MUSLIM VIOLENCE IN AMERICA 40 YEARS AGO

[NUKE MECCA]

Harlem Split on Plan to Honor Officer Killed in Mosque in ’72

By ANNE BARNARD
The New York Times
Published: May 11, 2012

Stirring emotions that date back 40 years to days of violent tension
between African-American Muslims and the police, a Harlem community
board is weighing whether to name a street after a police officer who
was shot in 1972 inside a renowned Harlem mosque. People in the
neighborhood wonder whether the gesture will reopen old wounds or help
heal them.

On April 14, 1972, Officer Phillip W. Cardillo was one of five
officers who entered the mosque, at 116th Street and Lenox Avenue —
then the New York headquarters of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam —
responding to a report of a police officer in trouble inside.

It was a particularly incendiary alarm at a time of high-profile
murders of police officers by radical groups around the country and
crackling tension between the police and residents of black
neighborhoods after riots had convulsed many cities in the preceding
years.

The call turned out to be spurious, and a melee ensued in which
someone grabbed Officer Cardillo’s gun and shot him; he died six days
later.

Amid fears of violence in the neighborhood, police officials ordered
the officers out of the mosque and apologized to the mosque’s leaders,
who said they believed they were being invaded by a hostile police
force.

The events left lingering resentment among some police officers who
say that politics derailed the investigation. No one has ever been
convicted in Officer Cardillo’s killing.

Now, the Police Department and advocates for officers want to add
“Officer Phillip Cardillo Way” to the street signs on 123rd Street,
between Frederick Douglass Boulevard and St. Nicholas Avenue, a short
block that is seven blocks from the mosque and abuts the 28th Precinct
station house. They say they have collected 2,300 signatures
supporting the proposal, including many from the neighborhood.

To Randy Jurgensen, a retired police detective who was there when the
shooting took place and investigated it, enough time has passed that
the proposed street naming can be viewed not as an endorsement of
either side or a statement about 1970s politics, but as a simple
memorial to an officer who died in the line of duty.

“This is not going to be a huge celebration,” he said.

“It’s going to be held with dignity and it’s going to be quietly done,
because this is about a police officer who gave his life. That’s all.”

But for Harlem residents, especially those old enough to remember the
events, it may not be that simple, as became clear at a community
board meeting on Thursday in which board members insisted that
advocates of the street naming — led by Inspector Rodney Harrison, a
former commander of the 28th Precinct — deliver a letter proving they
had consulted with local imams.

Street names are particularly resonant in the district. Figures like
Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X have
their names attached to major thoroughfares. And while Harlem has
moved on from internal disputes that divided the neighborhood after
the 1972 shooting, some would rather not reopen the subject, said a
person familiar with the street-naming procedure, who asked not to be
identified because of the sensitivity of the continuing process.
“There’s some history here,” the person said, adding that some
residents want to make sure that the views of those who opposed the
police are also heard. “It’s sensitive.”

Today, the domed mosque is a landmark of a transformed, gentrifying
Harlem, and its imam, Izak-El Mu’eed Pasha, served as the New York
Police Department’s first Muslim chaplain. It houses a different
congregation, the Malcolm Shabazz Mosque. The Nation of Islam’s Mosque
No. 7 has moved to another Harlem site.

The fate of the proposal hangs, for the moment, on the cooperation of
the imams of those mosques — at a time when cooperation with the
police is a delicate matter in New York’s Muslim community. Tensions
between some Muslims and the police are largely of a different nature
from 40 years ago; they stem from widespread surveillance of mosques
and Muslim organizations in the years after Sept. 11, and are
accompanied by efforts on both sides to improve understanding.

Inspector Harrison, who according to Mr. Jergensen often consults with
the imams on routine police matters like crime prevention, met with
them several times and was told that they would neither support nor
oppose the naming.

Board members said they wanted to see a letter from the imams
confirming that, or to have them attend a meeting, according to two
people present; Inspector Harrison said he doubted either option would
be possible. “They are not going to come in here and say thumbs up,”
he said, according to a report on the Web site DNAInfo.com New York,
which covered the meeting.

The imams did not return phone calls on Friday.

Mr. Jurgensen said the renaming was one way of achieving closure for
Officer Cardillo’s children, who were very young when he died,
especially since, a police spokesman said, the recent reopening of the
case “did not yield any new conclusive evidence.”

“We are not looking to open old wounds,” Inspector Harrison told the
board, “but to heal old wounds.”

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