Author: Joe Siegal
It’s been hard to escape from media coverage of the exploits of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, now serving out the last year of what has become a twelve-year, three-term stay in office. During his tenure, Bloomberg has raised his profile to that of a nationally respected political figure, hailed for his lack of party affiliation in an era of political polarization as well as for his tendency to speak out on the issues he feels most passionately about.
For all the articles published, TV news segments aired and late-night monologue jokes cracked about Bloomberg’s “big soda ban,” a shamefully small fraction of media attention has been dedicated to his administration’s biggest and most unjust misstep: the willful continuation and expansion of the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) possibly unconstitutional and largely racist “stop-and-frisk” policy. Police in the city can stop and search anyone they deem suspicious, even without probable cause, creating an environment in which law enforcement and citizens are at odds. Courtesy of lackluster oversight on the parts of Bloomberg and police commissioner Ray Kelly, current NYPD practices are counter-productive, ethically suspect and destined to yield a conflagration in police-civillian relations.
According to the New York Times, on Saturday Mar. 9, 16-year-old Kimani Gray was shot and killed by two plainclothes NYPD officers in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. The officers allegedly told Gray “don’t move,” and “freeze” after seeing him adjust his waistband suspiciously. They then allegedly saw him reach for a .38 caliber pistol, at which time they fired eleven shots in his direction. The facts of the case are still unraveling, but this latest policing tragedy has brought the NYPD’s questionable practices back into light, sparking outrage, protests and subsequent arrests in Brooklyn. Gray had a prior criminal record which was publicized in the days after his death. The two cops who shot him also had records of their own: for civil rights violations. According to the New York Daily News, Sergeant Mourad Mourad and Officer Jovaniel Cordova have been accused of violations that include illegal stops and arrests. If those who violate civil rights and possibly constitutional rights in the name of law enforcement are permitted to continue doing so, tragedies like Gray’s shooting will continue to occur.
Gray’s death and a current unrelated federal trial evaluating the legality of stop-and-frisk are beginning to bring overdue attention to the problems of Mayor Bloomberg’s policies. The words emblazoned on the side of every NYPD squad car read, “Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect,” a credo which the conduct of today’s NYPD does not match and which is indicative of the gap between the perceived successes of the Bloomberg era and the real facts. As of last week, the NYPD has conducted over five million stops of New Yorkers under Mayor Bloomberg, 90 percent of which have involved African-Americans or Latinos, and 88 percent of which produce no incriminating evidence, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
While this is a local issue, its national relevance with regard to Fourth Amendment rights that protect Americans from unlawful search and seizure should elicit outrage. At the end of 2012, Bloomberg cited New York’s drop in homicides as a result of stop-and-frisk to justify his policy that turns up many more dimebags of marijuana than it does guns. In fact, ACLU reports that guns are involved in less than .2 percent of stops; marijuana arrests, meanwhile, are the most commonly booked offense in the city, according to the Associated Press. Bloomberg cannot continue to frame stop-and-frisk as a policy that takes guns off the streets and prevents homicides if minor drug offenses are its biggest successes. This punitive attitude, a remnant of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s 1990s crackdown on enforcing minor crimes, has fostered a culture in which the NYPD actively targets citizens, especially young people of color.
The NYPD’s gross misconduct towards people of color is not by any means a new problem (a quick Google search of the names of Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell or Abner Louima proves this point). The newer problem is the NYPD’s and city government’s complacent attitude. Governor Andrew Cuomo’s reported plan to push for marijuana decriminalization is a necessary step in the right direction, but one which by itself represents a mere band-aid on the gushing wound that is New York’s ineffective policing system. As long as the murder numbers look good and the neighborhoods where news cameras venture seem to be safe, many New Yorkers, and sadly, some of their representatives, ignore the issue of police brutality because it doesn’t affect them directly. By covering up the injustice of its police force’s practices in order to claim that the city is safer, New York is refusing to confront deep-rooted issues that have plagued communities for years.
The larger issue at play in Gray’s case is the tendency of the NYPD to overstep boundaries when it comes to enforcing laws, often to the ultimate detriment of citizens. Gray may or may not have had a gun on him when he was killed. Regardless, the circumstances of his death are awful and entirely preventable. The biggest tragedy in this story, however, is that a 16 year-old kid living in a heavily policed area may have justifiably viewed the NYPD not as his protector, but as a threat to his safety.
Last June, as I walked through Brooklyn putting up posters for a political campaign, the man I was working with, a former resident of the neighborhood now likely in his forties, led me over to an alley between two apartment buildings. In graphic detail, he told me about a night during the height of the ’80s crack epidemic when he was dragged from a nightclub across the street into that very alley and beaten unconscious by NYPD officers. He claimed the incident was unprovoked, and the result of the high tension of the times, and I believed him. His lesson for me, a privileged kid from a vastly different part of the city whose only run-in with the NYPD involved an officer cartoonishly stomping out a joint, was that incidents like his are avoidable and unnecessary. The longer these problems continue to go unchecked, the more inescapable the cycle of punishment will become.
Joe Siegal is a sophomore American Studies major. He can be reached at siegal@oxy.edu.
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