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Sharpton announces Fifth Avenue march to protest police shooting

BY HERBERT LOWE | Newsday Staff Writer

December 16, 2006

Organizers of Saturday's "March for Justice" along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan plan to reveal a list of demands that they say, if enacted, would improve police community relations in New York City.

No speeches are planned during the march, which organizers said will be led by the Rev. Al Sharpton and the family of Sean Bell, the Queens man killed in a controversial police shooting on Nov. 25.

The march is to begin at noon at 59th Street, with participants walking 25 blocks south to Herald Square. Demonstrators are expected to be dignified and silent, said organizers, comparing the march to nonviolent protests of the 1960s led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The New York Police Department, in an advisory Friday evening, said Fifth Avenue will be open to vehicles during the march and demonstrators will walk in the roadway's east lane.

"The demands and the solemn march should speak for themselves," said Bill Batson, a spokesman for the event's main sponsor, the Coalition to Improve Police and Community Relations. The coalition is a collaboration of elected officials and community, clergy and labor leaders, organizers said.

Batson said the demands still were being finalized but would mirror some of the recommendations put forth after the fatal police shooting of Amadou Diallo in 1999 and the police assault on Abner Louima in 1997. Sharpton and others are expected to speak before the march at the National Action Network's new headquarters on West 145th Street.

Bell, 23, was killed on his wedding day and two of his friends were wounded in a hail of 50 police bullets outside a Queens strip club -- a shooting that remains under investigation by the Queens district attorney. All three men were unarmed.

Since then, there have been four police shootings in the city, including one on Wednesday in the Bronx in which police said they killed a 19-year-old armed man whose gun was turning into a sergeant's stomach during a tussle.

At a news conference Friday at City Hall, Sharpton called the march a moral appeal for change in city police practices.

"Many will be shopping for trinkets and toys. We will be shopping for justice," he said. "The fact that we are going on probably the most visible street in the world tomorrow, you don't have to talk to be heard. You just got to show up."

Sharpton previously had said the march will stretch to Macy's at Herald Square. Batson said there was no definite end point.

The NYPD advisory said marchers, upon reaching Herald Square, will turn west on 34th Street and walk toward Seventh Avenue. Charter buses that took participants to the march's start will be parked on the north side of 34th Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues, police said.

Others planning to march included Bell's fiancee, Nicole Paultre-Bell; one of Bell's two friends who was wounded in the Nov. 25 shooting; and Louima, the Haitian immigrant who was sodomized with a broomstick in a bathroom at the 75th Precinct by city cops.

Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers; City Comptroller William Thompson Jr.; State Sen. Malcolm Smith (D-St. Albans); City Councilman Robert Jackson (D-Manhattan); and Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum also were at the news conference.

This story was supplemented with an Associated Press report.