Vol. 74/No. 21      May 31, 2010

The main reason given by the cops for the stops was “furtive movements.” Other reasons they listed include “inappropriate attire for season” and “wearing clothes commonly used in a crime,” according to the Center for Constitutional Rights.

In a March 13 column titled “Big Brother in Blue,” liberal New York Times columnist Bob Herbert notes that the targets of this police harassment are often forced “to sprawl face down on the sidewalk or spread themselves against a wall or over the hood of a car to be searched.”

Close to 90 percent of those stopped are not arrested or given summonses. In most cases, however, no matter what the outcome of the “frisk” the person’s name is entered into the police department’s permanent computerized database.

Conservative columnist Heather MacDonald defended the policy in the March 25 New York Post. She writes that stop and frisk deters “criminal activity before it happens.”

MacDonald asserts that “blacks and Hispanics committed 98 percent of all shootings. Blacks committed nearly 70 percent of all robberies” in the city. The policy is not biased, she claims, because the percentage of those arrested during the stops, about 6 percent, is the same for Blacks, Latinos, and whites.

The indiscriminate stopping and harassment of Blacks and Latinos goes hand in hand with New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plans to expand a network of security cameras and license plate readers in the city to fight “terrorism” and “street crime.” An existing network covers the New York Stock Exchange and other “high-profile” buildings, according to the Associated Press.

Bloomberg says the expansion to midtown will be completed by 2011. Under the plan existing and new cameras operated by private companies would also be connected to the police department’s network. There are thousands of surveillance cameras in the city.

Meanwhile, the Chicago City Council on May 12 approved a $16.5 million settlement of a federal class-action lawsuit against the city police department.

The lawsuit, filed in 2004, charged that an “institutionalized system of police torture” existed in Chicago, including shackling people to walls or benches and depriving them of food and water.

In a related case, jury selection in the trial of former Chicago police detective Jon Burge began May 6. After revelations that for some two decades city cops beat, applied electric shocks, and nearly suffocated prisoners, Burge was fired in 1993.

Dozens of people went to prison based on coerced confessions extracted by the cops. Burge is not being charged with torture. Instead he is accused of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying under oath in 2003 about the abuses.
 
 
Related articles:
U.S. gov’t takes aim at workers rights
Free the Cuban Five!
Oppose assault on workers rights
Seattle video shows cop brutality  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home