(MintPress)— “Stop-and-frisk is the most massive local racial profiling program in the country. All children, of every color, should feel protected by our police, not threatened, harassed or intimidated. Stop-and-frisk is a violation of NYPD policy, our constitution and the basic values of liberty and justice for all,” said President and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) after attending a protest which drew thousands in New York over the weekend to protest the “stop-and-frisk” policy which allows the New York Police Department (NYPD) police to stop, search and question people who they deem suspicious.
50,000 march in New York Sunday
The silent march down Fifth Avenue in New York City drew up to 50,000 civil and human right advocates, according to media reports, who gathered to bring attention to racial profiling and to protest the city’s stop-and-frisk policing practice which they say is abusive and discriminatory.
According to an analysis by the New York Civil Liberties Union, innocent New Yorkers have been subjected to police stops and street interrogations more than 4 million times since 2004, and black and Latino communities continue to be the overwhelming target of these tactics. Nearly 9 out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been completely innocent, the group says.
MintPress previously reported that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg acknowledged that the policy has not been effective in reducing the number of shootings. Last year alone, a record 685,724 people were stopped and frisked, 1,821 were victims of gunfire. That’s nearly the same number as in 2002, Bloomberg’s first year in office, when 1,892 people were shot, but just 97,296 were frisked.
Protesters marched to Bloomberg’s town house Sunday on East 79th Street. Police had blocked off the home and sidewalk in front of it and would not say whether the mayor was home.
Matthew Swaye, 34, a former Bronx school teacher and self-described longtime Occupy protester, told the Huffington Post that “the silence ended and the people’s voices came out,” after Occupy Wall Street activists apparently continued past a cutoff point where police tried to direct protesters to side streets below East 77th Street on Fifth Avenue.
“We were told to go home and we weren’t ready to go yet,” said Swaye. He said his wife Christina Gonzalez, 25, who was also protesting, was one of at least nine protesters arrested in connection with the march.
Protesters, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, held up bright yellow signs and banners with black print reading “End Stop & Frisk”, and “Stop Racial Profiling”. In a series of photos taken by the Associated Press documenting the event, hand-made signs carried by protesters read “My skin color is not a crime” and photos of the dead body of Ramarley Graham, the unarmed 18-year-old shot to death by the NYPD in his grandmother’s Bronx apartment back in February. Graham’s death has been linked to the stop and frisk campaign, with critics charging that the tragedy was symptomatic of a hyper-aggressive policy which predominantly targets low-income minority neighborhoods.
Rights groups combine forces, speak out
“Stop-and-frisk policing violates our civil rights as citizens, humiliates our personhood, violates racial profiling laws, and violates our constitutional right to probable cause,” the Rev. Al Sharpton, President of National Action Network, said in a press release put out by the ACLU. “Therefore it is illegal, immoral, and must be ended. You cannot mend bias. You must end bias.”
Representatives from a diverse array of national rights advocacy and community groups came out in support of ending the stop-and-frisk program. Leaders from the National Advocacy Director for the National Network for Arab American Communities, LatinoJustice PRLDE, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the NYC Central Labor Council and many others were quoted in the statement.
“The misguided policy regarding Stop-and-Frisk has been disrupting neighborhoods, and hurting the vital relationship between communities and the NYPD for too long,” said Yetta Kurland, civil rights attorney and member of the National Lawyers Guild. “It hurts our communities and the NYPD and it has to stop. This practice has disproportionately impacted communities of color and the LGBTQ community but it effects all of us.”
A federal judge recently gave class-action status to a lawsuit against the NYPD earlier this year, finding “overwhelming evidence” that top brass had put in place “a centralized stop-and-frisk program that has led to thousands of unlawful stops.”
The suit alleged that officers are pushed to meet quotas under the controversial program and punished if those quotas are not met.
New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly then stated the NYPD would take steps to scale back the frisks, and police would be retrained on conducting lawful stops and reminded against racial profiling.
In May, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin in Manhattan said in a written ruling that she believed the majority of New Yorkers unlawfully stopped would never file a lawsuit, so class-action status was created for just these kinds of court cases. “First, suspicionless stops should never occur,” Scheindlin stated.
Scheindlin added that the police department’s “cavalier attitude towards the prospect of a `widespread practice of suspicionless stops’ displays a deeply troubling apathy towards New Yorkers’ most fundamental constitutional rights.”