklyn Navy Yard to join workers around the world for a series of escalating labor actions in solidarity with Palestine … until the demilitarization of Brooklyn Navy Yard, the end of the occupation in Palestine, and the end of imperialism throughout the world.”

Swipe It Forward

For many New Yorkers in the struggle against police violence and U.S. imperialism, the events of the past month have only energized their resistance — and the subway has become a common site of solidarity.

In the days after the NYPD sprayed bullets onto the L train platform in Brownsville, the grassroots group Swipe It Forward, which distributes pre-paid Metrocards to community members to resist the criminalization of poverty, renewed its calls for New Yorkers to pay subway fares for people who can’t afford to. Activists have also organized “liberation train rides” so that organizers from intersecting movements across boroughs could travel to demonstrations together — and reach the “the poor and struggling margins of the Empire State” who don’t generally attend marches or protests.

Meanwhile, autonomous actors smashed the contactless card readers at numerous L train stations across the city, making it impossible for police and MTA workers to enforce the fare. “Whether it’s paying the pigs to menace Black and Brown communities and restrict movement, funding genocide near and far, or creating technology to convenience the rich and confine the poor, capitalism is designed to kill,” one group wrote in a statement. “This is a call to action.… Puncture the walls of the techno-prison and see real light, breathe real air, and destroy the fare!”

And in the wake of yet another violent NYPD crackdown on pro-Palestine protesters, Within Our Lifetime has released a new set of demands, calling for the resignation of Eric Adams; the disbandment of the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, which is notorious for its brutality against protesters; and the closure of the NYPD’s office in Israel, which sits on the ruins of the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village Kfar Saba.

“Will You Carry Our Dead?”

At the September 20 protest of the subway shooting, Henry passed out signs with the names of Black people, many of them LGBTQ, who had been killed by the NYPD in recent years.

“I asked people, ‘will you carry our dead?’ And to have those names be passed out, and see people’s pride in carrying them.… Not to cry, but solidarity — there’s nothing like it,” Henry said. “For me, going to a demonstration is spiritual.”

At the heart of this work is building relationships, community members say.

“Our oppressors understand that the more separation and decentralization of communities there is, the more they are able to leverage their power and dictate what our futures are going to look like,” said François. “They fear the unity of Black and Brown people.”

“A lot of us don’t know our neighbors and that’s a big problem,” she added. “I think we can start there.”

For Equality for Flatbush — which now faces the prospect of being shut down due to lack of funds — this looks like fundraising to cover people’s rent, connecting locals with housing lawyers and standing up for elders who are being abused by their landlords. The group is also the city’s only rapid response alternative to 911, meaning that neighbors can call them to deescalate in times of crisis, rather than involving the NYPD. When locals do encounter the police, the group’s members, mostly Caribbean and Latina women, arrive at the scene to record the interaction, a practice known as cop watching.

“It’s not crisis intervention, it’s family. These are our people. We have to look out for each other,” Henry said. “We have no choice. We’ll die…. We’re fighting gentrification, displacement and police violence in Brooklyn the same way people in Palestine — and all over the world — are fighting colonial occupation and fighting for their homes.”

On September 24, at an action against Israel’s massacres in Lebanon, hundreds of protesters poured through the streets of Manhattan, breaking past the NYPD barrier to surround the UN and the Israeli consulate, where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was slated to appear later that week. There, Within Our Lifetime founder Nerdeen Kiswani announced to the crowd that the state of Missouri had just executed Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, a Black imam, father and poet who had been imprisoned for 21 years.

The news was met with gasps from the crowd. Then, in unison, protesters recited one of Williams’s last poems, “The Perplexing Smiles of the Children of Palestine” — written as he was confined to a cell and awaiting his state-sanctioned murder: “In the face of apex arrogance / and ethnic cleansing by any definition… / still your laughter can be heard / and somehow you are able to smile / O Resilient Children of Palestine!”