White Plains Rally Calls for Police Accountability
By Andrew Vitelli – Protestors marched alongside police and city and state officials last week, as hundreds attended a White Plains march calling for police reform following the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.
“We must eliminate the insanity of the continual racism that is destroying America,” Rev. Franklyn Richardson of the Grace Baptist Church in Mt. Vernon said as the march concluded with a rally at Court Street. “We individually, in our own individual space, must take up the fight against racism. We must condemn it whenever we see it. We must not allow it to be a part of American culture.”
Starting at Calvary Baptist Church in White Plains, protestors marched first to the Winbrook Public Housing building where Kenneth Chamberlain, a 68-year-old former Marine, was killed during a confrontation with police in 2011. The march continued to police headquarters, where White Plains Police Chief Anne FitzSimmons led the group in prayer, before finally heading towards Court Street.
“We want to show America an example of a good community and of a loving community and a community that is going to ask those hard questions, hear the right answers, and make police and the community to be as one,” Calvary’s Rev. Erwin Lee Trollinger, the event’s organizer, said at the outset of the march. “This not an angry march. This is not a fighting march. This is a coming together march.”
The march and rally followed fatal shootings by police of a number of black men, most recently Sterling and Castile in Louisiana and Minnesota, respectively, as well as the murder of five police officers in Dallas earlier this month. The marchers were joined by White Plains police officers, as speakers stressed that they were speaking out not against police but for better policing practices. The Westchester Coalition for Police Reform handed out fliers with a list of objectives, including the establishment of independent oversight structures.
“I am not now nor have I ever been anti-law enforcement,” Kenneth Chamberlain Jr., the son of the former Marine killed in 2011 and founder of WCPR, said at the Court Street rally. “I am anti-individuals who feel that they can do whatever they want to whomever they want with impunity.”
Many of the marchers held signs reading “Black Lives Matter,” “Stop Police Impunity,” and “#ThisStopsToday,” while others listed the names of black men and women killed by police in recent years. As they marched, people chanted “This is what democracy looks like” and, “The people united will never be defeated.” The rally was attended by officials including White Plains Mayor Tom Roach, council members Milagros Lecuona and Nadine Hunt-Robinson, and Assemblyman David Buchwald, a White Plains resident.
“This is a remarkable display of our capacity to rise above our differences and find unity in our similarities,” Richardson told the crowd at Court Street. “We must make America know that racism has no place in American society.”
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