We know New York's Stop and Frisk law originated in the Black Codes of the American slave system, as much of American law and institutions, including the police who evolved from the slave catchers. It is shameful to know nearly 700,000
black and minority men were stopped by the NYPD last year. It is disgusting to watch it happen on the streets of New York, especially and mostly in black neighborhoods. It is indicative of life under occupation, similar to the Gaza Strip or the West Bank in occupied Palestine, or the old apartheid regime in South Africa.
Perhaps the NYPD should follow the example of the pass system used in South Africa or in San Francisco during the hunt for Patty Hearst: all black men in San Francisco were stopped and given a pass to carry while the hunt for the kidnapped rich white girl was on. I was stopped and given a pass to indicate the SFPD were familiar with me already so I could hurry on my business.
An old black woman once said, "It ain't so bad being black, it's just inconvenient." And so it is.Aside from Henry Louis Gates, life is much different when a black lives in a white community, one is treated so very different by the police. I had a rich friend who lived in a affluent area of the Bay where few blacks lived. His teenage son was stopped repeatedly for driving with no license, no registration, no insurance and speeding. Each time the police simply called his father to come get his son and that was it. Isn't this wonderful? On one occasion I was babysitting this teenager when he had a party and the police came. Even though the teenagers were drinking and smoking weed, the officers only wanted to know if an adult was present. When I came to the door, the officers said, "Sir, thank you and have a nice evening."
The reemergence of Jim Crow laws represent a society in fear of itself, its children, especially those "other" children, simply because they are not wanted nor needed in the global economy. They are worth more in jail, prison and juvenile hall. The slave catchers returned the slaves to their owners, although they could kill them if they resisted, but they had to pay the owners for the loss of their property. Today, the Africans caught in the neo-slave system are worthless and thus can be killed by the police (slave catchers) or can kill themselves as in black on black homicide. Surely, there was no black on black homicide during the centuries of the American slave system. A black wouldn't think of killing another black owned by the white master.
How long can this go on, this low intensity war against North American Africans? Perhaps we should fill the jails and prisons, even though at this hour there are 2.4 million incarcerated, mostly black, brown and poor white. Would America then feel save and secure when all unneeded black men are off the streets, and of course their families would be placed in family prisons or community centers since the ghettos would quickly be gentrified with yuppies and buppies so that the American life can return to its normal state in the world of make believe.
The jails and prisons would then, of course, be places of education in revolution and critical thinking, where black men could configure a new life when the opportunity afforded itself. Resistance would grow to a point when a general amnesty would be forced upon the socalled American social order and probably a large population of the disaffected would be deported to some territory within or without these United States of America.
--Marvin X
Taking On Police Tactic, Critics Hit Racial Divide
By JOHN ELIGON
Published: March 22, 2012
ALBANY — Black and Latino lawmakers, fed up over the frequency with which New York City police officers are stopping and frisking minority men, are battling what they say is a racial divide as they push legislation to rein in the practice.
The divide, they say, is largely informed by personal experience: many who object to the practice say that they have themselves been stopped by the police for reasons they believe were related to race.
Senator Kevin S. Parker, a Brooklyn Democrat, recalled several occasions when, as a high school student walking home in Flatbush, he was stopped by the police, patted down, told to empty his pockets, produce identification and divulge his destination.
Assemblyman Karim Camara, a Democrat from Brooklyn, remembers greeting a woman who was walking down a street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, when, he said, officers in plain clothes approached him and demanded to know who he was, where he was going and whether he had any guns or drugs.
And when Senator Adriano Espaillat, a Manhattan Democrat, was just 14, he said, detectives threw him against a wall and patted him down in Washington Heights, in Manhattan, when he was on his way to buy a Dominican newspaper for his father.
The lawmakers say the racial imbalance with which stop-and-frisk is applied has a corollary effect: Many white legislators have remained silent on the issue, or have supported the police, revealing a racial gap over attitudes toward the practice.
“There is an ethnic divide on who’s being stopped and frisked, and there is an ethnic divide on who’s fighting against the policy,” said State Senator Eric L. Adams, a Democrat and a retired police captain from Brooklyn.
The lawmakers’ effort to set off a debate in Albany is taking place with an increased focus on the interplay between race and public safety. It was highlighted in New York by the fatal shooting last month of Ramarley Graham, 18, by a police officer in the Bronx, and nationally by the fatal shooting last month of Trayvon Martin, 17, by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida. The young men were unarmed.
“Both illustrate the perils of racial stereotyping when individuals are empowered with the capacity to make life and death decisions,” said Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat. He said the shootings had “further emboldened legislators to continue to fight to deal with the out-of-control stop-and-frisk practices.”
The split among Albany lawmakers over the stop-and-frisk issue reflects a divide among New York City voters: according to a Quinnipiac University poll released on March 13, 59 percent of white voters approve of it, and 27 percent of black voters do.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, facing increased complaints about the practice, has pushed back hard against critics. Last week, assailed by the City Council over the practice, Mr. Kelly said that the policy was an important policing tool intended to reduce the violence that has victimized blacks and Hispanics, and that, “What I haven’t heard is any solution to the violence problems in these communities.”
“People are upset about being stopped,” he continued, “yet what is the answer?”
According to the Police Department, 96 percent of shooting victims last year, and 90 percent of murder victims, were minorities.
“There’s more police assigned to a place like East New York than, say, a precinct in Riverdale,” said the Police Department spokesman, Paul J. Browne, “so the police are going to be in a position to observe suspicious behavior more frequently.”
The Police Department has said that it conducted a record 684,330 stops last year, and that 87 percent of those stopped were black or Hispanic. About 10 percent of the stops led to arrests or summonses and 1 percent to the recovery of a weapon, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has examined police data.
But the Police Department frames the numbers in a different way: last year, it said, it recovered 8,000 weapons, 800 of them handguns, via stops. And over the last decade, the number of murders has dropped by 51 percent, “in part because of stop, question and frisk,” Mr. Browne said.
Some white elected officials have strongly criticized the stop-and-frisk policy. They included the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, and the public advocate, Bill de Blasio, both of whom are likely candidates for mayor; and Brad Lander and Daniel Dromm, who are on the Council. Senator Michael Gianaris, a Democrat from Queens, has offered a bill that would make it illegal for the department to set a quota for the number of stops officers must make.
Mr. Stringer said it was important for elected officials “who look like me” to help broaden the coalition of New Yorkers fighting against stop-and-frisk.
But race continues to dominate discussion of the issue. Assemblyman Keith L. T. Wright, a black Democrat from Harlem, is still smarting over a legislative debate he had in 2008 with Assemblyman David R. Townsend Jr., a white Republican from central New York, on a proposal to prohibit racial profiling. Mr. Townsend said part of good police work involved questioning people who seemed out of place in a particular neighborhood, regardless of their race.
“If you were spotted in an affluent section of Oneida County where we don’t have minority people living, and you were driving around through these houses, and I was a law enforcement officer and a highway patrol, I would stop you to say, No. 1: ‘Are you lost? Is there something we can help you with, or what are you doing here?’ ” Mr. Townsend said to Mr. Wright.
Two years ago, the Legislature passed a law requiring police officials in New York City to no longer store the names and addresses of people stopped but not charged. Gov. David A. Paterson, the state’s first African-American governor, signed the measure despite objections not only from city officials, but also, he said, from an all-white panel advising him on the issue.
In a recent interview, Mr. Paterson, a Democrat, said his views of the measure were informed by his own experience, which included being stopped three times by the police.
“It’s a feeling of being degraded,” he said. “I think that’s what people who it hasn’t happened to don’t understand.”
Now, Mr. Jeffries is sponsoring a bill that would make it a violation, not a crime, to possess small quantities of marijuana in public view. The bill, he said, would curb the tens of thousands of arrests each year that result when officers stop people and ask them to empty their pockets, leading to the revelation of small amounts of marijuana.
Mr. Wright has been urging passage of a bill that would prohibit police officers from stopping people based solely on their race or ethnicity. Mr. Parker is behind legislation to create the post of inspector general for the police.
And in the Council, Jumaane D. Williams has introduced bills that would require officers to inform people they stop that they can refuse to be searched and make mandatory and citywide a pilot program in which officers give those stopped a business card with a phone number, in case they want to lodge a complaint.
Mr. Williams has had his own run-ins with police. He said he was stopped in Brooklyn last year, after he had bought a BMW, by officers who said, “We want to make sure it’s yours.” And, in an episode that drew widespread publicity, he was detained by the police last year after an argument with officers over whether he was allowed to use a closed sidewalk during the West Indian American Day Parade.
“We know that the legislation is not going to stop stop-and-frisk,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is provide more accountability with the N.Y.P.D. and their practices and policies.”
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