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Stop and Frisk.

Shani O Hilton

Colorlines magazine has a great video (produced by two young women interning there, Karina Hurtado and Naima Ramos-Chapman) giving voices to the victims of NYC’s Stop and Frisk policy in Brooklyn.


Transcript (I did it myself, so forgive any errors) after the jump.

Interviewer: How many times have you been stopped and frisked?

Young man: Probably like, 20 times for the year.

Interviewer: 20?

Young man: Yeah.

2nd young man: 15, 20 times.

3rd young man: My friends get stopped all the time. All the time.

[Break, title card]

4th man: So they frisk me, they check my bag. Make sure I have nothing illegal, like ‘oh, we’re just stopping you because you look like somebody who robbed a store around here earlier, before.’

5th man: I fit the same profile.

6th man: They said I ‘look like someone.’

Young woman: They ‘fit the description.’

7th man: I ‘fit the description.’

8th man: I look like a ‘potential gangbanger.’

9th man: They’re talking about how I ‘fit the description’ of somebody else that was doing something.

7th man: Brownsville, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, Williamsburg is like the biggest-hit sections of Brooklyn where they really harass people.

5th man: The police have a generalization of black men as far as, okay, do-rag, pants sagging, uh, Jordans. That’s like 75 percent of like, everybody.

Woman: We had just came out the house, and we was walking toward the store which was down the block. They didn’t ask for no ID, they just said ‘search yourself, put your hands up’ so they could search him, and they searched him and I asked, ‘what is it for?’ and they said ‘someone just got robbed around the corner and he fit the description,’ just like that.

10th man: Pulled me over and started searching me and all that, and, me being the person I am, I felt like it was a problem, so I gave them a problem. Long story short, I ended up with a broken tooth. My baby mother’s mother witnessed them beating me in the back of the car on the way to the precinct. I came home from doing 13 days on Riker’s Island, and when I finally seen the judge a second time, she couldn’t figure out what was the reason for them stopping me in the first place.

1st man: Violated.

7th man: Degrading.

6th man: My rights have been violated.

5th man: Belittled.

11th man: I simply just can’t walk down the street without being accused of something I have nothing to do with.

Older man: It’s getting to a point, they’re getting used to it now. You see cops and you automatically know, they’re gonna search you. If your pants off your behind, they’re gonna search you. Every kid is not a criminal. Every kid not doing nothing bad. But that’s what they do.

27 thoughts on Stop and Frisk.

  2. God this is so depressing. And how the hell is it legal? Or do we (as a society) just not care about how violating it is? WTF.

  3. God this is so depressing. And how the hell is it legal? Or do we (as a society) just not care about how violating it is? WTF. Andrea

    Sadly, the 4th Amendment has pretty much gone out the window after years of SCOTUS trying to “balance” individual rights against the public interest, tough-on-crime politicians tripping over one another for the votes of the most vicious amongst us, a war on drugs that apparently needs to be won at all costs, and a culture that treats police like heroes even when they constant prove themselves to be nothing more than an unusually aggressive street gang. Besides, the people getting searched are usually brown; it hardly takes a legal scholar to see that brown folks only have rights when someone with political pull is watching. All New York has done is give a name and step up a policy thats been business as usual for our Criminals in Blue for as long as anyone can remember.

  5. Recently, the UK was stopping and searching men who looked vaguely like terrorist stereotypes; although I seem to recall a big fuss about civil rights being made and it being reduced. I’d be interested to know if they stopped and searched more people with Northern Irish accents when the main terrorist threat to the UK was from IRA militants.

    Pretty much anyone who fits the stereotype of a criminal held by the police officers doing the searching is going to be stopped and searched. It’s appalling that one racial group is perceived to be more criminal than the other. I’ll bet that they don’t solve many crimes by random stops and searches and make the police seem more brutal and inaccessible to victims wishing to report crime.

  6. I used to teach middle school in Brownsville. One of those folks interviewed? One of my former students.

    So furious. We used to watch this happen walking to the subway from the school all the time, and then the cops would try to talk to us, because we were white, and they thought they saw kindred spirits or something.

    They could not have been more wrong.

  7. I’ll bet that they don’t solve many crimes by random stops and searches and make the police seem more brutal and inaccessible to victims wishing to report crime.

    Its not about solving crimes (although even if it was, it would still be repugnant). Stop and Frisk policy comes down to three things. First its about bumping arrest counts for minor offenses like simple possession, curfew violations, minor weapons offenses, and the like so that police look more productive. If you stop enough black kids chances are you’ll manage to figure out a way to charge one of them with something a couple of times a week so it looks like you’re earning your pay. Second, its about creating a sense of fear in what is perceived to be a criminal populace. If people are used to being stopped, to seeing stops, it becomes routine and fewer people are going to challenge it. Stop and Frisk gives police more power simply by making egregious civil rights violations seem routine. Finally, Stop and Frisk is for the more privileged voters. Police are like any other business, they know who their paying customers are and engage in policies that appeal to those customers. If they think white people are afraid of the scary brown folk then Stop and Frisk wins twice: it not only shows the privileged folk with political clout that the police are out there and harassing the people that ought to be harassed but it increases fear in white people by making it appear as if theres a tide of criminal activity coming from the kinds of people getting stopped. You can’t get a clearer example of the way raw racism perpetuates and advances itself through casual oppression.

  9. And of course, the cops would be beside themselves with indignation if you suggested that they were questioning these people because they were black.

  10. Daniel Jose Older had a recent post @ Racialicious about this:
    http://www.racialicious.com/2010/07/30/notsomuch-the-truth-about-black-on-white-crime/

    In it is a link to a Villiage Voice piece; a whistle blower has revealed the whole ugly mess behind “Stop and Frisk” at the 81st Precinct (Bed-Stuy). In retaliation, thw whistleblower was pulled from his house, cuffed and sent to a psych-ward for 6 days. Of course, this a local symptom of two larger problems: racism and a thing police precints are under pressure to do known as juking the stats. David Simon (“The Wire”, “Homicide”) has a revealing interview with Bill Moyers here:
    http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04172009/watch.html

  11. It’s not legal – it’s just an unconstitutional act without a remedy. The police know damn well none of these kids are going to sue them for stopping them illegally – and they couldn’t because how will they put a dollar value on the “damage” done to them by being illegally stopped? If no one gets hurt or dies or has a valuable public reputation that can be ruined, there won’t be a lawsuit.

  12. Outstanding post, Shani.

    I wasn’t aware of NYC’s “Stop & Frisk” policy, so I Googled.

    What is this about the Gov. Paterson signing a bill into law that forces the NYPD to expunge from a database the names and addresses of victims who are terrorized in this way? Isn’t this just making the problem worse?

  14. What is this about the Gov. Paterson signing a bill into law that forces the NYPD to expunge from a database the names and addresses of victims who are terrorized in this way? Isn’t this just making the problem worse?

    No, it protects those people from a background check — white middle-class Americans often assume “where there’s smoke there’s fire” and will not hire someone if they see that the cops even questioned them.

    Keeping metrics on who is abused in this way would be good, but not at the expense of causing victims of this treatment to possibly suffer any worse at the hands of employers.

  15. What is this about the Gov. Paterson signing a bill into law that forces the NYPD to expunge from a database the names and addresses of victims who are terrorized in this way? Isn’t this just making the problem worse?

    Keeping a list of victims might be worthwhile if there was some chance of that list being used against the cops but, given your handle, I’m guessing that you’re probably already aware that there are relatively few restrictions on the behavior of government agents. Our Bullies in Blue aren’t going to be held accountable and a list of people they’ve terrorized is more likely to be used as a badge of honor than any kind evidence against them.

    What a list does do is it creates a permanent record of people who have had contact with police. That kind of record could well come up in background checks later on, as Alara mentioned already. More immediately, however, that database is available to police who use it to identify people. A big part of Stop and Frisk is to generate information that police can use later: names, faces, hangouts, who is out on the street. Police get a list of names of people who have been stopped, stopped together, and how many times. Its a modern version of a “usual suspects” list.

  17. You can’t get a clearer example of the way raw racism perpetuates and advances itself through casual oppression.

    Haven’t you ever watched Fox “News”?

  20. Stop and frisk doesn’t work, degrades the residents who are forced to endure or observe these encounters, and further undermines the relationship between the police and the neighborhood residents.

    These encounters amounted to nearly one stop a year for every one of the 14,000 residents of these blocks. In some instances, people were stopped because the police said they fit the description of a suspect. But the data show that fewer than 9 percent of stops were made based on “fit description.” Far more — nearly 26,000 times — the police listed either “furtive movement,” a catch-all category that critics say can mean anything, or “other” as the only reason for the stop. Many of the stops, the data show, were driven by the police’s ability to enforce seemingly minor violations of rules governing who can come and go in the city’s public housing.

    The encounters — most urgently meant to get guns off the streets — yield few arrests. Across the city, 6 percent of stops result in arrests. In these roughly eight square blocks of Brownsville, the arrest rate is less than 1 percent. The 13,200 stops the police made in this neighborhood last year resulted in arrests of 109 people. In the more than 50,000 stops since 2006, the police recovered 25 guns.

  21. Yup, it’s just about exactly like that. The same thing happened to me back in the 1970s oil-shock recessions when I was a long-haired high-school drop-out hitchhiking around the country looking for work… and sometimes food and shelter. The most extreme ever was standing at a toll plaza in New Jersey and being stopped, ID’d, and searched three times in one standing, with the third state patrol car pulling over while the second was literally still pulling away. So anyway, yeah, 20 times in a year sounds like roughly the middle of the pull-over bell curve for anyone who fits the local “undesirables” profile.

    It really sucked stagnant pond water then and it sucks that it’s still happening.

    What really sucked about it is that you often got the impression the cops who are doing it are as much bored or trying to look busy as serious about “stopping crime.” I mean, yeah, you can make a case that vigilance is important I guess, but after a while you have to know they know who’s a problem and who’s just trying to go about their business. I know some of them are doing it out of racial, class, or cultural intolerance but I think too many of them do it because they can.

    figleaf

  22. Across the city, 6 percent of stops result in arrests. In these roughly eight square blocks of Brownsville, the arrest rate is less than 1 percent.

    And how much do you want to bet that once you’ve cut out arrests for outstanding warrants, non-crimes like possession, and arrests stemming from the unnecessary stop in the first place (resisting arrest, disturbing the peace, etc.) the arrest rates are even more dismal.

  23. William:
    And how much do you want to bet that once you’ve cut out arrests for outstanding warrants, non-crimes like possession, and arrests stemming from the unnecessary stop in the first place (resisting arrest, disturbing the peace, etc.) the arrest rates are even more dismal.  

    A lot.

  24. William hits it on the head. They stop somebody, and if you go along with it, you’re accepting the degrading and illegal treatment, normalizing it. If you object, you’re arrested for resisting or disturbing and you’re just another statistic, justifying it. Self justifying law enforcement policies can’t possibly be a good idea in a supposedly free society. Of course, neither can crimes which are defined at the discretion of people charged with enforcement like resisting arrest and disturbing the peace. There’s a big problem when “anything you do that the police don’t like” can be cause for arrest, prosecution, and incarceration.

  25. William hits it on the head. They stop somebody, and if you go along with it, you’re accepting the degrading and illegal treatment, normalizing it. If you object, you’re arrested for resisting or disturbing and you’re just another statistic, justifying it. Self justifying law enforcement policies can’t possibly be a good idea in a supposedly free society. Of course, neither can crimes which are defined at the discretion of people charged with enforcement like resisting arrest and disturbing the peace. There’s a big problem when “anything you do that the police don’t like” can be cause for arrest, prosecution, and incarceration – and they can use policies like stop and frisk to provoke people they don’t like into doing something they can define as offensive.

  27. Of course, neither can crimes which are defined at the discretion of people charged with enforcement like resisting arrest and disturbing the peace. There’s a big problem when “anything you do that the police don’t like” can be cause for arrest, prosecution, and incarceration.

    Thats a big problem with discretionary laws in general. I don’t have the exact numbers, but I know that a lot of “resisting arrest” charges end up getting dropped, as do a lot of “obstruction of justice/interference with official duty” charges, and the lion’s share of “disturbing the peace” charges. Laws like that are rarely used to actually prosecute or incarcerate, that isn’t their purpose. They act as legal feints, momentary justifications that are never intended to stand up to judicial scrutiny, they’re threats. Its a way for a cop (or prosecutor) to say “I can arrest you any time I want, force you to undergo the public embarrassment, expose you to the danger of a lock up, physically dominate you, silence you, and remove you from any situation, at any time, for any reason.”

    Arrest someone on a Wednesday for “disturbing the peace,” they make bail by Friday, but on Thursday they could well have lost their job. Thats the threat. It isn’t incarceration, its a show of force, a means of stopping people from even thinking of speaking up. Thats why police arrest people who take pictures of them, its not because they think they’ll get in trouble, its punishment for someone showing that they aren’t afraid.

    Its not a few bad apples, its not one bad policy in one overly-authoritative city, it is the very nature of a paramilitary police force. Oppression is the primary job of police, after that is revenue generation. The occasional arrest of an actual criminal is incidental.

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