Iris Baez: a mother's cause against brutality

By Roberto García and Alberto Rivera

BRONX, N.Y. - Walking in the Bronx toward the home of anti-police brutality activist Iris Baez, you feel a chill when you pass the place where Baez' son, Anthony, met his death at the hands of a New York City police officer on Dec. 22, 1994.

In response to the murder of her son, Baez led a grass-roots campaign to bring his killer to justice. She brought together other mothers of children murdered by police to form Community and Parents Against Police Violence.

New Yorkers can honor Baez and her work at the People's Weekly World/Nuestro Mundo New York Awards Luncheon Nov. 14 (see ad on page 2 for details).

For Baez, the pain remains and has been channeled into a grass-roots campaign, through the Anthony Baez Foundation, to educate young people about their constitutional rights.

She devotes her time to educating schoolchildren on the issue, distributing copies of the United States Constitution wherever she speaks.

Baez's own education on constitutional rights began when police officer Francis Livoti killed her son. "I didn't know much about the law; I was taking care of my children," she said in an interview with the World. "We learned after the murder of my son."

Anthony Baez, who was 29, and his brothers played football in front of the family house that deadly night. The ball hit Livoti's car, whereupon the officer immediately arrested Anthony's brother David and slammed his head into a jeep, knocking him to the ground.

When Anthony questioned this, the officer put Anthony, who suffered from asthma, in a chokehold until he was dead. Two of his brothers, meanwhile, were forced to the ground with guns pointed at their heads.

Iris Baez remembered that the Civilian Complaint Review Board did not make a case until forced to by community outrage. But Livoti was acquitted by a judge despite evidence of perjury by him and other cops.

This year, after a massive grassroots campaign led by Baez, Livoti was found guilty of violating Anthony Baez's civil rights and sentenced to 7 1/2 years in federal prison.

As to Livoti's fate, Iris Baez noted that he is living "the good life" in prison but has lost his pension. While justice has yet to be fully served, she noted, "Lo quien lo hace aquí, lo paga allá" (Whoever does it here, pays for it elsewhere). "God only gave us 10 commandments to keep. 'Thou shall not kill' is one of them," she added.

As to the attitudes of police, Baez offered an analogy: "When you see an animal in the street, you try to help. How can you not move when you see a human being?"

She remembers that the police did not even call for an ambulance when her son was murdered. In speaking on the moral corruption of the police, she said, "If it were one of us, we would be accomplices. If it would have turned out that my son was an accessory, he would have been facing death row."

In discussing her current work with schoolchildren, Baez points out the connection between police brutality and a system that miseducates children.

"By letting the schools run down, [the children] don't have to get educated, and they get blamed."

As to the recent gathering of the Ku Klux Klan in Manhattan, Baez said the KKK thought they could get away with marching because they knew that neither Mayor Rudolph Giuliani nor Police Commissioner Howard Safir were going to do anything about it, regardless of what they said publicly - just as they did nothing about the murder of her son. More than 8,000 New Yorkers turned out to stand up to the Klan - only 16 of whom showed up.

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