Monday, June 25, 2012
Posted in
Politics
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It takes a lot to make me call someone a fascist, but the mayor of New York City certainly qualifies. Under the direction of mayor Michael Bloomberg and police commissioner Raymond Kelly, the New York City police conduct about a half-million illegal, warrantless searches of pedestrians every year (last year it was more than 700,000). The program is called Stop & Frisk. Simply for walking down the street, any New Yorker can be stopped by the police and be frisked and searched. Supreme Court rulings have made it clear that warrantless searches are constitutional only if there is a suspicion of a crime having been committed, so these searches are definitely illegal. About 95% of the searches do not result in an arrest, so the vast majority of victims were not committing a crime. Those who are arrested are usually carrying some illegal substance, like marijuana. The city is being taken to court by various groups to stop the searches, but I think that the U.S. Justice Department should get involved.
Most of the searches are conducted in black and hispanic neighborhoods, and the vast majority of the victims are minorities. Bloomberg's excuse for the searches is that they discourage people from carrying guns and drugs. Maybe so, but it doesn't change the fact that stopping and searching people without suspicion is against the law. If legal justification can be found for searching pedestrians at random, what's to stop the police from searching people's homes at random? Bloomberg and Kelly do not have the authority to throw out the Constitution just because they don't like some of its provisions.
To make matters worse, many people are being arrested illegally as a result of these searches. New York law states that people who are caught carrying 1/4 ounce of marijuana or less should receive only a ticket, yet the police are arresting them. So there are not just illegal searches occurring, there are illegal arrests too -- how is that for a double-whammy?
In a country with our racial history, we can't afford to be doing things like this. From what I have read, the illegal searches are having a chilling effect on the residents of the neighborhoods where they are occurring. Many people feel that it is unsafe to go outside. And therein lies the irony: The police should make us feel safe; no one should feel that they need to protect themselves from the police. By turning every cop into a criminal, Bloomberg and Kelly are destroying any vestiges of respect that blacks and Latinos have for authority. And in the process, they are teaching every cop that it is okay to discriminate against minorities and to randomly violate people's rights.
There is a name for what's going on, of course: racial profiling. If searches like this were being conducted in white neighborhoods, there would be an immediate uproar.
Perhaps it shouldn't surprise me that this is happening. George W. Bush used 9/11 as an excuse to do all kinds of improper and illegal things in the name of security, and he set a precedent that others have followed. The ongoing x-rays and searches of every airline passenger is an outrage that even a liberal, Democratic president like Barack Obama permits and endorses. (In Israel, where the risk of sky-jackings is much greater, they have more sensible -- and less intrusive -- security procedures.) Despite the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, the use of tasers has brought torture into our lives. The Supreme Court, which is top-heavy with narrow-minded conservatives who have never experienced injustice, is not protecting us. That becomes clear when you consider that they recently ruled that people can be strip-searched for minor traffic offenses. Bit by bit we are losing our rights in the name of security.
Michael Bloomberg and Raymond Kelly are monsters. They offend our democracy. There are other ways to make neighborhoods safe than randomly searching people, but they have chosen the way that violates our most basic sense of fairness and justice. Bloomberg and Kelly are the ones who should be arrested.
In an article by James Freeman dated April 5, 2013 in the Wall Street Journal, the author says:
"The [stop & frisk] practice involves stopping people who behave suspiciously, questioning them and, if they appear to present a threat, frisking them to see if they're carrying a weapon."
But that is not what's happening in the Stop & Frisk program. At its peak in 2011, 700,000 people were stopped and frisked -- that's a hell of a lot of suspicious-looking people who were walking the streets! According to an article I read, suspicious behavior can include: being fidgety, changing directions, walking in a certain way, carrying a large item in a pocket, grabbing at a pocket, or looking over one’s shoulder. All of those behaviors are engaged in by ordinary people. Indeed, when I lived in New York City, I looked over my shoulder all the time -- and there were plenty of occasions when I changed direction because I forgot something.
In his press conferences, mayor Bloomberg describes the policy as "stop, question and frisk". He makes it sound as if the police politely stop and question people, but the reality is quite different. One pair of young black men were sitting on a bench eating a snack when the police approached them and ordered them to lie face down on the sidewalk. The police did not question them first. In another instance, the police approached a woman who was sitting on a bench waiting for a bus to go to work. They told her to stand up and they frisked her, just like that. In other instances, they simply stopped people who were walking down the street. Many of the victims were roughed up.
In Freeman's article, he says:
"What counts as suspicious? Commissioner Kelly mentions 'scouting out a car, or following people' -- or several young men waiting outside a bodega near closing time, or standing in the shadows near an ATM."
Let's take a look at these situations. How do the police know whether a young man is admiring a car or "scouting it out"? If the police frisk every young man who is looking at a car, a lot of innocent men will be victimized. Besides, you don't need a gun to steal a car, so the police would have to let them go anyway. The point is that the police should not be frisking someone unless an arrest is probable.
The same is true when young men hang out outside bodegas. I lived in New York City for decades, and I can tell you that young men hang out outside bodegas quite a bit. After all, bodegas have the four food groups that young men like to eat: chips, candy, soda and beer. If the police frisk every group of kids outside a bodega at closing time, the likelihood is that the majority of those kids will be innocent of any wrongdoing.
As for following someone, how do the police know when one person is following another?
In all these instances, the police can make their presence known and observe the scene until the "suspicious" activity ceases or they have real cause to make a stop. The role of the police is to deter crime by having a public presence, and also to intercede before a crime has been committed -- but only if a crime appears imminent. But in this Stop & Frisk program, the police are NOT required to meet those standards.
There are young men in New York City who have been stopped ten or twenty times or more. If that isn't a police state, I don't know what is. Bloomberg and Kelly are completely dense not to realize the psychological harm that this is doing to people. People feel victimized, and trust in the police is being destroyed. Indeed, the police themselves have been turned into criminals. The irony is that this program is supposed to make a safer city, but people in minority neighborhoods do not feel safe.
I'm mentioning the Wall Street Journal article because it is typical of the "spin" that conservatives put on the facts. The Wall Street Journal is a conservative paper, and conservatives in general are more comfortable with police states than other people are. They will justify the actions of the police no matter how outrageous they are. James Freeman himself is a white man who wears suits; he doesn't need to worry about being stopped and frisked. Freeman is not only white, he has that neat, cold, mean, anal, I-haven't-pooped-in-a-week look that so many conservatives have.
The problem with conservatives, of course, is that they can't put themselves in other people's shoes. Freeman can't imagine the humiliation that a person feels when his or her rights are violated, or the feeling of injustice a person feels when being singled out for his race or appearance. Despite that, conservatives such as Freeman don't want to believe that injustices are being committed, so they "spin" the facts to convince themselves that nothing really bad is happening.
Well, Mr. Freeman, something bad IS happening. People are being victimized by the police, instead of being protected by them. People of color are being alienated and disenfranchised. Racial-profiling is taking place, with all it's social-fabric-destroying consequences.
I predict that when all the lawsuits are over, New York City will end up paying out tens of millions of dollars to the victims. Bloomberg's and Kelly's stupidity will come back to haunt them.
Update: In August, 2013 a federal court ruled that the Stop & Frisk program was a violation of the Constitution, and it appointed a monitor to oversee the practice, along with other remedies. Appeals will be made, but it's clear that the city is in the wrong. Bloomberg's and Kelly's statements at press conferences after this ruling continue to mark them as fascists and racists in my eyes. Among other things, Bloomberg defiantly said that the ruling would not change the practices of the police by very much. Like I said: the man is a monster.
Update: On August 18, 2013, Commissioner Kelly appeared on the TV show Meet the Press and claimed several things that appear to be untrue. He said that Stop & Frisk is not a distinct program but is simply part of regular policing. However, the program has previously been given a clear name by both the mayor and the commissioner (Stop, Question and Frisk). He also said that the people who are being stopped are engaged in obvious criminal behavior, and he gave the example of a man walking down the street trying door knobs in an effort to find an open door. However, Kelly's statements don't correlate with what the police department has said at other times. For example, in response to the law suit the city gave the list (given above) of fidgety or furtive movements that can bring a person under suspicion, none of which indicate criminal activity.
Furthermore, "where there is smoke, there is fire". If the police were targeting only people engaged in obvious criminal behavior, there wouldn't be an uproar about the program -- and there wouldn't be hundreds of young men who had been stopped multiple times. It has been pointed out that the total number of stops that have been made -- more than 4,000,000 since 2004 -- exceeds the number of young men living in the city, then and now. In other words, over that nine year period, there have not been 4,000,000 young men living in New York City. Indeed, the total number of males living in the city (of all ages) is only about 4,000,000. That means that a very small demographic is being targeted over and over again. (Some women are being stopped, but not many.)
It appears that Kelly and Bloomberg have taken to lying in order to defend their unconstitutional program.
As I write this follow-up in 2014, Michael Bloomberg is out of office. However, it turns out that he was much more of a racist than I imagined. He not only had his Stop & Frisk policy which targeted minorities, but he was very active in gentrifying many ethnic neighborhoods. You probably know what gentrification is: It's when well-to-do people move into poorer neighborhoods, which raises property taxes and squeezed out the poorer people, who are usually ethnic. In New York City, gentrification isn't just a matter of rich people deciding to spread into poor neighborhoods. How it usually happens is that the city changes its zoning laws, and the zoning laws trigger the gentrification. During his tenure, Bloomberg pushed through zoning changes that allowed high-rise buildings to be built in older, poorer neighborhoods where previously there was a height limit of about six stories. The city then made sweetheart deals with various developers, giving those developers substantial tax breaks to build luxury high-rise buildings in those poorer neighborhoods, especially in downtown Brooklyn. (Bloomberg targeted downtown Brooklyn because it is close to the Wall Street area, and to Manhattan in general. New York City now become so wealthy that Manhattan won't hold all the rich people.) The result was that both poor residents and small businesses were thrown out of their buildings, and those buildings were then torn down to make way for the high-rise buildings. Neighborhoods were destroyed, and rents went up because of the influx of rich people. In the process, the developers – many of whom were not even from New York – made hundreds of millions of dollars. The gentrification hasn't stopped since Bloomberg left office; with the zoning laws changed, the process is still happening – so the damage that Bloomberg did is still being done.
Michael Bloomberg is jewish. The jews are a people who are victimized all over the world. You would think that a man like Bloomberg, being part of a minority himself, would have more sensitivity towards minorities in general given what his own people have suffered. Bloomberg represents the bad face of jews. Over the years, jews have often been bankers and other professionals who served the wealthy, and for that reason they have won the enmity of other minorities, especially brown-skinned minorities. It is a shame that Bloomberg chose to continue that negative tradition by victimizing New York's blacks and hispanics. Minorities should know better than to victimize other minorities.
Bloomberg, in my mind, is the worst of the worst, an egotist who thought he knew better than everyone else, and who ended up doing a huge amount of damaged to New York. It's good that he's gone. However, the government structure that allowed Bloomberg to make deals with developers is still in place, and it can – and will – happen again.
Most of the searches are conducted in black and hispanic neighborhoods, and the vast majority of the victims are minorities. Bloomberg's excuse for the searches is that they discourage people from carrying guns and drugs. Maybe so, but it doesn't change the fact that stopping and searching people without suspicion is against the law. If legal justification can be found for searching pedestrians at random, what's to stop the police from searching people's homes at random? Bloomberg and Kelly do not have the authority to throw out the Constitution just because they don't like some of its provisions.
To make matters worse, many people are being arrested illegally as a result of these searches. New York law states that people who are caught carrying 1/4 ounce of marijuana or less should receive only a ticket, yet the police are arresting them. So there are not just illegal searches occurring, there are illegal arrests too -- how is that for a double-whammy?
In a country with our racial history, we can't afford to be doing things like this. From what I have read, the illegal searches are having a chilling effect on the residents of the neighborhoods where they are occurring. Many people feel that it is unsafe to go outside. And therein lies the irony: The police should make us feel safe; no one should feel that they need to protect themselves from the police. By turning every cop into a criminal, Bloomberg and Kelly are destroying any vestiges of respect that blacks and Latinos have for authority. And in the process, they are teaching every cop that it is okay to discriminate against minorities and to randomly violate people's rights.
There is a name for what's going on, of course: racial profiling. If searches like this were being conducted in white neighborhoods, there would be an immediate uproar.
Perhaps it shouldn't surprise me that this is happening. George W. Bush used 9/11 as an excuse to do all kinds of improper and illegal things in the name of security, and he set a precedent that others have followed. The ongoing x-rays and searches of every airline passenger is an outrage that even a liberal, Democratic president like Barack Obama permits and endorses. (In Israel, where the risk of sky-jackings is much greater, they have more sensible -- and less intrusive -- security procedures.) Despite the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, the use of tasers has brought torture into our lives. The Supreme Court, which is top-heavy with narrow-minded conservatives who have never experienced injustice, is not protecting us. That becomes clear when you consider that they recently ruled that people can be strip-searched for minor traffic offenses. Bit by bit we are losing our rights in the name of security.
Michael Bloomberg and Raymond Kelly are monsters. They offend our democracy. There are other ways to make neighborhoods safe than randomly searching people, but they have chosen the way that violates our most basic sense of fairness and justice. Bloomberg and Kelly are the ones who should be arrested.
* * *
In an article by James Freeman dated April 5, 2013 in the Wall Street Journal, the author says:
"The [stop & frisk] practice involves stopping people who behave suspiciously, questioning them and, if they appear to present a threat, frisking them to see if they're carrying a weapon."
But that is not what's happening in the Stop & Frisk program. At its peak in 2011, 700,000 people were stopped and frisked -- that's a hell of a lot of suspicious-looking people who were walking the streets! According to an article I read, suspicious behavior can include: being fidgety, changing directions, walking in a certain way, carrying a large item in a pocket, grabbing at a pocket, or looking over one’s shoulder. All of those behaviors are engaged in by ordinary people. Indeed, when I lived in New York City, I looked over my shoulder all the time -- and there were plenty of occasions when I changed direction because I forgot something.
In his press conferences, mayor Bloomberg describes the policy as "stop, question and frisk". He makes it sound as if the police politely stop and question people, but the reality is quite different. One pair of young black men were sitting on a bench eating a snack when the police approached them and ordered them to lie face down on the sidewalk. The police did not question them first. In another instance, the police approached a woman who was sitting on a bench waiting for a bus to go to work. They told her to stand up and they frisked her, just like that. In other instances, they simply stopped people who were walking down the street. Many of the victims were roughed up.
In Freeman's article, he says:
"What counts as suspicious? Commissioner Kelly mentions 'scouting out a car, or following people' -- or several young men waiting outside a bodega near closing time, or standing in the shadows near an ATM."
Let's take a look at these situations. How do the police know whether a young man is admiring a car or "scouting it out"? If the police frisk every young man who is looking at a car, a lot of innocent men will be victimized. Besides, you don't need a gun to steal a car, so the police would have to let them go anyway. The point is that the police should not be frisking someone unless an arrest is probable.
The same is true when young men hang out outside bodegas. I lived in New York City for decades, and I can tell you that young men hang out outside bodegas quite a bit. After all, bodegas have the four food groups that young men like to eat: chips, candy, soda and beer. If the police frisk every group of kids outside a bodega at closing time, the likelihood is that the majority of those kids will be innocent of any wrongdoing.
As for following someone, how do the police know when one person is following another?
In all these instances, the police can make their presence known and observe the scene until the "suspicious" activity ceases or they have real cause to make a stop. The role of the police is to deter crime by having a public presence, and also to intercede before a crime has been committed -- but only if a crime appears imminent. But in this Stop & Frisk program, the police are NOT required to meet those standards.
There are young men in New York City who have been stopped ten or twenty times or more. If that isn't a police state, I don't know what is. Bloomberg and Kelly are completely dense not to realize the psychological harm that this is doing to people. People feel victimized, and trust in the police is being destroyed. Indeed, the police themselves have been turned into criminals. The irony is that this program is supposed to make a safer city, but people in minority neighborhoods do not feel safe.
I'm mentioning the Wall Street Journal article because it is typical of the "spin" that conservatives put on the facts. The Wall Street Journal is a conservative paper, and conservatives in general are more comfortable with police states than other people are. They will justify the actions of the police no matter how outrageous they are. James Freeman himself is a white man who wears suits; he doesn't need to worry about being stopped and frisked. Freeman is not only white, he has that neat, cold, mean, anal, I-haven't-pooped-in-a-week look that so many conservatives have.
The problem with conservatives, of course, is that they can't put themselves in other people's shoes. Freeman can't imagine the humiliation that a person feels when his or her rights are violated, or the feeling of injustice a person feels when being singled out for his race or appearance. Despite that, conservatives such as Freeman don't want to believe that injustices are being committed, so they "spin" the facts to convince themselves that nothing really bad is happening.
Well, Mr. Freeman, something bad IS happening. People are being victimized by the police, instead of being protected by them. People of color are being alienated and disenfranchised. Racial-profiling is taking place, with all it's social-fabric-destroying consequences.
I predict that when all the lawsuits are over, New York City will end up paying out tens of millions of dollars to the victims. Bloomberg's and Kelly's stupidity will come back to haunt them.
* * *
Update: In August, 2013 a federal court ruled that the Stop & Frisk program was a violation of the Constitution, and it appointed a monitor to oversee the practice, along with other remedies. Appeals will be made, but it's clear that the city is in the wrong. Bloomberg's and Kelly's statements at press conferences after this ruling continue to mark them as fascists and racists in my eyes. Among other things, Bloomberg defiantly said that the ruling would not change the practices of the police by very much. Like I said: the man is a monster.
* * *
Update: On August 18, 2013, Commissioner Kelly appeared on the TV show Meet the Press and claimed several things that appear to be untrue. He said that Stop & Frisk is not a distinct program but is simply part of regular policing. However, the program has previously been given a clear name by both the mayor and the commissioner (Stop, Question and Frisk). He also said that the people who are being stopped are engaged in obvious criminal behavior, and he gave the example of a man walking down the street trying door knobs in an effort to find an open door. However, Kelly's statements don't correlate with what the police department has said at other times. For example, in response to the law suit the city gave the list (given above) of fidgety or furtive movements that can bring a person under suspicion, none of which indicate criminal activity.
Furthermore, "where there is smoke, there is fire". If the police were targeting only people engaged in obvious criminal behavior, there wouldn't be an uproar about the program -- and there wouldn't be hundreds of young men who had been stopped multiple times. It has been pointed out that the total number of stops that have been made -- more than 4,000,000 since 2004 -- exceeds the number of young men living in the city, then and now. In other words, over that nine year period, there have not been 4,000,000 young men living in New York City. Indeed, the total number of males living in the city (of all ages) is only about 4,000,000. That means that a very small demographic is being targeted over and over again. (Some women are being stopped, but not many.)
It appears that Kelly and Bloomberg have taken to lying in order to defend their unconstitutional program.
* * *
As I write this follow-up in 2014, Michael Bloomberg is out of office. However, it turns out that he was much more of a racist than I imagined. He not only had his Stop & Frisk policy which targeted minorities, but he was very active in gentrifying many ethnic neighborhoods. You probably know what gentrification is: It's when well-to-do people move into poorer neighborhoods, which raises property taxes and squeezed out the poorer people, who are usually ethnic. In New York City, gentrification isn't just a matter of rich people deciding to spread into poor neighborhoods. How it usually happens is that the city changes its zoning laws, and the zoning laws trigger the gentrification. During his tenure, Bloomberg pushed through zoning changes that allowed high-rise buildings to be built in older, poorer neighborhoods where previously there was a height limit of about six stories. The city then made sweetheart deals with various developers, giving those developers substantial tax breaks to build luxury high-rise buildings in those poorer neighborhoods, especially in downtown Brooklyn. (Bloomberg targeted downtown Brooklyn because it is close to the Wall Street area, and to Manhattan in general. New York City now become so wealthy that Manhattan won't hold all the rich people.) The result was that both poor residents and small businesses were thrown out of their buildings, and those buildings were then torn down to make way for the high-rise buildings. Neighborhoods were destroyed, and rents went up because of the influx of rich people. In the process, the developers – many of whom were not even from New York – made hundreds of millions of dollars. The gentrification hasn't stopped since Bloomberg left office; with the zoning laws changed, the process is still happening – so the damage that Bloomberg did is still being done.
Michael Bloomberg is jewish. The jews are a people who are victimized all over the world. You would think that a man like Bloomberg, being part of a minority himself, would have more sensitivity towards minorities in general given what his own people have suffered. Bloomberg represents the bad face of jews. Over the years, jews have often been bankers and other professionals who served the wealthy, and for that reason they have won the enmity of other minorities, especially brown-skinned minorities. It is a shame that Bloomberg chose to continue that negative tradition by victimizing New York's blacks and hispanics. Minorities should know better than to victimize other minorities.
Bloomberg, in my mind, is the worst of the worst, an egotist who thought he knew better than everyone else, and who ended up doing a huge amount of damaged to New York. It's good that he's gone. However, the government structure that allowed Bloomberg to make deals with developers is still in place, and it can – and will – happen again.
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