Pictures – courtesy of stopmassincarceration.tumblr.com/; NYPD graphics – courtesy of nyc.gov; rally graphic courtesy of stopmassincarceration.tumblr.com.
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“In recent years, there has been a growing perception that the NYPD has sacrificed the protection of individuals’ civil liberties in order to achieve quantifiable law enforcement gains. The department’s stop and frisk practices are at the heart of this highly publicized debate.” — The United States Commission on Civil Rights
Doug Smith, who goes by “Smitty” and serves as Revolution Books’ campus liaison for college campuses throughout the five boroughs of New York, likes to quote founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party Carl Dix when he discusses NYPD’s strategies targeting communities of color supposedly for the purpose of preventing crime. “It’s like a counterinsurgency against a future insurgency,” he said, meaning that the paramilitary arm of city government thwarts the possibility of a popular uprising against systemic oppression.
Smitty, who was born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, guest lectures in college classes about sociopolitical issues like NYPD policy known as stop-and-frisk that has police officers stopping hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers of color in ethnic minority communities of color. Only a few percent are ever arrested. Stop-and-frisk is, according to legal-dictionary, part of freedictionary.com, a “type of limited search occurs when police confront a suspicious person in an effort to prevent crime from taking place. The police frisk (pat down) the person for weapons and question the person.”
It is “widespread,” “aggressive” and intending to “target communities of color at skyrocketing rates,” The New York Civil Liberties Union reports on its website. More than 1.6 million stops of New Yorkers have been conducted in three years leading up to 2009 and more than 576,000 occurred in 2009 alone, according to figures available on the NYPD website. Again, only a few percent are ever arrested.
The number of stops in 2011 is on track to break the 2010 record of over 600,000. [More NYCLU info here.]
Smitty said more needs to be done to make New York City communities of predominately white residents more aware of the stop and frisk policies that harass innocent residents in communities of color. Kevin S. Johnson, a New York Law school graduate and fellow with PROP, Police Reform Organizing Project, said stop and frisk is a “tool for police to exercise muscle-power” in order to drive productivity goals and meet quotas. From Harlem to Bushwick, Brooklyn, he said stop and frisk is a means to intimidate those in the black and latino communities.
Johnson manned a desk collecting signatures and contact information of guests arriving at a panel discussion at Riverside Church near Columbia University this past fall semester. PROP had organized the event to cover topics related to reforming the NYPD.
He joined PROP two months earlier after he had become interested in sex worker rights and police abuse of the population. He was balding and wore a shiny blue button-up shirt, jeans and cowboy boots.
Daniel Puerto, Lesbian, Gay, Bi and Transsexual justice project organizer, said police practices including unfair policing and racial profiling, especially in the homosexual communities “had proven ineffective.” The most egregious police abuse occurs in low-income communities and among young people of color. The police lump various minority populations together, generalizing them, he said.
In these neighborhoods, which include Jackson Heights, Queens, Puerto said, police have been known to profile anyone carrying two or more condoms as a sex-worker. Puerto, in black ray-ban reading glasses, khaki pants, dress shoes and a white sweater, had arrived late and was unable to join the panel as a speaker. He did, however, serve as a translator for Spanish-speaking audience members during the question and answer session.
Liliana Segura, Associate Editor at The Nation magazine, served as the panel moderator. The audience, which filled less than half of the available seats, booed and called out when Segura recalled mayor Michael Bloomberg, commenting about the NYPD, “I have my own private army.”
Robert Gangi, Director of PROP and Senior Policy Advocate of the Urban Justice Center who had arranged the panel discussion, said the goals of PROP include legislation reform and changing the Rockefeller drug laws. Former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller pushed through a series of drug laws in the 1970s establishing minimum sentences for selling narcotics in the state. They have been criticized by law groups since the late 70s that they are ineffective and harshly imprison minor offenders.
The International Centre for Prison Studies reports there were nearly 2.3 million prisoners in the United States at the end of 2009 residing in 3,365 local jails, 1,558 state facilities and 146 federal facilities. This stands in contrast to China; with four times the United States population, China has 1.6 million incarcerated.
Gangi said a resident of the Bronx had 150 times greater chance of being stopped than a resident of the Upper East Side. A particular population targeted by the police includes street vendors; more than 7,000 are arrested a year. These statistics create “a very disturbing picture of policies and practices” that harm rather than protect the city’s communities, Gangi said. As a community against unfair policing, he said, “It’s time for us to come together.”
Panelist Khary Lazarre-White, Executive Director & Co-Founder, Brotherhood/Sister Sol youth support center, said the New York State Penal Code requires “reasonable suspicion” for a person to be stopped and questioned. When 94 percent of New Yorkers stopped are let go without charge, “that meets no reasonable standard I’ve ever heard of,” he said.
The term ”’police state’ is not an exaggeration,” Lazarre-White said, when 16 and 17 year olds are in prison with adults and over 3 million incidences of stop and frisk have occurred in the last ten years.
The issue is “pervasive, widespread and intentional,” Lazarre-White also said.
When Christine Rodriguez of the The Ali Forney Center, Housing for Homeless LGBT Youth, asked if anyone in the audience was angry, Katherine White, a 21-year-old sociology student at Fordham, blonde, wearing a black v-neck T-shirt and jeansshouted, “Hell yeah.” A resident of the Bronx, White said people shouldn’t be “targeted for who they are.” She became involved in Occupy Wall Street and was at a November 28th student protest in front of Baruch College where students clashed with police and some were arrested, she said.
The panel featured at least three people identifying themselves as transgender Mexicans who spoke through interpreters. They told stories of police harassment due to their sexual orientation.
Written on a white board near tables with photo-copied flyers and pamphlets of information, such as names and contact information of city council members, “The NYPD needs to be reformed because” and attendees were asked to write their ideas underneath. In green marker, someone had scribbled, “it is racist and discriminating … paid to represent the interests of the 1%.”
Ribka Getachew, a senior at Columbia University, said she was frustrated that activists forget a broader spectrum of people exists who care and would like to be involved. In an orange knit hat, and orange leather jacket, grey sweats, silver athletic shoes, and a long orange feather earring, Getachew said she was there to “create that branch” that connects a diverse array of people.
Getachew, 21, handed out flyers declaring the following day, Friday, December 2 a “City-Wide Day of Student Action.” She said after gathering at Pace University in lower Manhattan, demonstrators planned to march to 1 Police Plaza. The Village Voice Blog reported Friday, December 2, they eventually were rerouted, circling lower Manhattan and ending at central booking. It was a shady and cold that afternoon in front of Pace University where sculpture artist Jonah Groeneboer sat waiting for the march to begin. He sipped on coconut water and said he liked these kind of smaller demonstrations because they were more intimate and were directed at more specific causes.
“There are those who plan actions as a form of civil disobedience. I go as someone who supports them,” said Groeneboer, wearing a denim jacket, blue denim jeans and black leather boots. A Lower East Side resident, he was not a student but heard of the march through friends via the Internet.
Stop Mass Incarceration organizers were heard saying that buses with Columbia students were late, pushing back the start of the march. As passers-by took noice or seemed annoyed at the crowd performing a human “mic-check,” Ginger O’Farrell walked among them handing out flyers seeking interns and volunteers with Revolution Newspaper where she volunteers. She said she was responsible for the graphic design, layout and photographic aspects of the paper.
Activists in the demonstration using the human telephone technique encouraged participants to eat now because they would be hungry later, indicating that some would be arrested. The Village Voice later reported no arrests occurred.
A woman with grey hair and a leather jacket held a sign, “Being Black or Latino is not a crime.” One passerby, Alex Jagiello, 32, of Forest Hills, Queens, said he was wary of protesters vilifying and dehumanizing the police as a monolithic institution rather than comprised of individuals. He also said that he believed the group would be too easily dismissed because of the small turnout. Wearing a pink scarf, a sweater and jeans, he said he was on his way to a Starbucks. He refused to disclose his occupation.
Occupy Wall Street, where many of the assembled had participated, brought public attention to causes but also likely increased animosity towards those engaged in protests, he said. By this time, Getachew had arrived, wearing a bright green backpack and waving a white sheet with writing on it, calling out in echo the statements of the human telephone’s leader. The group had grown to perhaps 30, a core group of students and youth, others old enough to have begun protesting in the 60s and those with cameras and microphones to record them.
“We won’t stop ‘til we stop stop and frisk,” echoed loudly off the tall surrounding buildings.
A postscript of sorts: Despite the shallow mainstream news coverage of the controversial police policy, alternate news media and activist groups have stepped up to fill in. An example: NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly Wins “2011 Bull Connor Award.”
Nevertheless, it would be unfair and shortsighted to focus on the perceived shortcomings of mainstream news media such as the New York Post, the New York Daily News and the broadcast affiliates of ABC, NBC and CBS. Commissioner Kelly is well respected by most on the New York City Council, including the elected reps from the communities most targeted by the NYPD.
Michael Hensley can be reached at mhensley@hunter.cuny.edu