It's been seven years to the day since Amadou Diallo was gunned down by four police officers in the vestibule of his building on Sedgewick Avenue in Soundville.

Even as the amount of high profile cases of racialized police brutality have declined with the exit of Giuliani and the lionization of the NYPD as 9/11 martyr, the role of the police as the neoliberal bourgeoisie's agents of gentrification at gunpoint has continued, and the widescale repression of thousands of people during the 2004 RNC "rent-a-city" occupation and subsequent sustained harassment and intimidation of Critical Mass bicyclists are perhaps some of the most visible illustrations of this. But of course, distinctly racialized assaults on immigrants and people of color have hardly dissapeared over the past four years as well, as the folks arrested in the SWAT attack on a Critical Resistance fundraising party can attest.

New York has not forgotten the Amadou Diallos and Abner Louimas and Patrick Dorismonds, but memory isn't enough. How can we build a city in which working class people of color and immigrants aren't targets, aren't palimpsests on which state violence can be written by billioaire politicians who call striking workers "selfish thugs" and their armed guard ready to make Mott Haven safe for yuppies and unaffordable for anyone else?