by Ron Riekki
Following a comprehensive investigation, the Justice Department announced today [December 12, 2024] that the Mount Vernon, New York, Police Department (MVPD) engages in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of rights secured by the U.S. Constitution and federal law. Specifically, the Justice Department finds that MVPD:
- Uses excessive force in numerous ways, including by unnecessarily escalating minor encounters and by overusing tasers and closed-fist strikes, particularly against individuals who have already been taken to the ground, are controlled by many officers or are already fully or partially restrained;
- Conducted unlawful strip searches and body cavity searches of individuals until at least 2023; and
- Makes arrests without probable cause.
Sometimes bodies kill bodies and bodies
haunt bodies and sometimes bodies taunt
bodies and sometimes bodies search bodies
and sometimes those bodies are bloody
from the hoods where they’re buried in
blindness and sometimes bodies are bottled
into incarceration-hungry systems and some-
times systems kill bodies and sometimes
bodies suffocate and sometimes bodies
aren’t bodies when they’re killed and
erased and sometimes bodies are innocent
and mostly bodies are innocent and always
bodies are innocent and sometimes systems
are guilty and sometimes systems are guilty
and sometimes systems are guilty and often
systems are guilty and this system is guilty.
Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.
