Young and Black and
Latino people are being systematically targeted by the New York Police
Department. Basic constitutional rights that guarantee for every individual
freedom from search, seizure and detention without an established probable
cause of criminal misconduct have been shredded in New York City.
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In 2009, the NYPD
carried out 581,000 so-called Stop and Frisk detentions. It is a policy
targeting Black and Latino people. No probable cause is necessary. The police
say that it is intended to keep illegal guns off the street. But only 1.3
percent of those who were detained and searched in 2009 were even allegedly
caught with weapons.
Guess what happens to
the information that the police collected on those nearly 600,000 people who
were illegally seized, searched and detained even though they were not arrested
or charged with any criminal offense?
If you guessed that the
New York City police kept the information as part of a huge and growing
surveillance database, you would be right.
The NYPD says that they
never use the database information against “innocent people” but they need to
maintain this illegally collected information for “investigative purposes.”
On July 16, Gov. David
Patterson, after wobbling for weeks under the pressure from the cops and Mayor Michael
Bloomberg, signed into law a measure that prevents the police from maintaining
the database for people who were detained by “Stop and Frisk” but never charged
with a crime.
Patterson was also
feeling heat from the Black and Latino communities that are sick and tired of
the criminalization of young people.
Patterson said, “There
is a principle—which is compatible with the presumption of innocence, and is
deeply ingrained in our sense of justice—that individuals wrongly accused of a
crime should suffer neither stigma nor adverse consequences by virtue of an
arrest or criminal accusation not resulting in conviction.”
Patterson
and the other politicians, however, refuse to end the “Stop and Frisk” program.
The “Stop and Frisk”
program is proof positive that the current policing practice is based on the
maintenance of an apartheid, Jim Crow-style criminal justice system.
A recent New York Times editorial
cites some of the evidence and analysis developed by its reporters that make it
clear the NYPD is nothing other than a holdover of the racist police state that
became the symbol of the segregated South.
The Times editorial
states that its reporters determined that “the heavily minority neighborhood of
Brownsville, Brooklyn, reported that police officers logged nearly 52,000 stops
within eight odd blocks over the last four years.” The editorial continues:
“A 26-year-old legal
assistant with no criminal record who grew up in the area said that he had been
stopped 30 or 40 times.
“According to a Times
analysis of reports filed by officers, less than 9 percent of the stops in the
neighborhood were made because the person fit the description of a suspect. In
about half the stops, the officers listed ‘other’ or cited ‘furtive movement,’
a catch-all category that can be used to mask harassment.” (New York Times,
July 13)
Malcolm X stated, “You
can’t have capitalism without racism.” The police are the armed guardians of
the social and economic order in which a handful of capitalist bankers wield
decisive economic power. The
police exemplify the worst features of the racism that is built into
capitalism.
The entire multinational
working class needs to unite in defense of Black and Latino youth.
