“He grabbed me by my bookbag and he started pushing me down. So I’m going backwards like down the hill and he just kept pushing me, pushing me, it looked like he we was going to hit me.  I felt like they was trying to make me resist or fight back.”
~Alvin, NY youth

MLK once said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”; it was true then and it’s true today.  The NYPD “stop and frisk” program that allows the New York police department to stop someone for no reason whatsoever is a violation of civil rights.  It is simply unacceptable to live in a so called “free society” wherein we allow government institutions to profile or harass American citizens without probably cause.  Now – the NYPD might disagree … they may in fact think they have probable cause; that might sound something like this: “Go stop that young n*gger; I want to f*ck with someone today.”  They just leave the white hoods at home.

I actually don’t blame the police 100%.  Let’s say 50% of all NYPD are complete racists (which I do not necessarily believe); any institution that allows those racist individuals to profile and act on their own discriminatory beliefs is a system that needs to be fixed.  In this case – the system directed by the Mayor and the Chief of Police are the problem.  If Mayor Bloomberg didn’t start this program; these civil liberty violations would be significantly fewer in number.  Watch the video and tell me if you think that’s what justice looks like.

The Nation explains the video HERE:

In this video, exclusive to TheNation.com, Alvin describes his experience of the stop, and working NYPD officers come forward to explain the damage stop-and-frisk has done to their profession and their relationship to the communities they serve. The emphasis on racking up stops has also hindered what many officers consider to be the real work they should be doing on the streets. The video sheds unprecedented light on a practice, cheered on by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, that has put the city’s young people of color in the department’s crosshairs.

The audio also betrays the seeming arbitrariness of stops and the failure of some police officers to fully comprehend or be able to articulate a clear motivation for carrying out a practice they’re asked to repeat on a regular basis.

And, according to Charney, the only thing the police officers do with clarity during this stop is announce its unconstitutionality.

We shared surveillance video of cops arresting and beating a young black kid in the Bronx for suspicion of drugs but he didn’t have anything on him and the surveillance video conflicted with the statement from the NYPD; you can see that HERE.

It isn’t a coincidence that 23% of New York citizens are black but blacks make up 50% of all the “stop and frisk” police stops in the city; you can see more on that HERE.

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