NYPD Racial Profiling Challenged in Court

• • criminal justice, NYC

There is a major court case happening in New York that seeks to challenge the NYPD’s practice of racial profiling through it’s “stop-and-frisk” policing.  The case, known as Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al., makes the claim that the NYPD’s policy is unconstitutional because it unfairly targets black and Latino people, specifically young men.

According to The Nation:

The NYPD has just surpassed 5 million stop-and-frisks during the Bloomberg era. Most stops have been of people of color, and the overwhelming majority were found innocent of any wrongdoing, according to the department’s own statistics. And though the number of stops may have gone down recently—as pressure on the department and increased awareness of the policy has officers and supervisors thinking twice about how they employ the practice—the existence of quotas ensures that New Yorkers will continue to be harassed unnecessarily by the NYPD.

Not familiar with the “stop-and-frisk” practice?  Here’s a video, secretly recorded by someone enduring stop-and-frisk policing from October, 2012 (about 13 minutes – and pardon the oil company advert at the beginning):

I’ll post more here about the Floyd case as it unfolds.

Documentary: “The Central Park Five”

• • criminal justice, documentary

There is an excellent, devastating, and powerful documentary out now in some theaters and on InDemand on cable, called “The Central Park Five.” The film, by Ken Burns, David McMahon and Sarah Burns, tells the story of the five black and Latino teenagers who, in 1989, were arrested and charged with brutally attacking and raping a white female jogger in Central Park. News media swarmed the case, referring to the incident as a “wilding” and to the young men as a “wolfpack.” The five young men spent years in prison before the truth about what really happened became clear. Here is a short (2:27) trailer:

Go see it if you can get to a theater, or call it up on your cable TV. Even though this documentary was inexplicably not included in the short list for Academy Awards, I’m certain that this film will be important in college classrooms for many years to come.

The [Drug] War on African Americans and Latino/as in San Francisco

• • African Americans, Americans of color, criminal justice, Latinos, law, police, politics, racism

On April 12, 2012 the San Francisco Human Rights Commission held a public hearing on “The Human Rights Impact of the War on Drugs in San Francisco.” I attended upon the request of the Commission for a report authored with Mike Males (Research Fellow, CJCJ) for the Center for Criminal and Juvenile Justice. The pews of the hearing in SF City Hall were packed, and the room charged with howls and cheers immediately upon the first testimony of the evening by California NAACP President, Alice Huffman: “I will submit to you that the War on Drugs has destroyed many African American men and women and has not protected us at all.” Notably, the NAACP solidified their fundamental and universal opposition to the drug war in a 2011 resolution.

President Huffman, along with many others offering community and expert testimony declared their agreement with the 2011 Global Commission Report on the War on Drugs. The Report explicitly labels drug war policies utter failures, and calls for an immediate pivot toward legalization and regulation of illicit substances, and for public policy to define and treat drug abuse, addiction, and overdose deaths as public health issues. Further, the report recognizes legalization as a viable strategy to combat the violence and state corruption that regulates the illicit drug trade, as was the case in the (alcohol) prohibition era recently illustrated in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.

In my testimony with CJCJ’s Selena Teji, we summarized the findings of my report with Dr. Males:

• African Americans experience felony drug arrest rates 19 times higher than other races in San Francisco, and 7.3 times higher than African Americans elsewhere in California.
• San Francisco’s explosion in drug felony arrests of African Americans, during the 1995-2009 period, did not occur elsewhere in the state, nor for other measured racial categories in the city.
• The city’s African American female youth account for over 40% of the felony drug arrests of African American female youths in California, and have arrest rates 50 times higher than their counterparts in other counties.
• More than half of all youth drug felonies involved African Americans, who constitute 9% of the city’s youth; and one-third Latino males, who comprise 11% of the city’s youth.
• Despite disproportionately high drug arrest rates among young African Americans in San Francisco, of the more than 2,000 residents and nonresidents in the city who have died from abuse of illicit drugs in the last decade, 6 in 10 were non-Latino Whites, and more than 7 in 10 were age 40 and older.
• Such stunning and socially destructive practices and disparities arguably constitute human rights violations against African Americans in San Francisco under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the anti-discriminatory clause of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In agreement with social scientific research on contemporary systemic racism that recognizes the institutionalization of racial privilege and oppression and the role of “color-blind racism” in the post-civil rights era (Feagin, 1977, 2006, 2010; Feagin and Vera, 2001; Bonilla-Silva, 2003; Alexander, 2010; Ostertag and Armaline, 2011), international law does not require proof of conscious, explicit racial animus in the legal definition of racial discrimination as do U.S. courts—discriminatory results suffice (see also Fellner and Mauer, 1998).

Though a full report from the hearing in April awaits decision, that if adopted by the Commission would initiate review and public response by SFPD and the Board of Supervisors at the very least, the report’s adoption and publication are currently stalled. Populations of color, victims of the drug war, and the civil society that pays for this long expensive policy failure deserve an end to the drug war—perhaps faster than the system can or will deliver absent considerable resistance and political pressure.

References:

Alexander, M. (2010). The New Jim Crow. New York, NY: The New Press.

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. (2003). Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the US. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Feagin, Joe. 1977. “Indirect Institutionalized Discrimination: A Typology and Policy Analysis.” American Politics Quarterly 5(1):177-220.

______. (2006). Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression. New York: Routledge.

______. (2010). Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations. New
York: Routledge.

Feagin, Joe, Hernán Vera, and Pinar Batur. (2001). White Racism. 2nd ed. New York:
Routledge.

Fellner & Mauer. (1998). Losing the Vote: The Impact of Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States. Washington D.C.: Joint Report from Human Rights Watch and The Sentencing Project. Retrieved on 03/30/12 from http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/File/FVR/fd_losingthevote.pdf.

International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination [ICERD], 660 UNTS 195, entered into force Jan. 4, 1969. The United States ratified ICERD on October 21, 1994.

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, G.A. res. 2200A (XXI), 21 U.N. GAOR Supp. (No. 16) at 52, U.N. Doc. A/6316 (1966), 999 U.N.T.S. 171, entered into force March 23, 1976, Art. 25. The U.S. ratified the ICCPR on June 8, 1992.

Ostertag, S. & W. T. Armaline. (2011). Image isn’t everything: Contemporary systemic racism and anti- racism in the age of Obama. Humanity and Society, 35(3).

William Armaline is the Director of Human Rights (@SJSUHumanRights) and an assistant professor in Justice Studies at San Jose State University.

Rodney King (1965-2012)

• • criminal justice, memoriam, racism

This Sunday marked the passing of Rodney King, and perhaps fittingly, that same day tens of thousands participated in a Silent March down Fifth Avenue to protest the stop-and-frisk practices of the NYPD.

 

There have been quite a few write ups about his passing, and the significance of his life, around the web and here are a few of those:

  • Touré writes in his Elegy for Rodney King: It was the media that transformed King’s horrific ordeal into a moment that would never die. That’s why the moment sits on a gruesome continuum of other horrific moments that were captured by the media and thus swelled to have a forceful impact on America. From Emmett Till in 1955, who was killed and beaten beyond recognition and memorialized by a photograph of his mutilated corpse lying in its coffin, to Trayvon Martin this year, whose moment of death was captured by multiple pieces of audio that seem to paint a frightening portrait of his last moments. These three are martyrs who were crucified, their bodies sacrificed, and their moment recorded and disseminated, thus showing black pain and revealing American injustice and accessing the moral power that was necessary to inspire change. …. But despite the nation watching in horror and feeling for Rodney King, another Rodney King incident could happen today.
  • Jamil Smith, producer at MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry show, writes: Rodney King nearly became the subject of one of those signs, but he survived. His battle was one which African Americans had fought many times before outside of the glare of the cameras — and yet, despite the presence of a camera, had to fight again. The cameras, in a sense, later turned on him, repeating another theme of cultural strife in this country: subjecting those symbols of those of us who must suffer with its negative effects daily to the media microscope, chipping away at dignity all the while. There’s a reason why you’re seeing a lot of “flawed” and “complicated” in headlines about King’s death, as if having been an addict somehow validated him being beaten to within an inch of his life by L.A.’s Finest. (Aren’t we all flawed and complicated?)
  • Davey D points out that “Even, in Los Angeles the place where Rodney King’s beating was supposed to spark improvement within LAPD we see that police killing civilians is up a whopping 70%. … One would think after the King beating we would’ve witnessed a sea change of improvements within the police departments. sadly what we’ve seen is fast track to enhanced, new and improved forms brutality and harassment. Since the killing of Trayvon Martin we’ve had over 30 Black people alone killed by police. That speaks volumes.”
  • Dr. Jelani Cobb writes: “The removal of Police Chief Daryl Gates and the subsequent appointment of Willie Williams, the first black police chief in L.A. history, was directly related to King’s beating. But in 2009, television viewers saw grainy footage of another black man lying prone at the feet of a California police officer, this time in Oakland. The man, Oscar Grant, had been shot and killed. Earlier this year, the New York Civil Liberties Union released a reportpointing out that in 2011 the N.Y.P.D. conducted nearly six hundred and eighty-six thousand stop-and-frisks, with blacks and Latinos accounting for more than eighty-six per cent of those targeted by police.
  • Dr. James Braxton Peterson reminds us that: “Although Rodney King escaped death that night [he was beaten by LAPD], his life was irrevocably altered; his history became inextricably linked with the violent history of police brutality, racial profiling, and racialized injustice.”

 

  • Dr. Marc Lamont Hill spoke with Rodney King a couple of months before his death, and asked him if he thought the US could erupt in violence again if, for example, George Zimmerman were acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.  When King said he didn’t believe it would, Hill chided him for his optimism, then he writes:  “Given everything that we’d seen and done as a country, how he could he be so invested in the goodness of America? He said that like all people, he had doubts. But his faith in God and America were stronger than those doubts.   That, in a nutshell, is who Rodney King was.  Not the lawless monster portrayed by the LAPD. Not the walking punch line depicted in both Black and mainstream culture. And not the unrepentant addict who never conquered his demons. Rather, Rodney King was someone who desperately aimed to love his way through the absurdity of America’s racial condition.”

 

 

 

The Scars of Stop-and-Frisk: Documentary

• • criminal justice, racial profiling

In 2011, the NYPD stopped and frisked people 685,724 times, and fully 87% of those searches involved blacks or Latinos, many of them young men, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union. There is a groundswell of protest growing against these racist police practices, yet too often, the voices of those most affected by it are not included in the discussion. Until now.

Filmmakers Julie Dressner and Edwin Martinez have created a documentary about one young man, Tyquan Brehon, who lives in one of neighborhoods in Brooklyn most frequently targeted by the police. In this short clip (5:55) which appears in The New York Times, Tyquan tells his story:

By his count, before his 18th birthday, Tyquan had been unjustifiably stopped by the police more than 60 times. His hope in sharing his story is that this will be a bigger project to examine more closely the impact of the stop-and-frisk policy on actual human beings.

Racial Profiling in France and U.S., (Pt.2)

• • criminal justice, Europe, racial profiling

In Part 1 of this post, I wrote about the similarities between the police practice of racial profiling in France and the U.S., emphasizing that different constructs of race in both countries, nonetheless, produce the same outcome, again racial profiling.

Though discredited by science, race as inherent inferiority and superiority has been central to the socio-economic organization of the U.S. The four horsemen of racial inequality—education, incarceration, health, and wealth—are living legacies of race-making in the U.S. and so is racial profiling.

 

(Image source)

“There’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact,” said President Obama in 2009 after the profiling and arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

And the stop-and-frisk of innocent, predominately Black and Latino New Yorkers is also a fact, numbering over 4 million by some estimates since 2002.  The experiences of New York University Professor Manthia Diawara  illustrates how racial profiling cuts across social class. Professor Diawara was stopped and humiliated by the police while riding in a taxi, not in the U.S. but Paris, France.

Stop-and-frisk laws in the US are not necessarily illegal, but the lawsuit against the New York Police Department’s use of this tactic challenges its legality. Similarly, stop-and-searches in France are not illegal, but racial profiling is. It should not be forgotten that racial profiling led to the 2005 revolts in France, following the deaths of 17 year old Zyed Benna and 15 year old Bouna Traoré who mistook a transformer in a power station as a safe haven and were horribly electrocuted when fleeing from a police control.

Ultimately, the Trayvon Martin tragedy and these examples are only the surface of a more pervasive and malignant, international problem in countries where blackness and stigmatized difference are major triggers of racial bias associated with pathology and crime. Will passing the “End Racial Profiling Act of 2011” in the U.S. make a difference when perception drives profiling? Hard to say. But Civil Rights history shows that behavior can be legislated where beliefs cannot. In France, however, where no such model exists, the anti-profiling lawsuit and Hollande’s reforms were largely made possible by grassroots activists, using non-traditional methods, including a damning Hip Hop focused public awareness series by the NGO, “Stop le contrôle au faciès.”

(image source)

Are stops-and-searches racially motivated in a race-blind France? OSJI lawyer Lanna Hollo sums it up best:

“The claimants are all black or North African men who were stopped by police because of what they look like rather than what they did.  This is racial, or ethnic profiling, constituting discrimination which is illegal according to the French Constitution and international law.”

Similarly, Trayvon Martin and countless others in the U.S. have been stopped for what they looked like not for what they did.

 

~ Trica Danielle Keaton, PhD, Associate Professor, African American & Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt Unviersity, is the author, of several books, most recently the co-edited volume, Black France / France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2012). This volume includes a preface by Christiane Taubira, who was recently named Minister of Justice by President Hollande. With thanks to Mamadou Diouf, Roy Jensen and Stephen Steinberg for their encouragement and invaluable comments on an earlier drafts of this work.

Racial Profiling in France and the U.S., (Pt.1)

• • criminal justice, Europe, police, racial profiling

On April 11, 2012, the special prosecutor in the Trayvon Martin case issued a second-degree murder charge against George Zimmerman who, in the affidavit, is described as having “profiled” the unarmed 17 year old teenager before firing the fatal shot. In that document, the word “profiled” stands alone without mention of race or color, casting doubt, for some, on whether race was involved.

That very same day, on the other side of the Atlantic, lawyers in France filed a landmark civil lawsuit, the first ever alleging racial profiling against the police force. All fifteen claimants in the suit are Black or Arab, and all but one is a French citizen. The word “racial” in the English translation of this type of profiling is however deceptive. Race in France is a highly taboo concept and word, expunged from political discourse and rare in everyday use. What gets translated as racial profiling, un contrôle au faciès, refers instead to an identity control or stop-and-search by the police, based not on race but arguably appearances alone.

 

(French Police Stop Unidentified Man, 2011. image from HRW)

Comparatively, these cases resonate on many levels and show how race-conscious and race-blind models still produce the same outcome: racial profiling. Although neither country has had the political will to confront this issue, the French lawsuit and one filed in New York in May represent major challenges to French and U.S. stop-and-frisk practices that have gone unabated. These lawsuits are also an important litmus test of racial profiling in stops-and-searches by police since primarily men of color in both countries are singled out.

France has long cultivated an official race-blindness, raising the maddening question of how to fight and document racial profiling when race itself is unacknowledged or evaded. Race and ethnicity are absent in the French census, and ethno-racial statistics are banned under French law, making it hard to document any form of racial discrimination. “If you mention ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ statistics to a French person,” states French sociologist Michel Wieviorka, “he or she will consider you to be a racist. The French do not consider ‘race’ as a social construction, they consider it to be a physical definition of human groups, and will not accept it.”

The new Socialist government under François Hollande acted quickly on this issue, introducing reforms that would require French police to give a receipt to people stopped. Doing so creates at once a paper trail where none had previously existed and a possible weapon in battling racial profiling. But Hollande’s administration faces a hostile police union that publicly denounced this initiative as racist and ferociously denies racial profiling, even though Arabs and Blacks are targeted.

Reports by Human Rights Watch and the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) tell another story, one showing excessive, multiple, and abusive controls of people of color, in particular outer-city youth, in direct violation of people’s rights. Per OSJI findings,  “Blacks were overall six times more likely than Whites to be stopped by police while Arabs were generally 7.6 times more likely than Whites to be stopped by the police.”

But how can profiling that is actually racial be identified in race-blind countries without a social concept of race? And, how, in the pursuit of justice and equality, can the pernicious effects of thinking and classification in racial terms be avoided when using such a concept? Not only does race-blindness deny the obvious, but when it is law or policy, deprived of historical context, it strips anti-racists of the rhetorical weapons they need to battle racial oppression.

I address these questions in Part 2.

 

~ Trica Danielle Keaton, PhD, Associate Professor, African American & Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt Unviersity, is the author, of several books, most recently the co-edited volume, Black France / France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2012). This volume includes a preface by Christiane Taubira, who was recently named Minister of Justice by President Hollande. With thanks to Mamadou Diouf, Roy Jensen and Stephen Steinberg for their encouragement and invaluable comments on an earlier drafts of this work.

Ending the Institutional Racism of NYC’s Marijuana Arrests

• • criminal justice, digital video, new jim crow

Over the past 15 years, New York City has become the marijuana arrest capital of the world due to a policing policy that functions to institutionalize racism. More than 84 percent of those arrested were people of color – even though young whites use marijuana at higher rates. Research by CUNY Professor Harry Levine finds a systematic, racial bias (pdf) to the NYPD’s approach to policing marijuana.

While possession of a small amount of marijuana (less than 25 grams) has been decriminalized in New York State since 1977, more than 50,000 people were arrested in New York City for “possessing or burning marijuana in public view” in 2011 (largely the result of the City’s controversial stop-and-frisk practices that recorded almost 700,000 stop-and-frisks last year alone).

A large majority of these arrests are the result of illegal searches, false charges, and entrapment. Several organizations in New York City such as the Drug Policy Alliance, the Institute for Juvenile Justice Reform and Alternatives (IJJRA) and VOCAL New York, are working to end these racially biased and illegal marijuana arrests. The main way these organizations are doing this now is through a piece of legislation currently in the NY State legislature.

Democrat Assemblyman Hakeem Jefferies and Republican State Senator Mark Grisanti have legislation that would clarify and to go back to the original intent of the 1977 law and make under 7/8 of an ounce an unarrestable offense. Since Jeffries will likely be elected to Congress in November, and the legislative session is almost over, this is the last chance to pass this bill. In this short (2:12) video, Assemblyman Hakeem Jefferies explains what’s behind this legislation:

Conservative media pundits like Bill O’Reilly argue that further decriminalizing marijuana will lead to an increase in street crime (as he did on air this morning on Fox & Friends or as ), but there’s no evidence for such a claim. In fact, a recent New York Times piece clarifies this by noting that crime has also dropped in jurisdictions that don’t use NYC’s aggressive, racist stop-and-frisk policing strategy.

If you’d like to take action to stop this form of institutional racism, you can sign this online petition.

Racial Underrepresentation and Discrimination in Jury Decisions

• • African Americans, criminal justice, social justice, systemic racism, whites



A Duke University press release recently described a major research study of racial disparity and likely racial bias/discrimination in jury decisions involving black and white defendants in two Florida counties:

Juries formed from all-white jury pools in Florida convicted black defendants 16 percent more often than white defendants, a gap that was nearly eliminated when at least one member of the jury pool was black, according to a Duke University-led study. The researchers examined more than 700 non-capital felony criminal cases in Sarasota and Lake counties from 2000-2010 and looked at the effects of the age, race and gender of jury pools on conviction rates.

There is a nice graphic of the Duke research results here.

The lead researcher, Patrick Bayer, the chair of Duke’s Economics Department (You can view a youtube interview with Bayer here.), has pointed out the U.S. Constitution’s 6th amendment officially imbeds the idea of a “right to a trial by a fair and impartial jury of our peers,” which is “a bedrock of the criminal justice system in the U.S.”

At least in constitutional words and theory that is. In fact, as this study suggests, the “justice” system’s practices periodically follow the path of individual and institutionalized racism rather than the path of a trial by a fair and impartial jury of one’s peers. In these Florida counties 40 percent of the jury pools had no black members, and most of the other pools had only one or two. And there is much other recent evidence of systemic racism in our criminal “justice” system as well, as we have previously discussed here.

For centuries, a great many African Americans have not gotten the benefit of this 6th amendment’s grand and egalitarian language. It is also interesting which amendments in the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution get the most praise, publicity and attention these days in the United States. This is not one of them.

Justice for Trayvon Martin

• • criminal justice, hate crime, youth

Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old, unarmed black teenager was shot and killed last month in a gated community in Florida, after a man saw him walking down a street and thought he looked “suspicious.” The case has attracted a great deal of attention because George Zimmerman, the man who has admitted to shooting Martin, has not been arrested. Melissa Harris-Perry has more in this short (4 minute) video:

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If you want to see justice for Trayvon Martin, you can sign a petition here.

Update: Here is part of a letter you can sign that is being sent out by color of change to the US Attorney General and Florida Attorney General, that updates some of the information on the police (lack of?) investigation:

At the crime scene, the Sanford, Florida police botched their questioning of Zimmerman, refused to take the full statements of witnesses, and pressured neighbors to side with the shooter’s claim of self-defense. Sanford’s police department has a history of failing to hold perpetrators accountable for violent acts against Black individuals. The police misconduct in Trayvon’s case exemplifies the department’s systemic mishandling of investigations involving violence against Black victims. And now the State Attorney’s office has rubber-stamped the Sanford police’s non-investigation, claiming that there is not enough evidence to support even a manslaughter conviction for Trayvon’s senseless and entirely avoidable death.