Vol. 77/No. 46      December 23, 2013

The suit was filed by Alex Saleh, owner of the 207 Quickstop convenience store, as well as several of his employees and customers.

One of the plaintiffs is Earl Sampson, a 28-year-old worker at the store. He has been stopped and searched 288 times in the last five years, and arrested nearly 60 times on charges of “trespassing” while at the 207 Quickstop. Many of the arrests took place while he was working stocking shelves or taking out the trash.

“I started asking the officers why are they always stopping Earl,” Saleh told the Militant in a Dec. 1 interview at the store. “A cop told me, ‘He’s just a number. He’s the low fruit.’ When you do that it will reach a point when you’re violating people’s rights,” Saleh said.

The lawsuit alleges that the Miami Gardens Police Department maintains an illegal system of quotas for citations and arrests that cops must fill. It accuses the police and city officials with violating the Fourth Amendment protections against unjustified search and seizure, and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, for racial profiling. Sampson and most of the other plaintiffs are African-American.

Miami Gardens is a large, working-class suburb north of Miami. Most of the residents are Black. According to the Miami Herald, it has the highest murder rate of any municipality in Miami-Dade County. Children have been shot in a number of recent incidents.

For the last several years the police have had a “zero tolerance” policy in the name of stopping crime. “If you break the law, you’re going to jail,” Mayor Oliver Gilbert told reporters Nov. 7 after recent shootings.

“We need the police to stop real criminals,” Saleh said, so he initially signed on to the policy, giving the police permission to charge people with trespass in his absence. But when the police started arresting his customers and employees, he tried to opt out. The harassment continued, so he installed video cameras to document what was happening. “Two of the videos show I’m here when they arrested Earl,” he said.

Among other allegations, the suit states that Toree Daniels, 35, was stopped, searched and arrested dozens of times at the Quickstop, despite having the owners’ full permission to be there. Cops seized a bag of Red Bull energy drinks from another customer, Omar Dean, threw them on the ground, and then gave them away to passersby. The incident is captured on video.

Saleh said that the police and state attorney’s office did not respond to his complaints. “When there’s a complaint about the police, the state attorney looks the other way,” he said. “If it’s against a poor Black, or white, or Hispanic person they charge them, and then give them a deal that’s not really a deal,” referring to plea bargains. “You get a record, and then can’t get a job.”  
 
 
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