Racism and Injustice on a Massive Scale

This is a description of what is happening in a major country in the world today: In the space of a few months, the police in this country’s largest city stop hundreds of thousands of people who are not violating any laws and subject them to humiliating questioning and searches. Most of those stopped are people of oppressed minorities. The police put the names and addresses of everyone they stop this way into their database.

You can imagine how the official voices in the U.S. would howl if this country were one of the countries that the U.S. denounces as run by “dictators who deprive the people of their basic rights.”

But the fact is, what is described here is not happening in some other country—it’s right here in the USA, in New York City. This outrageous police practice is called “stop-and-frisk.”

Dogged by Police in Harlem

The stop-and-frisk facts and statistics in the NYCLU press release reflect the daily life experiences of hundreds of thousands of Black and Latino people in New York City, and millions more throughout this country.

Rodney, a Black man who lives in Harlem, told Revolution newspaper recently that he has been stopped-and-frisked by the police for "no apparent reason," or for just being "in the wrong neighborhood." When Revolution asked Rodney how he felt when cops treated him this way, he said that he was harassed so constantly by the police that he has become accustomed to it. "I'm used to it. I don't feel no certain way," Rodney said. "Everybody in Harlem, especially the minorities, they're used to it by now."

Read that sentence again: "Everybody in Harlem, especially the minorities. They're used to it by now." What kind of a society is it where many, many people—especially youth of oppressed nationalities—have come to think of being demeaned and brutalized by the police as a daily fact of life?!

A Record Number of Stops

An August 14, 2009 press release from the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) is titled “Record Number of Innocent New Yorkers Stopped, Interrogated by NYPD During First Half of Year.” Based on figures from the NYPD, the NYCLU reports that in the first six months of 2009 alone, cops in New York City stopped more than 273,000 people who—according to the police themselves—were not violating any laws. This represents the highest number of innocent people stopped and questioned by the NYPD in six months since the department began keeping stop-and-frisk data.

From January to June of this year, the NYPD as a whole (including the various precincts as well as bureaus such as housing, transit, and narcotics) stopped and frisked 311,646 people, the overwhelming majority of them Black and Latino. Of that total, more than 9 in 10—or 273,556 people—were not arrested or given a summons. In other words, by the NYPD’s own admission, in just the first six months of this year they had stopped and searched close to 275,000 people who were not even alleged to have committed any crime. It should be pointed out that the actual number of innocent New Yorkers subjected to these stop and frisks is no doubt even higher, since the figure does not account for people who were wrongfully accused of a crime by the police.

The stop-and-frisk figures are undeniable evidence of racial profiling by the NYPD. Of the total of 311,646 people stopped between January through June 2009, 163,118 (52.3 percent) are Black and 81,210 (32.1 percent) are Latino, while only 29,782 (9 percent) are white. Compare this with the overall New York City population figures according to nationality: 24 percent Black, 28 percent Latino, and 35 percent white (the rest are Native American, Asian American, and others).

Breaking down the data a bit further, of the 163,118 Black New Yorkers who were stopped and frisked, 148,731 (91.2 percent) were neither arrested nor given a summons. Similarly, of the 81,210 Latinos stopped, 68,689 (84.6 percent) were neither arrested nor given a summons.

The figures for the first half of 2009 come on top of the statistics for last year, when the NYPD stopped and frisked a record total of 531,159 times—again, overwhelmingly targeting Black and Latino people.

These figures for 2008 and the first half of 2009 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 41 shots at him when he pulled out his wallet. This murder put a spotlight on the fact that the NYPD had conducted 80,000 random searches of Black and Latino people in a year. In 2002, it was considered scandalous when it was reported that there were 98,000 stop-and-frisks. Now, seven years later, there are more than five times as many.

Furthermore, as the NYCLU points out, the names and addresses of all those subjected to stop-and-frisks are entered into an NYPD database. Christopher Dunn, associate legal director for the NYCLU, spoke to the implications of this: “The NYPD is, in effect, building a massive database of black and brown New Yorkers,” Dunn said. “Innocent New Yorkers who are the victims of unjustified police stops should not suffer the further harm of having their personal information kept in an NYPD database, which simply makes them targets for future investigations.”

Cops Justify Racial Profiling

And what justifications do the police offer for their massive harassment and humiliation of Blacks and Latinos? The NYPD’s own reports provide incredibly revealing, and infuriating, answers to that question. Let’s zero in on one particular precinct—the 75th Precinct in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn.

The police in that one precinct made a staggering 8,073 stops (far more than any other precinct) just from January to March 2009; 6,220 of those stopped (77 percent) were Black. In 3,795 of these 6,220 instances, the cops listed “furtive movements” as a reason for the stop. Other factors listed by the 75th Precinct for stopping and frisking African Americans included: “time of day fits crime incidence” (3,053); “proximity to scene of offense” (1,222); “inappropriate attire for the season” (656); and “wearing clothes commonly used in a crime” (543).

So what is being said here is, if you are Black or Latino in America, especially if you’re young, you must not do the following things or else you will be treated as a criminal, resulting in arbitrary warrantless searches or worse: Move in a way the cops don’t like; wear clothing the cops don’t like; be outdoors at a time when the cops say crimes are likely to be committed; or be in the area where the cops say somebody has committed a crime.

This is the reality of what is taking place in the biggest city of this “land of the free and home of the brave.” And NYPD’s racist stop-and-frisks are part of the daily police harassment and brutality faced by people of color in Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland, Houston, Philadelphia, and innumerable other cities and towns throughout this country. And every youth who is paying any attention knows that when the armed thugs in uniform stop them and order them to “assume the position,” 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.

This is NOT about “bad training procedures for cops” or “mistrust between the community and the police.” When police are stopping and harassing Blacks and Latinos in such massive numbers, that is not an “anomaly” or the result of a “few rotten apples.” This is a systematic policy. These are actions of an armed force of the state, whose role is to serve and protect a system—the system of capitalism-imperialism—and to sow an atmosphere of terror among the oppressed, especially the youth. Under this system, millions and millions of youth in the inner cities are robbed of any chance at a decent life—offered a “choice” between a life of crime and prisons, or killing and dying for an imperialist military that brutalizes and murders people around the world. The police are part of a whole state machinery, including the courts, laws, and so forth, that enforces the oppressive economic and social relations in this society. Trying to “foster greater community-police relations” makes about as much as sense as “fostering greater relations between the community and the KKK” would have made back in the day.

Illegal Even Under Their Own Laws

What makes the NYPD stop-and-frisks so outrageous is that they are blatantly and totally illegal, according to even this system’s own laws, including the Constitution. And the fact that the police are basically given free rein to do this exposes the actual role of the state machinery, including the police. People are supposedly protected from arbitrary searches by law enforcement forces, or being targeted by cops just because of their nationality or color of their skin. As the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) noted this January, in relation to the NYPD stop-and-frisk statistics for 2008: “Police stops and frisks without reasonable suspicion violate the Fourth Amendment, and racial profiling is a violation of fundamental rights and protections of the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

Under this system’s own laws, things like running away from police or most violations of the law are supposedly not punishable by the death penalty—let alone execution on the spot, with no trial. But look at what happened to Corey Harris, killed by a gunshot to the back by an off-duty Chicago cop this September 11 when he and other youths started running after an altercation. Look at many others murdered by police around the U.S. in similar situations. Or many killed for nothing at all, like Oscar Grant, killed by transit police in Oakland at the start of this year as he lay face down on a train platform.

This October 22, the National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation, it is critical that people join protests happening around the country, taking a visible stand against the vicious, systematic crimes of the police. One of the most heartbreaking sentiments Revolution has encountered in recent conversations with Black and Latino people about the police is a feeling of powerlessness: people saying they have been beaten up or beaten down so frequently by the cops that they don’t see how things could be any different. This is a situation that must be quickly and decisively transformed. Living in constant terror of being violated by the police is something that should never be accepted. People from many different backgrounds stepping out on October 22 can play an important role in giving heart to those most viciously subjugated by this system and its police.

As the statement “The Revolution We Need… The Leadership We Have” from the Revolutionary Communist Party says so powerfully: “The days when this system can just keep on doing what it does to people, here and all over the world…when people are not inspired and organized to stand up against these outrages and to build up the strength to put an end to this madness…those days must be GONE. And they CAN be.”

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