Mr. "Stop-and-Frisk" Bratton as New York's Police Commissioner—Same Thing, Different Package

December 16, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Amidst widespread outrage and protest against stop-and-frisk, incoming New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is giving lip service to reforming stop-and-frisk. But his answer to those who are fighting to end stop-and-frisk is to bring in "reformer" William J. Bratton, who has publicly stated that "any police department in America that tries to function without some form of 'stop-and-frisk,' or whatever terminology they use, is doomed to failure."

For Bratton, "It's a basic, fundamental tool of police work in the whole country. If you do away with stop-and-frisk, this city will go down the chute as fast as anything you can imagine." ("New York City's Top Cop Stands by Stop and Frisk Policy", Cynthia Fagen on newsmax.com, December 6, 2013)

Bratton was head of the NYC Transit Police from 1990-1992 under Mayor David Dinkins. He was New York Police Chief under Rudolph "Adolph" Giuliani from 1994-1996. And he was police chief in Los Angeles from 2002-2009.

Under Dinkins, Bratton instituted a "zero tolerance" pro-active policy for the transit police, where the transit police targeted Black and Latino youth for arrest for minor offenses that had never been enforced or which had been enforced with ticketing, not arrests. Bratton left the Transit Police in 1992 to become Police Commissioner in Boston.

He returned in 1994, when mayor Rudy Giuliani appointed him head of the entire NYPD. In that post he instituted aggressive police attacks on Black and Latino communities in the form of arrests for things like school truancy (he brags in his book Turnaround that he rounded up so many youth "we had to set up 'catchment' areas in school auditoriums and gymnasiums"). He initiated the stop-and-frisk program . Under Bratton, the pretenses for arrests grew more and more disconnected from any real criminal activity at all.

The Reality of Stop-and-Frisk

Excerpt from "The Real Problem With Stop-and-Frisk—and the Real Solution," Revolution #269, May 20, 2012:

Bill de Blasio, the "public advocate" of the City of New York City and mayor-elect of New York, says that stop-and-frisk is a "valid tool," but that "its increasing use has been 'corrosive' to community relations with the police.... 'We can't have the social fabric continuing to be torn,' Mr. de Blasio said, adding that the high number of stops, particularly among young Black and Latino residents, has made many New Yorkers uncomfortable and distrustful of the police officers who patrol their neighborhoods. 'It's breaking down something very fundamental here,' Mr. de Blasio added." ("Public Advocate to Call for Audit of Stop-and-Frisk Tactic", New York Times, May 9, 2012.)

Yes, Mr. de Blasio, in one sense you are right—stop-and-frisk is indeed "breaking down something very fundamental." It is breaking down the legitimacy of the state; that is, it is breaking down people's belief that the police and law are neutral and serve everyone, and that when the police use force they have a right to do so. And the more that people resist this, and the more this resistance is part of forcing the truth out about what these laws and cops are REALLY serving, the more this is true. Many defendants at last week's trial [May 4, 2012] linked stop-and-frisk to the whole history of white supremacist oppression in this country; some linked that white supremacy to capitalism itself, and talked about the need to sweep this whole system away. People at the trial saw with their own eyes that the system's justifications for this practice are utterly without any moral claim to right, and that even this system's own prosecutors and judges cannot defend this. And most at the trial became even more fired up and convinced of the need to mobilize people against this. But that's not a problem; matter of fact, the fact that this resistance is "breaking down something very fundamental here" (that is, the legitimacy of this system) is a good thing, and long overdue—and something we need a lot more of!

So, no, the problem, Mr. de Blasio, is NOT that stop-and-frisk is "corrosive to community relations with the police." And no, Mr. de Blasio, stop-and-frisk is NOT a "valid tool." It is a very vicious and illegitimate tool, and a key tool in the whole policy of mass incarceration of Black people and other oppressed people, a policy that is genocidal.

And the solution, Mr. de Blasio, does not lie in electing either you or anyone else to be mayor, promising new wine in the same old bottles. People have done that for generations and it has not changed anything fundamental. The solution lies in sweeping away a system that suckled on the blood of generations of slaves as its "mother's milk," that then fattened on the super-exploitation of African-Americans first as sharecroppers and then as proletarians who were confined by custom and often by law to the lowest and most exploited rungs of the workforce, that today finds itself unable to offer any kind of future to millions and tens of millions of the descendants of those generations and so has developed this new form of oppression: mass incarceration. Just a few weeks ago, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in a report on how Black ex-prisoners are discriminated against both as former prisoners and as African-Americans, noted that it is likely that 1 out of 3 Black men will spend time in prison in the course of their lifetimes (compared to 1 out of 17 white men)! ("Equal Opportunity Panel Updates Hiring Policy," New York Times, April 25, 2012.) What does that tell you about what the future holds if masses of people don't stand up and if, ultimately, there is NOT a revolution?

And that is why right now, very urgently—ultimately as a key part of that solution and today very directly as something that anyone with a sense of decency and a hatred of oppression and injustice should support and take up—there is a huge need: to not get derailed into false solutions but to stand up, to step out, to support and join this struggle against mass incarceration.

Revolution has written extensively about stop-and-frisk and the struggle by the people in New York who demand the end to this police tactic of racially profiling people and stopping them for no other cause than they "look or move like a criminal." What Bratton instituted in New York in the 1990s has, today, brought the horror of a police pogrom against Blacks and Latinos in the city. Li Onesto, writing in Revolution (#299, March 31, 2013), put it this way:

"More than 1.6 million people live in Manhattan, New York. If every single one of these people were detained and harassed, had their pockets gone through and were humiliated.... if all these people had this done to them not only once, but three times... this would be the number of stop-and-frisks carried out by the NYPD since 2004: FIVE MILLION in the last nine years. And it's not just the sheer number that is such an outrage:

In 88 percent of these encounters—4.4 million—the person detained was doing nothing wrong.

Nearly 90 percent of those stopped were Black or Latino.

Only 1.9 percent of those frisked in 2011 had a weapon.

In 2002, there were less than 100,000 stop-and-frisk stops; in 2011 there were 685,724—a 600 percent increase."

Bratton's Real Track Record in LA

When Bratton became chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, he inherited a system of gang injunctions that was started under LAPD Chief Daryl Gates in the latter part of the 1980s. Bratton used these gang injunctions as a way to institute his "zero tolerance" policing in Los Angeles. The gang injunctions became a more palatable way to round up Black and Latino youth and incarcerate them because it was presented as dealing with gangs that were seen as the main problem on the streets of Los Angeles, not only by those who rule the city but also by broad sections of people.

The accompanying hype was to blame the gangs, and not the system that created the gangs—the system that flooded the ghettos of Los Angeles with crack cocaine, failed to provide a decent education, and had no prospects of gainful employment for Black and Latino youth. It is beyond the scope of this article to outline what this meant for thousands of people, but all our readers need to look at the reality of what was happening. Carl Dix from the Revolutionary Communist Party has made the point:

"This horrific racially targeted massive incarceration is a consequence of not having made revolution in the '60s. The revolutionary upheaval of that period rocked the ruling class back on its heels, but it didn't seize power from them. Having ridden those storms out, and conscious of the role the uprisings of Black people played in spearheading that and their potential for sparking future upheaval, the ruling class has moved to viciously suppress that potential before it can manifest itself—counter-insurgency before the insurgency.

"If things are allowed to continue on this trajectory, the reality of millions of the oppressed penned up in the ghettos and barrios without opportunity or hope will intensify. Going in and out of jail will remain a rite of passage for millions of oppressed youth, many of whom already look to their immediate future and can see nothing more than prison or death. This is slow genocide and, given the sharp divisions in the ruling class and the building up and unleashing of outright fascist forces, it could easily become fast genocide." (Revolution #242, August 14, 2011)

In LA, in the name of "community based policing and protecting the community from the gangs," whole communities were targeted by the police in the name of stopping the gangs—with thousands, especially Black and Latino youth, stopped. It was all combined with meetings with church and community leaders to enlist their support and the insistence that the pigs get out of their cars and make a show of treating people with respect.

But what was the reality of Bratton's program?

The gang injunctions and how the LAPD enforced them fit how Bratton viewed them as "some form of 'stop-and-frisk.'" The cops would set up in public places like parks and target people as gang members and then arrest them. They would make broad sweeps into neighborhoods, going to residences that they have labeled as "gang houses" and rounding up people at these residences as well as making sweeps in all the streets while they are going to houses. Gang injunctions gave the police broad authority to label anyone as a gang member without any evidence to that fact. An example was the injunction against the Grape Street Gang that identified 16 people as gang members, but Bratton's police force indiscriminately upped that to 240 names in 2006. ("Policing Gangs in LA: A Critical Look at Gang Injunctions and Community-Policing," by Andy Garofalo, The Subaltern, November 22, 2011.)

The cops used the gang injunctions to harass Black and Latino youth in huge sections of the city where there are now 44 separate gang injunctions. It became a crime for two or more youth to congregate in any outside area. Once someone is swept up under the gang injunction they face a "Contempt of Court" charge, which is punishable by six months in jail and/or a $1,000 fine. This has created militarized zones in these neighborhoods where youth have become afraid to go outside, and it has primed the pipeline to prison and mass incarceration.

Bratton also worked to hire more minority nationalities to the LAPD in the name of reforming the LAPD. But ask yourself: given the whole set-up of laws, courts, and so forth, does changing the skin color of the LAPD really mean anything? Whatever their nationality, the forces of the LAPD are carrying out the enforcement of laws and policies which suppress vast numbers of minority youth and result in the mass incarceration of thousands.

Again, let's look at the reality of what has happened.

William Bratton pushed to the limits a system of gang injunctions in Los Angeles that targeted Black and Latino youth.

As LA police chief, Bratton presided over the police department that rioted on May Day 2007 in MacArthur Park against people protesting for immigrant rights, where 600 cops indiscriminately fired rubber bullets into a large crowd, injuring many. Photo: AP

He presided over the LA police department that rioted on May Day 2007 in MacArthur Park against people protesting for immigrant rights, where 600 cops indiscriminately fired rubber bullets into a large crowd, injuring many. Racial profiling was a standard practice of the LAPD under Bratton.

In a study done on police stops in Los Angeles for the year 2004, it was found that 80 percent of those who were stopped were Black and Latino. In this one-year period of 2004 over 100,000 Black people were stopped in a city with a Black population of slightly over 300,000. ("A Study of Racially Disparate Outcomes in the Los Angeles Police Department" by Ian Ayres and Jonathan Borowsky, prepared for ACLU of Southern California, October 2008.) Further, by 2008, the total number of pedestrian and motor stops in Los Angeles had increased to 875,204, almost to the levels of Stop and Frisk in New York. ("Policing Los Angeles Under a Consent Decree: The Dynamics of Change at the LAPD," by Christopher Stone, Todd Foglesong, and Christine Cole, Harvard Kennedy School, May 2009)

"Reform" = Brutality and Murder

The legacy of Bratton's "reformed" LAPD is that they are nothing more than a bunch of brutalizing and murdering thugs. Between 2007 and 2011, police in LA County killed 159 people. They murdered 23-year-old Kennedy Garcia as he lay prone on the ground on his stomach with his hands cuffed behind his back. Dontaze Storey was killed after he had five bullets pumped into him by LAPD and when the cops attempted to put Dontaze in a body bag, paramedics noticed he was still alive!

LAPD murdered 37-year-old Manuel Jamines in cold blood by shooting him in the head twice only 40 seconds after they confronted him. The cops handcuffed his lifeless corpse and threw a white sheet over it. An LAPD SWAT team murdered 19-month-old Suzie Marie Pena and her 34-year-old father, Jose Raul Pena, who was holding Suzie during a two-and-a-half-hour standoff with police. 27-year-old Steven Washington, a Black man with autism, was just walking down the street when police driving near him heard a noise and responded by shooting and killing Steven.

During the Christopher Dorner manhunt, the LAPD opened fire on a pick up truck (that did not match the description of the pickup that Dorner was driving) wounding two Latinas—a 47-year-old woman and her 71-year-old mother. (Dorner, an ex-LA cop, was a murder suspect. See "The Dorner Controversy Continues," Revolution #296, February 24, 2013.)

And in a vicious and brutal show of force against Occupy LA, the Los Angeles police shot rubber bullets, beat, and arrested people as the Occupiers and others were writing and drawing with chalk at the monthly Downtown LA Art Walk.

The Role of Police

As NY Police Commissioner Bratton will continue the tradition of "Stop-and-Frisk" or "whatever terminology" he and de Blasio want to use. Again, let's be clear about the role of the police. As Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, has stated:

"The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness." (BAsics 1:24)

Send us your comments.

If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.