Stop and Frisk Back in the Headlines

Last week, NYC's disgusting Apartheid stop-and-frisk program returned to the headlines as the new police chief endorsed the practice while admitting that he's been a victim of it.  

New Police Chief

Phillip Banks III is the ultimate Uncle. Tom.  He took time last week to endorse the use of stop and frisk tactics in NYC to harass and humiliate people of color in our city. But, he supports the racist approach to policing that Mayor Bloomberg has made the centerpiece of his mayoralty while admitting that the practice victimizes people of color. Phillip Banks III, as a person of color, has actually been victimized by the practice. Yet, he supports the practice fully and wishes to see his fellow New Yorkers suffer from it. 

All of us should have just as much contempt for Phillip Banks III as we do for Ray Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg. In fact, one could argue that Phillip Banks III should be held in the highest contempt because he supports the racist stop-and-frisk program while possessing familiarity with the burden it imposes on law-abiding New Yorkers. Phillip Banks III knows that 90% of stop-and-frisk victims are people of color and that 90% of the stop-and-frisk victims are not even issued a summons. Moreover, Phillip Banks III knows that despite the stop-and-frisk programs avoidance of stops of white New Yorkers, those white New Yorkers who are stopped are twice as likely to have illegal guns or illegal drugs as the people of color who get the attention of the NYPD. 

While Bloomberg and Kelly seem to enjoy the Apartheid system for the control and power it affords them, Phillip Banks III enjoys the practice of actually subjugating his sisters and brothers throughout our great city.

So, Phillip Banks III must resign now. We cannot afford to tolerate the Bloomberg Apartheid a day longer. If Bloomberg, Kelly, and Phillip Banks III won't leave quietly, we must all raise our voices loudly and force them out immediately.

NYPD Inspector General

Predictably, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly opposes independent oversight of the NYPD. As the City Council looks to mandate an Inspector General for the NYPD to investigate police abuses, Ray Kelly states that such an approach would endanger the public. In essence, the public is only safe if the NYPD has unlimited freedom to break laws and violate constitutional freedoms. Of course, he's wrong. We won't be safe until his power is taken away. We'll only be safe when the NYPD is forced to respect the rule of law and reduce their abuse of people of color in our city. 

NAACP Takes on Bloomberg on Stop and Frisk

The NAACP has called on Mayor Bloomberg to end his stop-and-frisk tyranny.

NAACP and Stop and Frisk

Yesterday, the NAACP made news by stating the need for stop-and-frisk to end immediately.

The head of the NAACP took the pulpit of a Brooklyn church on Sunday to demand that Mayor Bloomberg end the controversial stop-and-frisk program before his term ends.
“Mayor Bloomberg, I ask you, before you leave, repair the damage you have done,” pleaded NAACP President Benjamin Jealous. Addressing about 100 worshipers at Nazarene Congregational Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Jealous called for New Yorkers to “stand up” and tell the mayor, “There is no place for racial profiling.”

The Next Mayor

We will have a new Mayor in January 2014, and the NAACP is determined not to allow the next Mayor to abuse people of color the way that the current Mayor has for so many years.

As Bloomberg's third, and last, term nears its end in January, Jealous said he expects the city's new mayor to oppose stop-and-frisk tactics, along with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The Democrat announced recently that he's working to help stop the practice.
If the new mayor doesn't do that, too, Jealous vowed that "we'll do a lot more than march."

Stop and Frisk

As we discussed last week, stop-and-frisk has been the topic we've addressed with the greatest frequency and with deepest concern. It is the topic that should be at the top of the agenda for any Mayoral candidate.

Stop and Frisk Revisted

Last week, a new set of data regarding stop-and-frisk activity in NYC in 2012 emerged. While much has changed, much has not. 

Stop and Frisk History

We have repeatedly urged an end to the unconstitutional, racist, and disgusting Bloomberg stop-and-frisk Apartheid system in NYC.

Here is what we said in June 2011:

More than any other issue we have highlighted, we have focused on Mayor Bloomberg's and the NYPD's obsession with stopping innocent people of color in our city.

In March of this year, we focused on the payments that our city has made using our tax dollars to the victims of stop-and-frisk activity.

In September of last year, we expressed frustration with the quotas imposed on NYPD officers by their superiors and how those quotas drive the stop-and-frisk abuses.

In July of last year, we praised Governor Paterson for ending the NYPD practice of indefinite retention of data collected from the innocent victims of the stop-and-frisk reign of terror that the NYPD brings on a consistent basis to communities of color in our city.

In May of last year, we summarized all of our previous blogs regarding the stop-and-frisk outrage and noted, with alarm, that the often cited "fit the description" excuse for the stop-and-frisk abuses were not even the excuses that the NYPD actually lists for the horrible racism that drives their policing philosophy. The NYPD's own excuse for stopping hundreds of thousands of innocent people of color each year is that the stopped individuals were behaving suspiciously. There is no crime reported in the area and no description to fit. The act of being a person of color makes one suspicious to the NYPD, and the NYPD's race-based suspicions turn into stops.

The Mayor and the NYPD continue to increase their racist tactics and intensify their abuse of communities of color, and non-racist people must stand up and oppose these abuses. If the Mayor will not end these practices, we must demand that the Mayor resign. No police force in our country should be permitted to abuse its citizens of color with such ferocious and racist dedication. We, as residents of the greatest city on our planet, must put an end to it.

Stop and Frisk Constitutionality

In the Bronx, the Bloomberg stop-and-frisk Apartheid was determined to violate the United States Constitution, but Bloomberg was unashamed and undeterred. 

 

2012 Stop-and-Frisk Data

Now, we have learned that NYC's stop and frisk numbers declined in 2012:

* Cops made 685,724 stops in 2011, compared with 533,042 last year.
* They used stop-and-frisk to take 780 guns off city streets last year, a 5 percent drop from 2011.
* A total of 7,137 weapons were confiscated. The number of knives recovered was 4,970, a 15 percent decline from 2011.
* There were also 1,387 “other” types of weapons recovered last year — a 12 percent drop from 2011.
* Five percent of the stops last year ended with a summons being issued and 6 percent ended with an arrest, according to the new NYPD numbers. Those numbers are about the same as the 2011 figures.

The New York Civil Liberties Union, a persistent critic of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy, slammed the numbers.

“These numbers show that the NYPD continues to stop, interrogate and humiliate innocent people far too frequently and that New Yorkers of color continue to bear the brunt of this indignity,” said NYCLU executive director Donna Lieberman.
Lieberman also said guns were found in only .01 percent of stops, calling the figure “an unbelievably poor yield rate for such an intrusive, wasteful and humiliating police action.”

Highlights of 2012 Blogs

Today is the last day of 2012, and we use this week's blog to look back at the highlights of the 2012 Manhattan Viewpoint blogs.

NYPD Abuses Increase While Stop and Frisk Evolves

We began 2012 frustrated by the additional abuses of the NYPD that were added to the racist stop-and-frisk policies that we have been facing from years from the NYPD. The NYPD beat NYC residents and killed an unarmed young man. The outrage we felt was increased by learning that the NYPD had been tracking muslims in Newark, NJ. The last straw was the revelation that the NYPD was spying on left-of-center groups despite the lack of evidence that any threat was presented by the groups.

Stop-and-frisk abuses by the NYPD began to decline in April of 2012 because of community pressure for change.

We end 2012 praying that Mayor Bloomberg's and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly's unrepentant support for stop-and-frisk abuses of people of color in our city will end early in 2013 rather than wait for a new Mayor to take over.

Other Highlights

Congressman Charlie Rangel was re-elected after a long and difficult campaign.

President Obama won all of the most educated states in the US as he earned a second term as President.

Colonel Young Park remains in disrepair but now has community support for an upgrade.

The Barclays Center opened in Brooklyn.

Hurricane Sandy devastated our community.

Looking Forward to 2013

The NY Times described the upcoming year's political focus well.

"Mayoral politics will dominate the local headlines. Mr. Bloomberg’s many would-be successors will not have the personal fortune he spent to win office ($174 per vote in 2009). Which of them will end up on the November ballot: Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker? Joseph J. Lhota, who is leaving the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to look into running as a Republican? Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner?"

Stop and Frisk Solutions Emerge in the NY City Council

Last week, the New York City Council held hearings regarding proposals to start repairing the broken stop and frisk policing approach.

Stop and Frisk

We have often discussed the tragedy of Mayor Bloomberg's obsession with using skin color as the key determinant of whether a resident should be treated as a criminal or not. The Mayor has been unwilling to consider any non-racist alternatives to his approach, and his police commissioner has even suggested that the racist stop and frisk policies persist because no alternatives have been proposed by the opponents of the practice.

The judge supporting a law suit against NYC for the stop-and-frisk abuses helped lay out the problems with the practice, and the New York Times stated how unhelpful and racist the Mayor's approach is.

"As Judge Scheindlin notes in her opinion, a report by the legal scholar Jeffrey Fagan found that blacks and Latinos were more likely to be stopped at police discretion, not just in high-crime, high-minority areas, but in districts where crime is minimal and populations are mixed.
Police officials say that officers stop people when they have reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. An analysis last year by The Times of street stops in one mainly black Brooklyn neighborhood found that officers listed vague reasons in half the stops, including “furtive movement,” a category that can be used to mask harassment.
The Fagan report found that arrests are made in less than 6 percent of all street stops — a lower rate than if the police simply set up random checkpoints. Less than 1 percent of stops turned up weapons. This suggests that hundreds of thousands of people, mostly minorities, have been stopped for no legitimate reason — or worse, because of the color of their skin."

Last Week's Hearing

The New York City Council held a hearing on four proposals to fix the stop-and-frisk abuses, but the NYPD, the entity which executed the stop-and-frisk activities, chose not to send a representative to the hearing. In fact, the only defender of the racist stop-and-frisk policies that the Mayor has made the centerpiece of his policing strategy was Counsel to the Mayor Michael Best. Best admitted that he knew virtually nothing about NYPD practices, abuses, or any of the controversies that resulted in the hearing. He repeatedly stated that any new laws related to the Mayor's stop-and-frisk policies would be "legally infirm," suggesting that the Council did not have the power to restrict the Mayor's ability to conduct law enforcement activities in a racist manner. Defenders of the Mayor and opponents of stop-and-frisk agreed that Michael Best provided no sound argument for his assertion that the NYC Council could not take action to reduce the abuses brought about by stop-and-frisk.

"Councilmember Brand Lander called Best's arguments 'absurd,' noting that taking this view, every single new law we passed would be considered 'curtailing.'  Speaker Christine Quinn asked Best who signed a law prohibiting racial profiling. 'Bloomberg! That's my point!' Quinn said. 'How could you say that we don't have the authority?'
Even the chairman of the Public Safety Committee, Peter Vallone Jr., who opened the hearing with a strident opposition to the bill that would loosen the current definition of racial profiling, said he was confused by Best's argument that creating Inspector General for the NYPD would infringe on the mayor's power. Best repeated that having guidelines for hiring the IG, as the bill does, would curtail the mayor's authority. 'You didn't give me a lot of reasons there,' Vallone said, shaking his head. 'But okay.' "

The New York Times described the four proposals:

1. Require police officers, when conducting stops, to identify themselves, provide their name and rank, and explain the reason for the stop.
2. Seek to add teeth to an existing ban on racial profiling
3. Require that officers inform individuals of their right to refuse a search and obtain proof of their consent, if granted, in cases in which there is no other legal basis to search an individual.
4. Create an office of the Inspector General, which would oversee the NYPD.

While City Council Speaker Christine Quinn refused to support these proposals, we hope that they will become law in our city. We should not elect any candidates who are unwilling to make changes to the racist stop-and-frisk policies of Mayor Bloomberg.

Slowing Stop and Frisk

After repeated increases, the number of stop and frisk incidents declined 25% in the second quarter of 2012 compared with 2011. The reasons for the decline are many.

Abuse

Ever since Bloomberg became Mayor, the tactic of stopping and frisking innocent New Yorkers has become an obsession for NYC law enforcement. The number of stops has risen from less than 100,000 in the pre-Bloomberg era to nearly 700,000 last year. Nearly 90% of those stopped are Black or Hispanic, but white residents who are stopped are more than twice as likely to be carrying illegal weapons or drugs. More than 90% of those stopped are not issued a summons or arrested. Even in low-crime neighborhoods and white neighborhoods, Black and Hispanic New Yorkers are stopped in far larger number than their population would suggest appropriate. These stops are a terrorist tactic adopted by Mayor Bloomberg and used as the primary law enforcement approach by the NYPD.

Recently, a federal judge certified a class action suit against NYC based on the stop and frisk abuses, and a silent march was held in June on Father's Day to protest the tactic and to seek its end.

Declining Abuse

The protest and the class action suit seem to be having an impact on law enforcement tactics.

In the months, of April, May, and June of 2012, NYPD officers conducted 25% less stops than in the same period in 2011. But, the number of stops was still a sky-high 133,000. We cannot accept these outrageous tactics. The 25% decline is not nearly enough. NYC is still on pace to have more than 600,000 stops in 2012, and such a performance would reinforce the need for the Mayor and the police commissioner to resign.

The NYPD is claiming that the decline in stop and frisk incidents is a result of changes in the NYPD's placement of rookies. The NYPD states that rookies have been placed in high crime areas and told to stop any suspicious people and that rookies are now being placed elsewhere. The approach of making rookies the engine of the stop and frisk abuses is itself outrageous. They learn, early in their careers, to abuse residents of color and to over-emphasize stopping innocent people rather than identifying criminals or reducing crime.

The real reason for the reduction comes from the community's response to the stop and frisk abuses.

Letitia James, a critic of stop-and-frisk, isn't buying the NYPD's rationale. "I reject their reason for the reduction in stop and frisks. The reduction in stop and frisks is directly related to the criticism of the practice, of the abuse of the practice."

Officers tell WNYC that the 2nd quarter drop was expected, due to a reluctance by cops to conduct stops under growing controversy about the tactic.

The New York Civil Liberties Union said it was encouraged by the data. “This reduction is a good start, but much more needs to be done to rebuild community trust and protect New Yorkers from illegal and racially biased street stops,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said in a statement.

Let's hope that the "much more" Donna Lieberman wishes for will come in short order.

Bloomberg and Kelly Have Blood on Their Hands

Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly have blood on their hands. The skyrocketing shootings in our city are resulting from their adherence to racism and their rejection of common sense.

Stop and Frisk Costs Lives

As we have discussed many times, Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly have been harassing and humiliating innocent people of color throughout our city (in high crime areas and low crime areas in communities of color and in white communities) in record numbers every year since they rose to power, and they have been allowing criminals to thrive. 

A federal judge in 2011 supported a law suit based on stop and frisk while attacking the NYPD approach.

As Judge Scheindlin notes in her opinion, a report by the legal scholar Jeffrey Fagan found that blacks and Latinos were more likely to be stopped at police discretion, not just in high-crime, high-minority areas, but in districts where crime is minimal and populations are mixed.
Police officials say that officers stop people when they have reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. An analysis last year by The Times of street stops in one mainly black Brooklyn neighborhood found that officers listed vague reasons in half the stops, including “furtive movement,” a category that can be used to mask harassment.
The Fagan report found that arrests are made in less than 6 percent of all street stops — a lower rate than if the police simply set up random checkpoints. Less than 1 percent of stops turned up weapons. This suggests that hundreds of thousands of people, mostly minorities, have been stopped for no legitimate reason — or worse, because of the color of their skin.
The Police Department says it has a training program that explains proper arrest procedure and warns officers against racial profiling. But Judge Scheindlin was sharply critical of those efforts, noting that numerous officers did not recall ever receiving such training.

The NYPD has been using skin color to stop innocent people while letting real criminals go free. The Village Voice recently highlighted the NYPD's lack of willingness to address criminal activities.

Investigators went beyond [the whistle blower's] specific claims and found many other instances in the 81st Precinct where crime reports were missing, had been misclassified, altered, rejected, or not even entered into the computer system that tracks crime reports.

These weren't minor incidents. The victims included a Chinese-food delivery man robbed and beaten bloody, a man robbed at gunpoint, a cab driver robbed at gunpoint, a woman assaulted and beaten black and blue, a woman beaten by her spouse, and a woman burgled by men who forced their way into her apartment.

"When viewed in their totality, a disturbing pattern is prevalent and gives credence to the allegation that crimes are being improperly reported in order to avoid index-crime classifications," investigators concluded. "This trend is indicative of a concerted effort to deliberately underreport crime in the 81st Precinct."

Stop and Frisk Does Not Reduce Crime

We have previously focused on the fact that stop and frisk does not reduce crime.

[A]lthough the stop-and-frisk rate increased six fold, the murder rate continued the same slight rate of decline during the last decade as it has since 1997. See the graph above. In fact, crime was reduce sharply in the early 1990's because of a massive increase in police officers and a Dinkins-led tactic called "community policing".

In 2002, Ray Kelly criticized stop and frisk.

“A large reservoir of good will was under construction” before Mr. Giuliani, he told the City Bar Association. “It was called community policing. But it was quickly abandoned for tough-sounding rhetoric and dubious stop-and-frisk tactics that sowed new seeds of community mistrust.”

He has changed his mind.

Mayor Bloomberg and his police chief Ray Kelly defend stop and frisk tactics by using the "big lie" that stop and frisk reduces crime. They know it does not reduce crime, yet they increase the number of young men of color who are stopped each year. They vocally and forcefully defend the practice as if their minds have been replaced by the mind of Bull Connor.

Time for Bloomberg and Kelly to Leave Office

We have experienced a recent dramatic rise in shootings. Bloomberg and Kelly have been obsessed with the racist stop and frisk approach, and that obsession is now costing lives in large numbers. This trend cannot be tolerated. If Bloomberg were one-tenth as focused on reducing crime as he has been on defending his racist law enforcement approach, preventing people of color from joining the Fire Department, maintaining the whitest administration in generations, and preventing children of color from entering gifted and talented programs, crime would be dropping rather than skyrocketing.

Now, after 11 years of the Mayor's refusal to follow common sense and after 11 years of the Mayor's unapologetic adherence to an Apartheid system, we need a new direction; we can ill afford to wait for the Mayor's current term to end. He must leave now.

NYC Police Applaud the Killing of Unarmed Youth

Our city's disgust with the behavior and practices of police officers in our city reached new levels as our city's police force engaged in a thoroughly horrifying standing ovation for the killer of an unarmed Bronx youth.

Ramarley Graham

The unarmed young man, who lost his life because our city's police are seeking to subdue and eliminate black residents rather than protect us, was named Ramarley Graham. He died in his own bathroom when he was shot by an NYPD officer who had stormed into the building by ordering other residents, at gun point, to step aside and let him in.

Footage from private surveillance cameras shows Graham walking into his grandmother's apartment building, a three-story home on a residential street.
Police officers, guns drawn, quickly follow and attempt to kick down the front door after finding it locked. In the back of the building, other officers swarm in through a rear apartment. The cameras do not capture what transpired inside, but officers quickly entered Graham's grandmother's apartment on the second floor. They did not have a search warrant.
The large number of officers at the house indicated that Graham wasn't likely to escape and that officers could have waited to obtain a warrant before storming the apartment.

Graham's death has resulted in a civil case against the NYPD by his family and neighbors. In a sign of how the NYPD treats its law-abiding citizenry, the landlord was abused after Graham was killed.

The gunshots brought the landlady, Paulet Minzie, 55, out of the shower and down the stairs from the third floor, with only a towel covering her below the waist, the court papers say.
“Police screamed at her causing great alarm,” the notice says. “Ms. Minzie immediately retreated up the stairs toward her apartment, trailed by the two officers who had just been searching for (and killed) Ramarley Graham.
As Ms. Minzie reached the threshold of her apartment door, police ordered her to put her hands up and put a gun to her head,” the papers say. One officer kept the gun to her head until she told him there were surveillance cameras operating, she alleged.
“[He\] immediately lowered his weapon. His demeanor completely changed, and he alerted his colleague that they may be on camera,” the papers say.

Cheering the Killing of Unarmed Black Youth

 

NYPD Officer Richard Haste killed Ramarley Graham. After he entered a not-guilty plea in a Bronx court, he was given a loud standing ovation by members of the NYPD.

 

The next time that the Mayor claims that the killings and abuse of people of color in our city at the hands of the NYPD is a coincidence, I want him to be reminded that no one has ever cheered a cop killer. The cops, when they are the murders, cheer the murder. Officers who have shot unarmed Black youth in the back have been named "officer of the month" and have had both their bail and their legal expenses paid for by the police union.

We need the Bloomberg years to end today. Too many deaths. Too much abuse. Bull Connor is not a good model for a NYC Mayor. Let's turn the page and end the Apartheid era in NYC.

June 17 March to End Stop and Frisk in NYC

Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, recently discussed the upcoming June 17 march in NYC in opposition to stop and frisk in The Root.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently made a disturbing revelation about the New York City Police Department's policy of stopping pedestrians and forcibly searching their bodies for weapons. He revealed that police do not actually expect to find any weapons.

Stop and Frisk Is Racist, Abusive, and Ineffective

In the wake of new data showing that New York City's stop-and-frisk encounters turned up one gun every 3,000 stops (or 0.03 percent of the time), Bloomberg compared the policy to a highway sobriety checkpoint. He argued that the program acts as a deterrent to crime, so it cannot be judged by its rate of success.

But for the majority of people who walk away without a charge, the experience serves only to undercut trust in the police who are sworn to protect them. The experience is an invasion of privacy, a humiliation and a stinging reminder of how police resources are being diverted away from solving homicides, rapes and other violent crimes to support an ineffective and racially biased practice.
Comparing police officers to officers at a checkpoint is both dangerous and misleading. Sobriety checkpoints are legal only because they are entirely random: Police must stop every car or every second, third or fourth car, and so on. This prevents any danger of profiling drivers based on stereotypes of race, gender and ethnicity.


With stop and frisk, there is no such mechanism in place. More than half of the stops in 2011 were justified in police ledgers as a response to "furtive movements." This ambiguity leaves little room for accountability at any level and significant room to illegally profile.

A recent New York Civil Liberties Union report showed that 87 percent of those stopped by the NYPD were African American or Latino, even though those groups were less likely than whites to be found with a weapon. Ninety percent of African Americans and Latinos stopped were innocent of any legal infraction.

There is no reason that people of color need more deterrence than any other racial group in the city. It would seem that the NYPD is trying to instill more fear in one section of the population over another -- a demographic that has less political clout and less means to defend itself from bullying.

Stop-and-frisk policing is, in fact, counterproductive. A healthy police force should be modeled on the image of a police officer walking the beat and interacting with neighbors. But in many New York City neighborhoods, residents live in fear of officers. Between those who get stopped, those who know someone who got stopped and those who read about racial disparities in the newspaper, the program erodes trust in police officers and destroys the valuable relationships between officers and the communities they serve.

Other large cities are effectively cutting crime without resorting to stop and frisk. The violent-crime rate fell 29 percent in New York City from 2001 to 2010, but it also fell 59 percent in Los Angeles over the same time period, 56 percent in New Orleans and 49 percent in Dallas. In these cities, community policing and data-driven methods have proved effective in rooting out crime.

March in NYC to Protest Stop and Frisk

This Father's Day, the NAACP and other civil rights activists, civil liberty advocates and community members will march silently down the streets of New York City to protest stop-and-frisk policing. The tradition of silent marches for civil rights dates back to 1917, when W.E.B. Du Bois and the 8-year-old NAACP marched through New York City to protest lynchings, segregation and race riots in the South.

Silence is a powerful force that, like other forms of nonviolent protest, holds a mirror to the brutality of one's opponents. On June 17 we will hold up a mirror to New York City's stop-and-frisk policy. For more information about the event, visit silentmarchnyc.org.


The NYPD is stopping New Yorkers at higher levels than at any time in the city's history. As the number of stops continues to grow, it will seem more and more as if the NYPD has set up a checkpoint on every corner. That would be an unwelcome development for the nation's most diverse city.

Speaker Quinn's Bloomberg Moment

Speaker Quinn's enthusiastic endorsement of stop-and-frisk disqualifies her in the Mayor's race. She has worked so hard to be loved by Mayor Bloomberg that she is endorsing his disgusting and shockingly racist approach to law enforcement.

Supporting Our City's Enemies

Last week, Speaker Quinn stated that she'd keep Ray Kelly as NYC's police commissioner if she became Mayor. For that reason alone, we must make ensuring that she never becomes Mayor a top priority.

Speaker Quinn is fully supportive of the same leaders who have brought the scourge of stop-and-frisk to our city, and our self-respect as NYC residents should make us determined to end that scourge as soon as possible.

Ray Kelly, with the full support of Mayor Bloomberg, has led a 700% increase in stopping and frisking innocent young men of color. If this activity occurred in another country, we'd consider it a human rights abuse. In 2011, Ray Kelly led the stopping of more young Black men than actually live in our city. That reality is worthy of restating: In one year, Ray Kelly stopped more innocent young Black men in our city than the number of young Black men who live in our city. The 700% increase in stop-and-frisk has not reduced crime, has not made us safer, has not resulted in a meaningful number of arrests, and has not recovered a meaningful amount of illegal weapons. The 700% increase in stop-and-frisk has resulted in de-humanizing young men of color in the eyes of law enforcement. The 700% increase in stop-and-frisk has undermined the relationship between communities of color and law enforcement. The 700% increase has caused law enforcement to focus on innocent young men of color while allowing real criminals to go unchallenged, uninvestigated, unarrested, and unconcerned as the pursue criminal activity. The NYPD has been telling crime victims to ignore the crimes they've endured so that officers have time to stop innocent young men of color. Ray Kelly is the architect and the personification of the unsafe, indefensible, racist, and counterproductive criminalization of being young, male, and non-white in our city. Speaker Quinn should be ashamed of herself for endorsing a discredited and morally bankrupt approach to policing our city. If Speaker Quinn is determined to side with the enemies of our city, she cannot be permitted to continue to lead us.

Mayoral Race 2013

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has been the loudest and strongest voice amongst likely Mayoral candidates in opposing stop and frisk. Public Advocate Bill de Blasio recently demanded an audit of stop and frisk. Only Speaker Quinn has endorsed stop and frisk. She stated: "[Stop-and-frisk] helped drive down crime rates."

Speaker Quinn's values are not acceptable in a NYC Mayor. We must oppose racism, white supremacy, and the dehumanization of young men of color. We must oppose Speaker Quinn.

200th Blog - Thank You

This is the 200th blog of Manhattan Viewpoint. Thank you for reading.

What is Manhattan Viewpoint?

Manhattan Viewpoint is focused on local issues, local activities, and local perspectives. Some national or international issues have a major impact locally and should be addressed with respect to that local impact. Many local issues are overlooked as we focus more broadly. Manhattan Viewpoint is here to help us see what is happening to us in our neighborhood.

Most Read Blog

The most read blog entry of the first 200 was a blog reflecting the local connection to a national issue. On May 30, 2011, Manhattan Viewpoint addressed the decline numbers of Board members of color at our nation's largest companies.

Though people of color represent 34% of the US population, people of color are only 10% of the population of Boards of Directors of Fortune 500 companies.Perhaps more troubling is the trend. The Boards of the largest 100 US companies lost nearly half of their Black male Board members between 2004 and 2010, going from 93 Board seats in 2004 to 51 Board seats in 2010. The combined male and female numbers for Black Board members dropped from 120 in 2004 to 77 in 2010. In 2010, Black Board members represented less than five percent of all Board seats.

In that same blog, Manhattan Viewpoint addressed the differing views of racial discrimination coming from different racial groups.

Perhaps a sign of the challenges our country faces in curing its race-oriented realities is a new study that shows that white US residents believe that the primary victims of racism are white Americans and that racism against white Americans in the US today is more severe than racism against Black Americans. While these findings are shocking, they may help explain why Boards of Directors of US companies are aggressively reducing their Black populations in recent years.

Prescient Blog

As Caroline Kennedy sought to be appointed to the US Senate by Governor David Paterson, we wrote that Paterson would be smarter to pick a young Congress member named Kirsten Gillibrand.


Senator Gillibrand has made us very proud. We told you so.

Mayor Bloomberg

Manhattan Viewpoint has consistently been critical of the Mayor's support for the racist stop-and-frisk policing of the NYPD, the Mayor's refusal to support racial integration of the NYC Fire Department, and the Mayor's exclusion of people of color from leading positions in his administration. The criticism has extended to his handling of education in our city, where only 28% of Black male students graduate high school.


We have not been unwilling to praise the Mayor when he deserved praise. He has improved the health of our residents with aggressive anti-smoking rules, improved information regarding calorie content provided by restaurant chains, led the opposition the proliferation of guns, and other undertaken other praise-worthy initiatives. Mayor Bloomberg was outspoken in support of the building of an Islamic cultural center in Lower Manhattan, even as polls showed that NYC residents opposed such a center. We praised him for being right about that center.


In the end, the Mayor's unwavering defense of intensely racist policies is not outweighed by the good that he's done. He has not been held accountable by voters for his support of those policies, but, Manhattan Viewpoint will continue to attempt to illuminate how unacceptable the Mayor's approach is.

What Next?

We hope that Manhattan Viewpoint does not end at 200 blog entries. The goal is to continue this effort to illuminate, educate, inspire, and mobilize.

Yale Offers an Alternative to Stop and Frisk

Mayor Bloomberg's brutally racist stop-and-frisk approach to law enforcement in NYC has not reduced crime. Now, a Yale professor and his student propose that NYC use an approach that has worked elsewhere.

Stop and Frisk Is a Failure

We know that Stop and Frisk does not work. Looking at murder rates and stop and frisk incidents shows that crime has not declined during the era of intense stopping and frisking of young men of color in our city. In fact, the Bloomberg approach, and its Apartheid-based vision in which all young men of color are investigated as criminals on a daily basis with probable cause being merely their combination of youth and skin color, has caused great pain and suffering in communities of color while not improving the safety in those communities.

[A]lthough the stop-and-frisk rate increased six fold, the murder rate continued the same slight rate of decline during the last decade as it has since 1997.

Mayor Bloomberg and his police chief Ray Kelly defend stop and frisk tactics by using the "big lie" that stop and frisk reduces crime. They know it does not reduce crime, yet they increase the number of young men of color who are stopped each year. They vocally and forcefully defend the practice as if their minds have been replaced by the mind of Bull Connor.

Many New Yorkers have given up on attempting to "talk sense into" Bloomberg and Kelly, and the conventional wisdom is that people of color will continue to suffer until a new Mayor takes office in 2014.

We should not give up so easily. Bloomberg undoubtedly wants to have a positive legacy, and he likely could be convinced that having a legacy of being more racist than Rudy Giuliani will be less and less attractive as the years pass. Bull Connor was controversial in his time. Today, he is the epitome of race-hatred. Years from now, Bloomberg will be viewed as the staunchest defender and promoter of institutionalized racism in the United States in the early years of the 21st Century. He must have moments when he'd rather be viewed as a positive force. Also, there is no guarantee that Bloomberg will not seek to be Mayor for at least another four years. He might try to stay in office to position himself for new opportunities, and he might decide that only he will keep stop and frisk in place. Bloomberg has changed the term limits in the past, and his wealth allows him to scare off potential challengers. Bloomberg might be the Mayor for the rest of his life, and young men of color should assume that Bloomberg's life will be long - far too long to wait for the end the of the Apartheid approach that he brought with him.

So, we need to keep telling the truth. We need to keep up the pressure. Mayor Bloomberg must end his racist approach to policing or resign. There is no middle ground, and we cannot assume that the Bloomberg nightmare ends in 2014. There is no firm expiration date for stop and frisk. It will end only when we raise our voices and make Mayor Bloomberg, Ray Kelly, and their Bull Connor brains choose a new direction.

Yale Professors Offer an Alternative

A new direction is what is offered by a Yale professor and his student.

It would be new for Bloomberg, but it is what worked to reduce crime in NYC previously. It was brought to New York City by Mayor Dinkins. It has worked in Boston and Seattle as well as in may other parts of the United States.

What the Yale professor and his student call "focused deterrents" relies on the community and the police force developing a positive relationship. In NYC, Bloomberg and Kelly have turned police and the community into enemies. They have demanded that the police abuse the innocent people in the community when the police should have been protecting the innocent and building trust in the process.

Developed by the criminologist David M. Kennedy, focused deterrence is in many ways the opposite of stopping and frisking large sections of the population. Beginning with the recognition that a small cohort of young men are responsible for most of the violent crime in minority neighborhoods, it targets the worst culprits for intensive investigation and criminal prosecution.

Focused deterrence also builds up community trust in the police, who are now going after the real bad guys instead of harassing innocent bystanders in an effort to score easy arrests. . .

Rather than sweep through and stop large numbers of young black men, the police built strong relationships with residents, promising greater responsiveness if they took back the reins of their community and told their sons, nephews and grandsons that the violence and the overt dealing must end.

"Going after the real bad guys" is what we seek.

We found that the NYPD was setting records for stopping innocent people of color while ignoring real criminals and encouraging victims of crime to ignore their victimization.

If the NYPD will end its terrorizing of innocent people and collaborate with the community to "go after the real bad guys", we can reduce crime and save Bloomberg from a Bull Connor legacy at the same time.

NYPD Gone Wild III

We have discussed at length the NYPD's outrageous spying on Muslims in Newark and its racist stop-and-frisk abuses in NYC. Last week, we learned of new NYPD abuses that stretch beyond racial or religious profiling to political profiling.

New Orleans Spying

The Daily News reported last week that left-of-center organizations meeting in New Orleans in 2008 were infiltrated by the NYPD. This is a shocking finding because it seems to undeniably unjustifiable. 

2004 Republican Convention

The previous defense of spying and infiltrating was a perceived need for the NYPD to have an over-the-top level of security and intelligence-gathering in the lead-up to the 2004 Republican National Convention in NYC. The NYPD spying activities related to the convention are the subject of an ongoing law suit, and the NYPD may ultimately be found to have violated the Constitutional rights of individuals who sought to oppose the Republican Party platform. If Constitutional violations are found, we would nonetheless have sympathy with any law enforcement organization taking responsibility for the entire leadership of one of our two major political parties for up to a week. Learning to provide security in such a situation and adhere to the Constitution will be a task for other cities in the years to come, and we should pray that the participants in future conventions are kept as safe as the Republicans were in NYC in 2004.

NYPD Gone Wild in Louisiana

With no Republican Convention as an excuse, the NYPD sent spies to the New Orleans convention that brought together left-of-center groups. Four years after the Republican Convention in NYC, the NYPD was spying on organizations that opposed federal government policies, even when those groups met far from NYC.

In April 2008, an undercover NYPD officer traveled to New Orleans to attend the People’s Summit, a gathering of liberal groups organized around their shared opposition to U.S. economic policy and the effect of trade agreements between the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

When the undercover effort was summarized for supervisors, it identified groups opposed to U.S. immigration policy, labor laws and racial profiling. Two activists — Jordan Flaherty, a journalist, and Marisa Franco, a labor organizer for housekeepers and nannies — were mentioned by name in one of the police intelligence reports obtained by the AP.

“One workshop was led by Jordan Flaherty, former member of the International Solidarity Movement Chapter in New York City,” officers wrote in an April 25, 2008, memo to David Cohen, the NYPD’s top intelligence officer. “Mr. Flaherty is an editor and journalist of the Left Turn Magazine and was one of the main organizers of the conference. Mr. Flaherty held a discussion calling for the increase of the divestment campaign of Israel and mentioned two events related to Palestine.”

The document is available here.

We are now completely convinced that these abuses will continue until Mayor Bloomberg and Ray Kelly leave their current roles. Their departure cannot come too soon.