New York Police Division commissioner Keechant Sewell, the primary girl to carry the submit, raised eyebrows throughout her swearing-in ceremony in entrance of a mural that includes FBI-most-wanted convicted cop-killer Assata Shakur.
Sewell was sworn in on Wednesday at Queensbridge Homes, a public housing growth in Queens, in entrance of a mural that includes well-known black revolutionaries, from slave revolt chief Nat Turner to Black Panther Huey Newton. Sewell’s household as soon as lived within the advanced.
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Maybe essentially the most controversial determine within the mural, Joanne Chesimard aka Assata Shakur, fled to Cuba in 1979 after escaping from a New Jersey jail the place she was being held following her conviction as an confederate within the homicide of State Trooper Werner Foerster. Granted political asylum by Cuban chief Fidel Castro, Shakur has remained in Cuba since then and lives there to this present day regardless of a hefty FBI bounty on her head.
The 73-year-old, a member of the Black Liberation Military, was convicted in 1977 of Foerster’s homicide and attained the doubtful honor of changing into the primary girl to be listed on the FBI’s most needed terrorist listing in 2013. The company doubled the reward for her seize to $ 2 million that yr, the 40th anniversary of the crime, declaring her a “home terrorist.”
“Whereas residing brazenly and freely in Cuba she continues to keep up and promote her terrorist ideology,” FBI particular agent Aaron Ford declared at a information convention on the 40th anniversary of the freeway shootout that noticed Foerster and a passenger within the automotive with Shakur killed following a site visitors cease. She and the driving force of the car had been sentenced to life in jail.
Her trigger was taken up by a number of high-profile civil rights activists who claimed she was not given a good trial amid the politically-charged local weather of the 1970s that noticed the FBI and different authorities companies infiltrate and dismantle American leftist actions just like the Black Panthers, to which Shakur had beforehand belonged.
Incoming New York Mayor Eric Adams praised Sewell as the primary girl to tackle the function of NYPD commissioner. She has served within the division for 22 years and was most lately Chief of Detectives for Nassau County, Lengthy Island. Adams heralded Sewell’s appointment, declaring that girls would now not be “all the time sitting on the bench, by no means allowed to get within the recreation.”
Sewell declared she would prioritize getting crime below management as commissioner. “The very first thing we now have to do is get a deal with on the violence within the metropolis,” she instructed MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Thursday.
