The practice known as “stop and frisk” has been prevalent in the Philadelphia Police Department for some time and has become a widespread practice in policing. This method is a way for police to lock up more and more youth, primarily working class Blacks and Latinos.
Recently, the Pennsylvania ACLU conducted a report on stop and frisk in Philadelphia. The report found that of 200,000 pedestrian stops in the first half of 2015, 33 percent of stops were made without reasonable suspicion.The report also stated that 42 percent of all frisks were done without reasonable suspicion. As expected, African Americans made accounted for 69 percent of stops, whites accounted for 23 percent and Latinos for 7 percent. People from oppressed communities accounted for an even higher share of individuals frisked: 79 percent were Black, 10 percent Latino, and 11 percent white.
These findings are outrageous but not surprising, given the PPD’s reputation for racist brutality against the Black community. African-Americans account for a plurality of the population in the city and have had a thriving community there for centuries.
This year, the City of Philadelphia elected a new mayor—Jim Kenney, a Democrat. When he ran for mayor, he campaigned on ending stop and frisk entirely, and as a result gained much support from Black voters. He won the election and was sworn in January 2016. The Philadelphia Police Department also received a new top commander, Richard Ross. The new Commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department was sworn into this role after former Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey stepped down in January of this year as well. Charles Ramsey was in favor of stop and frisk during his time as Commissioner.
Stop and frisk also led to mass numbers of arrests, which then backed up the court system in Philadelphia with non-violent cases. Most of these arrests were made to take large numbers of African-American and Latino women and men out of their communities by handing them harsh sentences for the least offensive of crimes. Even though marijuana was decriminalized by the Philadelphia city government, the reduced number of arrests for these violations still disproportionately target Blacks and Latinos.
Police officers are occupiers in the communities they patrol, containing the tensions created by the capitalist system. The brutal history of the Philadelphia Police Department, which carried out the MOVE bombing and was led by the notorious Commissioner Frank Rizzo.
Despite Kenney’s election, the story is still the same. Jim Kenney has now changed his stance on stop and frisk. He now claims that stop and frisk should be “constitutional and limited.” Police Commissioner Richard Ross claims that stop and frisk is “a law enforcement tool that arises out of a federal-court case from many, many years ago,” Ross said, “and if you were to take that away from police officers, you would have chaos on the streets of this nation. What is imperative is that you do it constitutionally.”
When asked about the disproportionate number of Blacks that have been profiled, Ross says, “The level of victimization in this city is at least that much in neighborhoods of color, if not higher. That is a fact that you cannot deny, and when people talk about neighborhoods being over-policed—well, where would you suggest we have them?”
Basically, he is stating that police need to be right where they are, in Black neighborhoods, policing Black life in Black Philadelphia.
Kenney and other politicians run on ending a tyrannical policies like stop and frisk, but once in office, try to adjust tyranny into something constitutional and say it should still be used. This is a fight we will keep fighting, exposing the hypocrisy and the corruption of politics in the City of Philadelphia.
