Revolution #154, February 1, 2009
NYPD Stop-and-Frisk Brutality
A recent article in the New York Times, prompted by the release of the New York Police Department figures for “stop-and-frisk” searches in 2008, has produced shocking evidence of brutal and pervasive oppression of Black and Latino people, and of the growing development of a “1984-style” fascist police state.
Brutal National Oppression
According to a January 4 article in the New York Times, the NY Police Department stopped and frisked over 500,000 people in 2008, 80% of them “young Black and Latino men.”
STOP. Read that sentence again. Think about what is going on.
Blacks and Latinos are 53% of the population of NYC; while “young men” is not clearly defined in the article, this category is obviously quite a bit less than half of that 53%, perhaps somewhere around 15% of the population of New York City.
The Times interviewed 23 young Black men at York College in Jamaica, Queens. 22 of the 23 had been stopped by the police; many said they had been stopped a half-dozen times or more.
The Times pointed out that many of the searches are carried out as part of “a spike in marijuana arrests in black neighborhoods” and notes that “ there has been no corresponding crackdown in white neighborhoods where, studies suggest, marijuana use is at least as heavy.” State Senator Bill Perkins who represents Harlem points out that “his precinct in Harlem has roughly the same crime rate as an Upper West Side precinct; yet the police frisk vastly more youths in his neighborhood.” (The Upper West Side borders Harlem.)
A Black youth in Queens. who said he used to think of the cops as “the good guys,” describes an incident where “he stepped out of Bryant High School and clasped hands with a Latino friend and a white buddy. A few moments later police officers put him against a wall and patted him down for drugs” saying “yours looked like a drug dealer’s handshake.”
All this gives a clear window on the fact that the huge disparity in arrests of minority youth is not about stopping crime, drugs, etc., but is part of a whole program of creating an atmosphere of terror among oppressed youth.
These figures are a massive increase even from the intolerable levels of 10 years ago, when a police shake-down squad carried out the cold-blooded murder of Amadou Diallo, firing 39 shots at him when he pulled out his wallet. This murder shone a bright light on fact that the NYPD had conducted 80,000 random searches of Black and Latino people. In 2002, when it was reported that there were 98,000 stop-and-frisks, it was considered scandalous. Now, six years later there are five times as many.
Only 4% of these encounters led to an arrest—down from 10% in 2002. That means that in at least 96%—480,000—encounters police admit that the victims had no illegal substances or weapons on them. And probably quite a few of the 4% arrested didn’t either; as the Times points out, “[F]ederal judges have suppressed guns as evidence in more than 20 cases after finding New York police officers’ testimony to be unreliable, inconsistent or false.”
The Times grossly trivializes what this means, favorably quoting one police “critic” who says these searches are “inefficient,” and Police Commissioner Kelly saying that he “understands” that people searched on the street “feel a loss of time, a loss of dignity…but we are saving lives.”
These searches are not an “inconvenience.” The college students who were searched reported guns being drawn on them, being forced to kiss the pavement. The Times said that many “spoke of the churn in their stomach as a cop approaches; some spoke of swallowing rage as officers patted them down.”
And the fear behind that “churn” and “rage” is very real. The Times article notes a few of the more notorious instances where “stop-and-search” has turned into beat, torture, rape or kill. York College itself is not far from where the NYPD fired 50 bullets at Sean Bell on his wedding day. In December 2008, three NYPD cops were indicted for sodomizing a man on a crowded subway platform in broad daylight. In 2004, Timothy Stansbury Jr., an unarmed 19-year-old was shot by cops for no reason at all on the roof of his apartment building. None of the cops involved in any of these cases has spent a day in jail. Lesser levels of police brutality are widespread and also unpunished—the Times reports that “the Police Department declined to pursue 42 percent of the cases in which the independent Civilian Complaint Review Board issued a finding of police misconduct.”
Every youth who is paying attention at all knows that when the armed thugs of the NYPD stop them and order them to “assume the position” that a wrong move on their part, or just nothing at all, can lead to a brutal beating or death, and nothing will happen to the cops who do it.
A Fascist-like Police State
The article also reveals a lot about the massive apparatus of political repression being built up.
- The NYPD has established an “intelligence division” staffed by former CIA officials and analysts who speak Urdu, Pashto, Farsi and Hindi, and equipped with the latest in computers and data-mining software.
- The NYPD has 1,000 surveillance cameras spread across Lower Manhattan.
- The NYPD does “not hesitate to apply a police clamp.” “During the 2004 Republican National Convention…officers arrested more than 1,800 people [i.e., demonstrators], often in highly disputed circumstances. The police held many for two days before arraignment.” [Note, police are legally required to arraign people within 24 hours; this was massively violated in order to keep as many protestors as possible in jail and off the streets during the protests.]
The Times article paints a truly chilling picture of a growing police state is being built on a foundation of pervasive and brutal violence aimed especially against Black and Latino people. This is a situation that has to be exposed far and wide. And people must not only spread the truth, but act on it, by opposing and condemning the crimes of the police and standing up for the rights of the people.
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