This video, published by The
Nation, captures one incident of a kind that occurs about 700,000 times a year to New Yorkers. Except if you're white. The young man in this video, the son of a cop,
was stopped multiple times in one day, for the “suspicious” behavior of wearing
a hoodie and a backpack, and “looking” at the police. In other words, walking while black.
Know any white people this happened to? Anyone on the Upper West Side? According to a New York Civil Liberties Union
report (see here
and here),
90% of those stopped are black (23%
of the population) and Latino (29% of the population). In fact, more young black men were stopped by the
NYPD in 2011 than there are young black men in New York City. Really, let that sink in. Who’s running the NYPD, Mike Bloomberg and Ray
Kelly, or George Zimmerman and Geraldo?
This is not about safety or crime
or guns. It’s about reminding minorities
and the poor of their place, by continually forcing them to be submissive to the
Man. It’s racially-profiled harassment. The statistics practically force that
conclusion. Fortunately, judges
– and even prosecutors
– are starting to come to, and act appropriately on, that conclusion.
This video is particularly instructive, because it also
shows how these practices force cops, many of whom are non-white, and most of whom,
we like to think, would actually prefer to be helpers rather than hunters of all the people, to submit to the criteria
of “productivity” embodied in the Compstat system. This perversely Fordist
system evaluates police performance, on the individual and precinct level, on
the basis of computer-driven statistical criteria, rewarding those with the
higher, and punishing those with the
lower, number of stops and arrests. One
might think, in a rational society with a rational policing policy, that there might
be a system that would recognize fewer
arrests as a marker of success. The methods
of measuring “efficiency” in the overtly authoritarian context of a capitalist
factory are not quite what’s needed to promote decent, cooperative community-police
relations in an ostensibly democratic, if unequal, capitalist society. As the officers in this video complain, the Compstat
system actually has the police working not to prevent, but to produce crime.
Turning police work into number crunching helps turn cops into hunters, and citizens
into haters of the police. And, since the
cops know which areas are definitely Posted: No Hunting, and which game has
low, and which no, bag limits, all that hunting and hating has to end up
concentrated in a few neighborhoods and a few ethnicities.
Combined with the draconian drug laws, it does become an ongoing war within certain sectors of society, kept largely invisible from the comfortable rest, until a recording like this comes out.
Combined with the draconian drug laws, it does become an ongoing war within certain sectors of society, kept largely invisible from the comfortable rest, until a recording like this comes out.
We should recognize what we see here: This is 21st-century New York City
Jim Crow. It’s a racially- and
ethnically-differentiated system of rights and privileges. Some classes of people have the right and privilege
to walk down the street in a hoodie, and to look at a cop, without being
harassed, detained, physically assaulted, and possibly arrested by armed agents
of the state. For others, those are prima facie suspicious, “enemy”
activities, which in themselves justify interrogation, et. seq., by the army of occupation.
However “Bull” Bloomberg tries to euphemize it, he knows
quite well that his precious stop-and-frisk would end the first day it was
enforced equally by race, ethnicity, and neighborhood.
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