The People's Record

93% of detained youth are black: New Orleans police chief says curfew enforcement isn’t racially biased
March 29, 2013

New Orleans Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas says his city’s curfew policies are put in place because children “are less likely to get hurt or hurt someone else” if they are at home during the nighttime. But youth advocates are arguing curfew enforcement disproportionately targets poor, African-American youth.

Serpas denies his officers engage in profiling youths when they enforce curfew laws but data analyzed by The Times-Picayune found that in 2011, 93 percent of youths detained at the city’s curfew center were black. (New Orleans is 33 percent white & 60 percent black.)

A 2000 study of New Orleans’ curfew law concluded that it did not deter crime. The Times-Picayune summarizes the report:

[The study called] “Do Juvenile Curfew Laws Work? A Time-Series Analysis of the New Orleans Law” found that the city’s ordinance was ineffective because it didn’t cover older adolescents and young adults, who often perpetrate crime; and it excluded what are called the “afterschool hours,” when minors are most likely to commit offenses.

Source

In other news about cops targeting black youth, Floyd v. City of New York began this week, a landmark class action suit over NYPD’s Stop & Frisk tactic run on a racially-based arrest quota system. 

5 million people have been stopped by NYPD’s Stop & Frisk. 4.3 million were black or Latino. 

A year after Ramarley Graham’s murder, a movement against police brutality grows
February 6, 2013

On February 1, 2012, 18-year-old Ramarley Graham was gunned down in his own home by New York City police in front of his grandmother and 6-year-old brother. The unarmed black teenager was killed with a bullet to the chest by officer Richard Haste after police broke into his family’s apartment claiming Graham had a gun.

On Friday, the one year anniversary of Graham’s murder, his family filed a suit against Haste, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and other officers for use of the discriminatory stop-and-frisk tactic and for allegedly covering up evidence from the day their son was murdered.

Unlike many other cases surrounding police violence, Haste faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison on first and second degree murder charges; he is the first NYPD officer to face criminal charges for a fatal shooting since 2007 when three officers were indicted for the murder of Sean Bell, another black victim who was shot 50 times.

Police violence hits communities of color

Graham’s murder is a familiar nightmare to many communities across the United States terrorized by police violence. From Harlem to Oakland, youth are subjected to legalized racial profiling, known as stop-and-frisk, which disproportionately targets 87 percent black and Latino people. Harassment and violence from area police forces have been a reality for communities of color for decades.

But families rarely see justice for their slain loved ones; officers typically receive what amounts to a slap on the wrist with paid leave. One such instance was the murder of black Oakland teenager Alan Blueford, who was shot three times by Oakland police and left dead in the street for four hours in May 2012, weeks before Blueford was set to graduate from high school.

Another was the shooting of Anaheim resident Manuel Diaz in July 2012. During a chase, police shot Diaz once in the leg and another time in the back of his head. Two days later, Anaheim police shot and killed Joel Acevedo during a car chase. Community members were outraged at the killings and demanded justice. According to Orange County DA records, there were 40 shootings by Anaheim police from 2003 to February 2011. Not one officer has been charged.

In New York City, incidents like these without reprimand occur all too often. Last June, NYPD narcotics detective Phillip Atkins shot 23-year-old Shantel Davis in the chest as the unarmed woman held her arms up crying out, “Don’t shoot me.” In September, NYPD officers opened fire and killed 20-year-old Reynaldo Cuevas as his Bronx bodega was being robbed. A month later, Noel Polanco was shot point blank after he was pulled over in his neighborhood in Queens.

The NYPD has led the way in police violence, paying a staggering $550 million to settle 8,882 lawsuits in 2011 alone. At the beginning of this year, a Manhattan Federal Court judge ruled that the tactic of stop-and-frisk was unconstitutional outside private residential buildings. However, shortly after, another judge lifted the ban on stops and searches of “suspicious looking people,” allowing stop-and-frisk to continue until the case goes to trial in March.

Families organize for justice

Families afflicted by police violence have responded by brewing up a social justice movement to put an end to unwarranted searches, frisks and shootings. Communities are organizing, storming courtrooms and police precincts to demand accountability and justice for the brutal acts. Organizations like All Things Harlem, Stop Police Brutality and NYCresistance are developing tactics to counter and prevent these attacks in their neighborhoods.

Activist Joseph “Jazz” Hayden of All Things Harlem has created a network of resistance by documenting police interactions and has been a strong voice against NYPD racial profiling and violence. Although he has directly been targeted by police for filming arrests and harassment in his neighborhood, Hayden continues to share incriminating videos of officers in an attempt to hold police responsible for civil liberties violations.

“Police violence in our black and brown communities isn’t anything new. They have tried to incriminate our youth, but we aren’t backing down,” Hayden said. “We have to continue to fight for our futures.”

Baltimore civil rights activist Reverend Annie Chambers has been a leading anti-police brutality advocate, organizing community members and families ever since her great grandson was murdered near her home in a case of mistaken identity.

“You look outside my window and see police cars at any time of the day,” Chambers said. “I have seen them with their brutality over and over again. Young people are now at the part where they won’t take it anymore.”

And now, family members of the slain are increasingly taking the justice system into their own hands. Ramarley Graham’s parents continue, one year on, to lead marches to police precincts reminiscent of the Civil Rights era, not only in remembrance of their son but for all those who have died at the hands of uniformed officers.

Alan Blueford’s parents have created Justice 4 Alan Blueford and hold weekly meetings to end racial profiling and police violence in the Bay Area.

Their case, and similar ones, are now pushing law enforcement officers into the national discussion about gun control and violence, spurring a new form of resistance by communities and neighborhoods long terrorized by unaccountable police brutality.

- Graciela
for Occupy.com

NYPD to restart ‘stop and frisk’
January 25, 2013

A Manhattan judge said she will allow the NYPD’s “stop-and-frisk” program to go on in the Bronx until she comes up with a solution to prevent police officers from violating the rights of their subjects.

Manhattan federal Judge Shira Sheindlin on Tuesday lifted an order to stop the program after agreeing with city lawyers who argued that ending the stop-and-frisk program would be a burden on the New York Police Department. The lawyers said that if the program were brought to an end in the Bronx, thousands of NYPD officers and their supervisors would have to be retrained to figure out how to halt trespassers outside the borough’s “Clean Halls” buildings without acting unconstitutionally.

The case will go to trial on March 18, but until then, the NYPD will be able to continue using the stop-and-frisk program in the Bronx to prevent suspicious-looking people from trespassing onto the grounds of public housing.

The judge said that if she were to stop the program immediately, then “a certain number of unconstitutional stops are likely to take place that would not have taken place in the absence of a stay,” which could lead to further lawsuits against the NYPD.

“On the other hand, allowing a longstanding unconstitutional practice to persist for a few months while the parties present arguments regarding the appropriate scope of a remedy is quite distinct from allowing such a practice to persist until the competition of a trial,” she said.

The judge initially ordered a halt to the trespass stops outside the Bronx “Clean Halls” on Jan. 8, but will once again allow them until she decides on the measures required to prevent unconstitutional human rights violations ahead of the upcoming trial.

The stop-and-frisk program allows officers of the NYPD to stop and search any person they suspect of criminal activity. Most of the people who were stopped and frisked under the program have been African-American or Hispanic, prompting concerns over racial profiling.

The stop-and-frisk program came under intense scrutiny in mid-2012, when thousands of people marched in opposition to the policy on June 17. Protesters also released a number of videos of police stopping minorities for their activism. Even some NYPD officers have expressed opposition to the program, which they believe encourages their fellow officers to exercise too much power and create heated tensions between them and their subjects.

In 2011, 684,330 people were stopped and questioned by the NYPD, which is a 600 percent increase from the year 2002. Of those stopped in 2011, 87 percent were African American or Latino.

The NYPD has argued that their program reduces crime, but only 12 percent of those stopped in 2011 were found violating the law and received  summons.

Allowing the stop-and-frisk program to continue in the Bronx will subject more New Yorkers to police stops and interrogations, nearly 90 percent of which involve innocent people and 87 percent of which involve African-Americans or Latinos.

Source

(Source: thepeoplesrecord.com)

WANT TO STOP BEING STOP-AND-FRISKED? STOP BEING BLACK
January 22, 2013 

For the past five months, an anonymous group called “Racism Still Exists” has been posting powerful billboards in bus shelters around Bed-Stuy, with the stated aim of “[illuminating] some of the ways in which racism operates in this country.” Their latest, spotted by photographer Stephanie Keith, is a poster that takes refreshingly direct aim at the NYPD for its racially-biased stop-and-frisk policy.

The tagline, “Don’t want to get stopped by the NYPD? Stop being black,” is both as striking and as true as it could possibly be, and is underscored by a series of statistics: in 2010, 52 percent of the 601,285 stops were of black people (according to the 2000 census, black people make up 26 percent of the city’s population), 98 percent of stops against black people did not yield any contraband, and of the 32,375 black people stopped for having a “suspicious bulge,” only one was found to have a pistol.

In the past, Racism Still Exists (RISE) has used billboards to document the racial disparities surrounding education, the fast food and tobacco industries, home ownership and wealth, and the film industry. Each poster is backed by a smart, thoroughly sourced argument on RISE’s Tumblr.

ColorLines did some looking into the ads, and though they weren’t able to find out who’s behind RISE, they did get some commentary from local activists, many of whom support the project. “Bed-Stuy, and Brooklyn in general, is going through a very profound transformation and we gotta put that in context,” said Kali Akuno of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. “For many of the young yuppies and buppies, they see the police playing a positive role and trying to engage in a race neutral dialouge.

“What the billboard is doing is kinda opening up and exploding this myth that [stop-and-frisk] is taking place in a race neutral light — it’s making people confront it in a very real way.”

Source

Also, please note the upcoming ‘STOP THE COPS’ unity march from Bronx to Harlem event. Please think about attending. It’s going to be huge. 

NYPD Deputy Inspector handcuffs photojournalist & deletes video footage of Stop-and-Frisk detainment
January 18, 2013 

A New York City police officer handcuffed a photojournalist before deleting his footage Wednesday, forcing the photographer to view the NYPD in a new light.

“I’ve always been very pro-cop, never been anti-cop,” Shimon Gifter said in a telephone interview with Photography is Not a Crime Thursday night.

“But if they can do this to a guy who is known to the community and to the cops as being very pro-cop, I would love to see what they would do a guy who is anti-NYPD.”

Gifter, who is based in Brooklyn and shoots for Jewish websites, said he was going about his day when he heard officers calling for back up to an area not far from him.

He quickly arrived on the scene expecting to find chaos, but everything was under control with several cops standing on the corner conversing and one suspect handcuffed in a police van.

So he started talking to people in the neighborhood, trying to figure out what had happened, discovering there was some type of altercation but several suspects had run off.

Meanwhile, four young men came upon the scene and were detained by police, although he didn’t believe they were involved in what had taken place.

But he started shooting video of police talking to them just in case. He was standing about 100 feet away.

“A cop walked up to me and told me not to film them because they are juveniles and I said OK,” he said.

“I usually don’t put stuff out there of juveniles unless they shot or stabbed somebody.”

So Gifter continued recording other parts of the scene, including the man in the police van as well as a police car driving the wrong way down the street.

Then out of nowhere, a sergeant from the 70th Precinct grabbed him from behind, snatched his camera and handcuffed him, forcing him to face a wall while he began scrolling through the camera, deleting all the clips he had recorded.

“He said, ‘you’re under arrest, didn’t the officers tell you to stop filming?’

“I said, yeah, but so what, it’s not illegal and I wasn’t filming the juveniles anyway.’”

Gifter kept trying to look back at what they were doing but the cop kept ordering him to turn away.

However, several witnesses were observing the situation, including when the cop dropped the camera, appearing to have done it on purpose.

After about ten minutes, they removed the handcuffs, returned his camera and sent him on his way.

It wasn’t until later that he realized they probably didn’t want him video recording them making a stop-and-frisk stop, a controversial policy in which a New York judge recently ruled a portion of it unconstitutional.

“I didn’t even know about the ruling, I knew there was some debate.”

He said the stop didn’t appear to be very interesting at the time. It was just some cops jotting down information from the youths.

Gifter, 38, has contacted the precinct’s internal affairs division and was assured the incident would be investigated, but he is not buying it.

“I think they’re lying. I don’t think they’re investigating at all,” he said.

“They didn’t ask for any of the names of the witnesses or anything.”

He said he has at least four witnesses but there were at least 75 people in the area when it took place.

He has somebody who is trying to recover the video. I hope they’re using PhotoRec.

Source

NYPD’s controversial ‘Stop & Frisk’ policy ruled unconstitutional
January 8, 2013

A key part of the NYPD’s controversial “stop and frisk” tactic has been ruled unconstitutional.

Manhattan Federal Court Judge Shira Scheindlin ordered police to refrain from making trespass stops outside private residential buildings — even though the landlord has given officers permission to do so as part of the NYPD’s “Clean Halls” program.

“While it may be difficult to say when precisely to draw the line between constitutional and unconstitutional police encounters such a line exists, and the NYPD has systematically crossed it when making trespass stops outside buildings,” Scheindlin wrote in a 157-page ruling.

The New York Civil Liberties Union argued in an eight-day hearing in October that “Clean Halls,” which exists only in the Bronx, leads to people being hassled by cops and sometimes cuffed near their own abode for no legitimate reason.

The NYCLU’s legal challenge centers on the case of Jaenean Ligon.

In August 2011 the mother of three sent her 17-year-old son to buy ketchup for the family’s dinner.

Two plaintclothes cops stopped the teen outside the family’s building on E. 163rd St. in the Bronx. Two uniformed officers also arrived on the scene.

After frisking the youngster, one of the cops buzzed Ligon’s apartment and asked she come downstairs to identify her son. Ligon testified the request sent her into a panic because she feared the worst — that her son had been seriously hurt or killed.

NYCLU lawyers argued that Ligon’s experience was all too common in high-crime neighborhoods in the Bronx where the “Clean Halls” program is in place.

At least one Bronx prosecutor, Jeannette Rucker, expressed skepticism about the legality of the practice, as well.

Rucker notified the NYPD in July of last year that her office would no longer rubber-stamp trespassing arrests made outside Clean Halls buildings and public housing projects unless the arresting officer was interviewed.

In addition to immediately halting such trespass stops in the Bronx, Scheindlin ordered a Jan. 31 hearing to determine what other relief should be granted.

“For those of us who do not fear being stopped as we approach or leave our own homes or those of our friend and family, it is difficult to believe that residents of one of our boroughs live under such a threat,” she wrote.

Two other stop and frisk cases are pending.

Source

NYPD lawsuits rise dramatically, cost NYC $550.4 million in last FY
December 30, 2012

In the 2011 fiscal year alone, New York City paid out a staggering $550.4 million— or about $70 per New York resident— to settle a litany of lawsuits ranging from personal injury claims to medical malpractice.

A large chunk of that over half a billion dollar figure— a five percent increase over the year before— stems from lawsuits brought against the New York Police Department. Lawsuits against the NYPD cost city taxpayers $185 million, more than any other city agency.

Using a report conducted by City Comptroller John Liu, The Daily News reports there were 8,882 lawsuits against the NYPD, a dramatic 35 percent increase over the previous fiscal year.

Between July 1, 2011, and June 30, 2012, the NYPD reportedly paid $22 million to settle civil rights cases made against officers.

Such settlements included $1.2 million paid out to two Colombian brothers who spent a combined 17 years in prison for armed robbery charges that were eventually thrown out.

In 2011, it was revealed the city shelled out nearly $6 billion to settle all sorts of claims from 2000-2010.

Source
Photo: An NYPD officer sucker punches Felix Rivera-Pitre, a Queens resident, during an OWS protest.

New York City residents are paying for a police force to brutalize their communities, racially profile through Stop & Frisk & jail their neighbors. These figures are outrageous, yet unsurprising. 

NYPD brutality during arrest in Crown Heights, Brooklyn on December 19:

This is a video taken from an apartment window that shows the tail end of some serious police brutality. At 00:17, an officer beats the person being arrested on the back of the head while the person is on their stomach on the floor. Eleven officers were on the scene.

The beating takes place in an alleyway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, between Union St. and President St, near Albany Ave. The incident occurred at about 1 p.m. on December 19.

If you have any information about this video, contact info@allthingsharlem. 

(Source: allthingsharlem.com)

The People’s Record Daily News Update - Whose news? Our news!

November 15, 2012 

Here are some stories you may not otherwise read about today:

• Cracks have been found in a nuclear reactor head located in South Carolina. The cracks indicate an increased chance for atomic disaster. The atomic energy plant has said that it has begun fixing the cracks this week.

• The hacktivist group Anonymous has expressed anger at Israel, saying that Israel has crossed a line in the sand by threatening to destroy access to the internet and other telecommunications in Gaza. Anonymous’ online statement warned the Israeli government: “Like all the other evil governments that have faced our rage, you will not survive it unscathed.”

• Several hundred women and men took to the streets in Ireland yesterday to demand legislative reform after Savita Halappanavar died from a pregnancy miscarriage. Halappanavar tried to get an abortion but was stopped by her doctors who “rejected” her request for the abortion. 

• The trial of three Stop-and-Frisk activists has ended sourly with a guilty conviction of Disorderly Conduct for  defendants Carl Dix, Jamel Mims, Morgan Rhodewalt and Bob Parsons. On a positive note, they were not found guilty on the more serious Obstruction of Government Administration charges. 

• For the first time in three years, the 17-country eurozone has fallen back into recession - a grim and potentially devastating sign, spreading fear that the recession will deepen and make the debt crises more difficult to handle. 

Follow us on Tumblr or by RSS feed for more daily updates. You can also like our Facebook page for related content. 

Why are NYPD murders on the rise?
November 2, 2012

It was 5 a.m. on October 4, and 22-year old Noel Polanco was driving himself, a co-worker and a friend home from his job at a nightclub in Queens when he was pulled over on a highway median by an unmarked vehicle.

It turned out that Noel had cut off a police car belonging to the Emergency Services Unit, a division of the New York Police Department tasked with responding in “high-crime areas.” Officers approached the car with rifles out, shouting at the driver to put his hands up. Within seconds, Officer Hassan Hamdy had fired one round through the open passenger window at the driver, killing Polanco, a U.S. Army Reservist.

“There was no time to put your hands up at all,” front-seat passenger Diane DeFerrari told the New York Post. “They shot in front of my face. Had I moved an inch, it would probably have been me.”

As DeFerrari told the New York Times, “This is all a case of road rage on behalf of the NYPD—that’s all this is.”

New York City has already paid out close to half a million dollars in claims against Hamdy for civil rights violations. The Polanco killing was so clearly unjustifiable that even NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly—breaking from past practice—called for a grand jury investigation.

This incident is only the latest in a string of murders committed by the New York Police Department this year. According to the Stolen Lives Project, 2012 saw 19 police killings, compared to 13 the year before. At this rate, the NYPD is on track for an increase of almost 70 percent in its murder rate, compared to last year.

In September, an NYPD officer shot and killed Reynaldo Cuevas, a 20-year old bodega worker, as he was fleeing his Bronx store which was being robbed. In the same 24 hour period, the police killed Walwyn Jackson in his Queens home. And in late September, Emergency Service Unit cops killed Harlem resident Mohammed Bah in his apartment doorway.

Jackson and Bah were among several cases in which the victims of the NYPD were mentally ill or troubled individuals—whose family members had called for help, but ended up on the receiving end of police violence instead. In March of this year, Shereese Francis, a diagnosed schizophrenic, was killed when four police officers attempted to subdue her by piling on top of her and literally suffocating her to death.

In the wake of the Polanco and Bah killings, NYPD officials transferred the head of the elite Emergency Service Unit. But this is clearly a long way from real justice given the scale of the killings. At least 221 people have been killed by the NYPD since the well-known 1999 case of Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo, gunned down in a hail of 41 bullets in the entranceway to his apartment building as he reached for his wallet.

“Why should a mother have to bear such pain and bury her loved one?” asked Juanita Young, whose son, Malcolm Ferguson, was killed by Bronx police in 2000. “We call for help and our sons end up dead. Who are we supposed to call if police come and our loved ones are carried out in a body bag?”

The tragic reality is that family members have yet to see any kind of apology from the police, let alone any serious steps to address the crisis of police homicides. Instead, the police take pains to justify their actions while the death toll climbs. “Instead of progression, this is regression,” said Amadou Diallo’s mother, Katiadou Diallo, at a protest of about 300 people outside City Hall in the wake of the murder of Mohammed Bah, also originally from Guinea.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

WHAT’S BEHIND this recent jump in NYPD murders? Policing in communities of color is intensifying increased racial and class polarization. Repression is a constant feature of an unequal society, and with poverty, cuts to social programs and joblessness continuing to take a toll, racist police violence as a means of social control has accompanied this immiseration.

Despite a continued decline in crime, police are encouraged to view themselves as patrolling a literal war zone. New York City has the lowest crime rate among the nation’s biggest cities, as measured by the FBI. According to one report, there were 515 killings citywide last year, compared with 2,245 in 1990, and murders are down by 18 percent.

Yet hostile attitudes on the part of the police are ramping up. “Every single day, our lives are in danger. Everybody out here is in danger,” a Brooklyn cop told a reporter for Reuters. Meanwhile, a hysterical New York Daily News editorial in July, headlined “Stop and Frisk—or Die,” fueled the climate for heavy-handed policing in the wake of an officer injured by gunfire in a public housing stairwell. “Now, let’s play a mental exercise designed to illustrate how insanely close the city has come to judicially mandated lawlessness…[i]t is clear that police are targeting the right places for their most intense enforcement efforts.”

But the day-to-day experience for people of color in New York City is of relentless police abuse and harassment, and that has been intensified by a push to meet quotas on stop-and-frisks—the NYPD’s racial profiling policy—and for a higher numbers of arrests.According to the New York Times, “The data show the initiative is conducted aggressively, sometimes in what can seem like a frenzy…feeding the department’s appetite for numbers.”

Jamel Mims on facing two years in prison for protesting Stop & Frisk
October 23, 2012

New York City teacher Jamel Mims faces up to two years in prison for nonviolently protesting the most controversial racial profiling policy in America today. Last year, he was one of the key members of a civil disobedience campaign to stop Stop-and-Frisk that boasted the iconic academic Cornel West as one of its leading advocates. Today, he stands on trial along with 12 other campaigners.

As discussed in last week’s State of the Left, the NYPD policy involves 1,800 instances of stopping and frisking citizens every day; in the last decade, 87% of people who are stopped are black or Latino; and about 9 of 10 are innocent of any wrongdoing. There is not even a hint of exaggeration in saying that certain sections of New York City are turned into police states for minority youth.

Enter Jamel Mims:

On Tuesday October 23, I will be on trial along with Carl Dix, who, with Cornel West, initiated the 2011 campaign of nonviolent protest to stop Stop-and-Frisk. We are facing up to two years in jail for non-violent protest at the NYPD 103rd precinct in Jamaica, Queens last year.

The stakes are undoubtedly high: this is the second stop-and-frisk protest mass trial resulting from the culminating action of the civil disobedience campaign that sparked citywide resistance to the policy.  The Queens District Attorney added a serious misdemeanor charge on us last month, and re-wrote our charges last week so that we’re charged with ‘acting in concert’ rather than as individuals.

The action last November  was the third such protest at New York City precincts with the most stop-and-frisks, this one taking place in the borough of Queens. We held a community rally and march through Jamaica, Queens, which ended at the 103rd Precinct.  As our march arrived at the precinct, it was completely barricaded on all sides – on lock-down in anticipation of the protest.  An officer slides open one of the metal grates and motions us inward so that we may protest at the precinct doors.  After minutes of chanting and singing outside of the precinct steps, 20 of us were arrested, quite quickly, but held for hours late into the next day.  For less than ten minutes of protesting stop-and-frisk outside of the doors 103rd precinct, which houses the NYPD officers who put fifty shots into Sean Bell, 12 co-defendants and I now find ourselves facing two years of jail time.

If anyone think this is just an empty threat, and they won’t convict or send us to jail, let me reiterate—the DA has twice bumped up the charges in the last month, and has made it very clear that the prosecutorial apparatus intends to place us behind bars. A year ago, those who had no first-hand experience of the humiliation of being illegally searched barely knew the practice occurred.  Those who got stopped and frisked thought there was nothing one could do about it. Now, the stop-and-frisk policy and the horrors it inflicts are going viral in mainstream society. Copwatch and videos of NYPD stops garner thousands of views, and nearly every day there are articles or opinion pieces about stop-and-frisk.  Potential mayoral candidates have even had to confront this, as politicians line up to claim their opposition to the policy, or express their desire to reform or modify it in the ongoing pursuit of public opinion.

In this watershed moment, when stop-and-frisk is opening a window into the daily plight of thousands, the very people who put their bodies on the line to put this issue into the spotlight and openly call out for its abolition are vigorously prosecuted and threatened with incarceration.  I refuse to accept this.  It’s unthinkable that the Queens District Attorney, who couldn’t make a case against the cops who murdered Sean Bell, is now throwing the book at nonviolent civil disobedience protesters.  In this light, the intended effect of this prosecution is insidiously transparent: to send a chilling effect through the movement against mass incarceration, and dampen the spirit of resistance it has ignited.  To put it quite simply: don’t speak up, and certainly don’t fight back.

Well, I’m speaking up.  And not just as someone who is passionate about the issue.  I speak as a target of police abuse, as a Fulbright Scholar whose scholarship was almost denied after being assaulted by Boston police while trying to leave a party. I speak to you as an artist and teacher whose work in New York City public schools has me witness the humiliation and degradation of the youth by the NYPD on a daily basis.  I speak to you as a committed opponent of the New Jim Crow, a system of mass incarceration that has 2.4 million mostly black and Latino men warehoused in prisons across the nation, with stop-and-frisk as a major pipeline into that system.

Most of all, I speak to you as someone who has cast their lot with those at the bottom of society: with those thousands of youth who are brutalized, targeted, harassed, and shuffled off behind bars — and is now facing years in prison for standing with them.

We fully intend to stop this railroading by bringing the political battle into the courtroom and putting Stop and Frisk on trial.  If we are allowed to be convicted and jailed without a massive fight, then the battle against stop-and-frisk and the spirit of resistance it has engendered will be seriously dampened. On the other hand, if people stand with us in this legal battle–if we meet and defeat their attempts to silence and punish us–then the movement will gain further initiative and pull many more people into the struggle against mass incarceration.

Source
Photo 1, 2

The United States police state imprisons all dissidents, from police brutality activists to government whistleblowers. 

Judge rules that millions can sue NYPD over stop-and-frisk
October 23, 2012

A federal judge in New York has given the go ahead for a class action lawsuit to move forward against the city’s police department over allegations that its stop-and-frisk program has continuously allowed officers to discriminate against minorities.

In a ruling made Wednesday by US District Judge Shira Scheindlin, the pending suit against the NYPD, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and others was granted class action status.

Authorities seem nonplussed.

When asked for his take on Judge Scheindlin’s decision, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly told the New York Times that he had no comment because the litigation was continuing, but offered one quip: “It is what it is.”

Mayor Bloomberg also said he couldn’t comment specifically on the ruling, but, according to the Associated Press, had some words nonetheless.

“Nobody should ask Ray Kelly to apologize – he’s not going to and neither am I – for saving 5,600 lives. And I think it’s fair to say that stop, question and frisk has been an essential part of the NYPD’s work; it’s taken more than 6,000 guns off the streets in the last eight years, and this year we are on pace to have the lowest number of murders in recorded history. … We’re not going to do anything that undermines that trend and threatens public safety,” said the mayor.

For others, however, it doesn’t seem as clear cut; in her ruling, Judge Scheindlin decries, “First, suspicionless stops should never occur.”

The current case began to take hold all the way back in 2008 when attorneys representing four plaintiffs first began seeking class action status. The four original named plaintiffs say that they were wrongfully stopped and frisked based on their race. In only 2011, the NYPD stopped 685,724 New Yorkers, reports the American Civil Liberties Union. In all, 89 percent of those stopped were either black or Latino. Of the nearly 700,000 cases in that year alone, 88 percent of the people stopped were found innocent. Such statistics are largely typical for previous years, although one thing that has changed as time has gone on is the number of pedestrians stopped by law enforcement.

“[T]he policing policies that the city has implemented over the past decade and half have led to a dramatic increase in the number of pedestrian stops, to the point of now reaching almost 600,000 a year,” Judge Scheindlin wrote of the case earlier this year.

Now anyone that feels they have been victimized similarly by the New York Police Department by means of an invasive and unwarranted search since 2005 can add their name to the case.

By way of the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk policies, police officers in the Big Apple are allowed to conduct searches of suspicious persons if they have reason to believe that they are committing a crime. Statistics documenting the history of the program reveal, however, that skin color seems to play a pivotal role when the police are left to decide who is frisked and who isn’t.

Judge Scheindlin says it is unlikely that many people will sign on to the case, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t many who would be excluded from doing so. The NYPD has already stopped and frisked more than 200,000 people on the streets of New York in the first three months of 2012 alone; between 2004 and 2009, around 2.8 million similar stops were carried out.

“This case presents an issue of great public concern: the disproportionate number of Blacks and Latinos, as compared to Whites, who become entangled in the criminal justice system,” the judge writes in her ruling. “The specific claims raised in this case are narrower but they are raised in the context of the extensively documented racial disparities in the rates of stops, arrests, convictions, and sentences that continue through the present day.”

Elsewhere in her ruling, Judge Scheindlin says that the NYPD’s arguments in favor of the program appear “cavalier”and display “a deeply troubling apathy towards New Yorkers’ most fundamental constitutional rights.”

In a statement offered to the AP, the law office for the city of New York says, “We respectfully disagree with the decision and are reviewing our legal options.”

Source

In the words of NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly, “It is what it is” - Legalized racial profiling.

Stopped-and-Frisked: ‘For Being a F**king Mutt’

On June 3, 2011, three plainclothes New York City Police officers stopped a Harlem teenager named Alvin and two of the officers questioned and frisked him while the third remained in their unmarked car. Alvin secretly captured the interaction on his cell phone, and the resulting audio is one of the only known recordings of stop-and-frisk in action.

In the course of the two-minute recording, the officers give no legally valid reason for the stop, use racially charged language and threaten Alvin with violence. Early in the stop, one of the officers asks, “You want me to smack you?” When Alvin asks why he is being threatened with arrest, the other officer responds, “For being a fucking mutt.” Later in the stop, while holding Alvin’s arm behind his back, the first officer says, “Dude, I’m gonna break your fuckin’ arm, then I’m gonna punch you in the fuckin’ face.”  

Source

Just a few of the awesome graphs put together by PrisonPolicy.org.

Direct Action events: The People’s Record goes to NYC

As a part of our larger project of documenting the North American activist community, we will cover various events in the New York City area in the next few weeks. We will be in the city from Sept. 13 to 23 then again on Oct. 6. 

We need all the bodies we can have in the streets to really send out a clear message that Wall Street corruption, racist NYPD policies, mass incarceration, Zionist occupation & destructive fracking practices are no longer acceptable & that we the people will fight back. 

If you have any suggestions for events, people to speak to, places to go, etc. just message us. FB events & more event details are linked. We hope to see some of our readers out at these events!

• Blow the Whistle on Stop & Frisk: September 13, 4 p.m. at 1 Police Plaza
• The Fight Against Mass Incarceration with Angela Davis, Cornel West, Michelle Alexander, Jazz Hayden & others: September 14, 7 p.m. at  91 Claremont Ave. Tickets required
• #S15 Anticapitalist March: September 15, 5 p.m. at 59th Street and 5th Avenue
• #S16 Autonomous FTP March: September 16, 8 p.m. at 91st Street Ruppert Park
• #S17 People’s Picket on Wall Street/ OWS One-Year Anniversary: September 17, 8 a.m. at Zuccotti Park
• Global Frackdown, Yes to Renewables!: September 22, 3 p.m. at 1047 Amsterdam Ave.
• Alexander Cockburn Memorial with Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali: September 22 at 51 North 1st Street
• Russell Tribunal on Palestine with Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker & Angela Davis: October 6, 7. Tickets required. 
• Stop “Stop & Frisk”: October 6, 3 p.m. at 110th Street & 5th Ave.