NYC cops target people of color

There are plenty of statistics that document the horrible reality of racism. Now there’s another: half a million people were stopped and searched by police in New York City last year, 55 percent of whom were Black and 30 percent Latin@.

The New York Police Department released the data to the New York City Council on Feb. 2. While the NYPD is required by law to provide a quarterly report on the number of people that police stop, question and frisk, with a breakdown by race and gender, it hasn’t done so since mid-2003.

The number of stops has skyrocketed in the last four years. In 2002, 97,296 people were stopped compared to 508,540 in 2006. The stop and search procedure has been in place since the administration of former Mayor John Lindsay in the 1960s.

The city council passed the 2001 law requiring the NYPD to report “stop and frisk” statistics in reaction to community outrage over the police killing of Amadou Diallo, an immigrant worker from Guinea, who was shot in a hail of 41 bullets. The four undercover cops who killed him said they mistook his wallet for a gun. His death showed the brutality of racial profiling.

It was the police killing of another unarmed man, African-American Sean Bell, which drew attention to the NYPD’s failure to submit its “stop and frisk” data. In late November, several undercover police officers fired 50 bullets at Bell and three of his friends as they drove away from a bachelor party for Bell. A few days later the New York Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to the police commissioner calling on him to comply with the law and provide the information.

While the police department has been silent on the subject, the number of complaints from people who’ve been stopped and searched has grown. The New York Times reported Feb. 3 that the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent city body that investigates charges of police misconduct, received 2,556 complaints last year, more than double the 1,128 complaints it received in 2003.

The numbers though don’t show the humiliation, terror and frequent death that people of color routinely suffer at the hands of the police. In 1998 the New Jersey Police Department’s decades long history of stopping people of color on the highway became public after the police shot and wounded four Black and Latino young men driving on the New Jersey turnpike en route to basketball tryouts.

Only a few cases of police stopping or shooting Blacks and Latin@s make it into the news. But it happens every week in cities around the country. In 2004, a New York cop shot and killed 19-year-old Timothy Stansbury as he opened the door of the roof of his building in Brooklyn’s Louis Armstrong housing project. He was using the roof to get to an adjoining building to attend a party.

That same year San Diego Chargers linebacker Steve Foley was shot three times outside his home by a police officer who claimed he suspected Foley of drunken driving. In 2005, five Black Somerville High School athletes were attacked and beaten by 10 white police in Medford, Mass., as they tried to attend a town carnival. And last year an elderly woman in Atlanta who shot at police trying to break into her house was shot and killed.

Such assaults rarely or never happen, of course, in the wealthy neighborhoods. And that was clear in the volumes of data the NYPD released on their stop and frisk incidents, which were tallied by precinct and transit district. The New York Times reported Feb. 5 that in the 75th precinct, with some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, the police stopped and questioned or frisked someone about once every 24 minutes. By comparison, in the 1st precinct, which includes the wealthy Wall Street, Tribeca and SoHo districts, the police stopped one person about every 16 hours.

The Times reported that Rev. Al Sharpton had announced that his organization, the National Action Network, would begin gathering plaintiffs to launch a class action against the city. A class action was filed against the city in 1999 by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of 10 young men of color who were stopped and frisked by undercover cops. In 2003, the plaintiffs won a settlement in Daniels v. the City of New York, which required the NYPD to audit officers who conduct stop and frisks to determine if they are based on “reasonable suspicion.” Only the people’s struggle though can stop the racism, including police brutality, that’s endemic to the capitalist system.