Excerpt from Term Paper:
1992 Wa Heights riots were the culmination of the series of violations that police officers had performed in the area. The situation of Michael O’Keefe’s shooting of Jose “Kiko” Garcia generated much controversy and influenced people in the area to organize a riot intended to protest for how the regulators were unwilling about prosecuting the police police officer. The local community got positively involved in denouncing this frame of mind and in aiming to use violence as a means to emphasise its point-of-view concerning the matter. This later on resulted to a full-on huge range that observed hundreds of protesters criticizing the region and wishing to harm virtually any representative of the device that they could come across.
Wa Heights was a poor and relatively calm neighborhood involve that much the times once drugs came to dominate the area’s roads. The presence of medications changed almost everything and people came to be a part of a chaotic drug-coordinated system that saw people killing for absurd reasons. The medicine industry got turned Washington Heights right into a warzone within years, taking into consideration that competitiveness and greed influenced young people to take up biceps and triceps against one another in order to enhance their profits. This also resulted in police officers must be better ready to deal with bad guys in the location and that some law enforcement agents did every thing in their electrical power in order to make sure that they would have the upper hand within a potential conflict with a legal in Wa Heights.
Eileen O’Keefe was obviously a member of the violent anticrime unit, Community Motion, and was requested with patrolling the Wa Heights area in order to be sure that crime amounts did not improvement even further. “For the work he loved, O’Keefe packed two guns, declaring, “Less than that would be madness in the three-four” (Hellman 40) The fact which the drug operate was growing fast in the area as well meant that hostility increased and that law enforcement real estate agents needed to undertake more hostile attitudes toward individuals that they interacted with in order to be sure they would put in force the law. To some degree, it appears perfectly normal for a police officer working in such an environment to pay attention to trying to appear as strong as he can possibly be with the purpose to bully criminals.
O’Keefe shot and killed Jose “Kiko” Garcia consequent into a conflict between two when the former statements that the latter attempted to take him. Based on the police officer, there was no different solution pertaining to him but for take out his gun and shoot Garcia in self-defense. While this seems to be properly normal, especially considering the victim’s background in the Washington Height drug picture, the case produced much controversy as eye-witnesses claimed that O’Keefe actually shot an innocent person and that there was no need for physical violence in that particular situation. “Two women who explained they witnessed the getting rid of fed some doubts that an overzealous Officer O’Keefe shot an innocent child. ” (The Lesson of Washington Heights)
The fact the fact that case has not been very clear and the authorities refused to consider taking that further, to court, affected the masses to rise against the system in a protest movements meant to have whole globe understand that Garcia was slain for not any actual explanation and that the criminal was still totally free. All factors seemed to level toward the fact that O’Keefe performed nothing incorrect, taking into consideration that Garcia was well-known simply by police officers as being a drug user and dealer. Furthermore, he was seen to carry a gun, thus and therefore many people could consider that the circumstance was a no-brainer.
In spite of the simple fact that it