Roper's Legions

Getting on the ballot in Brooklyn, arguably the most undemocratic county in the U.S., is akin to navigating a field of spiked bats swung by courthouse lawyers. It's an especially bloody affair if you're civil rights attorney Sandra Roper, who four years ago, in what was then an unthinkable act of defiance, challenged the reelection of the three-term incumbent Joe Hynes, known for his vengeful ways. The Roper rebellion of 2001 opened the gates to the unprecedented number of challengers facing Hynes in this year's race-five at last count-but it exacted a heavy price on Roper herself, who was indicted in 2003 on suspicious grand larceny charges vetted by Hynes' office.

The case was later dropped, but not before the shadow of criminality had effectively doomed Roper's campaign for DA this year. We are heartened, however, to see her taking up the standard for a run at the equally calcified office of the Brooklyn judiciary, where a seat in county Civil Court is open for challenge to whoever can get the 12,000 or so signatures needed to stay on the ballot.

Equally encouraging is that at least four insurgent candidates for City Council have made the ballsy decision to carry Roper on their petition sheets-ballsy because support for Roper is a tacit spitball in the eye of Joe Hynes, who has a habit of indicting politicos who displease him.

"People are scared," says an associate close to Norman Titus, a council candidate supporting Roper in Flatbush. "But god forbid Joe Hynes should still be DA in September."

"Brooklyn needs a revolution," said Eddie Rodriguez, 35, who is running in Red Hook and Sunset Park and carries Roper's name on his ballot "because Ms. Roper has been a catalyst for reform."

Campaigning in East New York, 41-year-old John Whitehead, who was a steelworker and now works a sanitation route, tells us that he, like Roper, once got slapped with false charges in the criminal justice system. "I wish someone had stuck up for me," he said.

Alika Ampry Samuel, a bouncy and bespectacled 29-year-old and recent CUNY law school graduate, is the youngest of this crowd and something of a homegrown Rosa Parks. At her Brownsville storefront, wearing a yellow Che Guevera t-shirt and blue jeans, she tells us that at age 13 she was roughed up by cops when she refused to get off a school bus that the cops (for no good reason) wanted emptied. When they got her off the bus, she argued until a sergeant said, "I've heard enough. Take her in!" She grabbed onto a metal grate and wouldn't let go.

Finally, the cops ripped her fingers from their grip and screamed at her all the way to the precinct. "I was scared to death," she says. Perhaps that's a good place to start in a career in politics, with the realization that the system, when it goes bad, can scare you to death. Sandra Roper knows something about that.