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Silent Treatment for NYPD

The following article was originally published on Wsj.com on June 17, 2012:

By Pervaiz Shallwani and Alison Fox

Thousands of protesters marched in silence through Manhattan on Sunday in an effort to end the New York Police Department's "stop-and-frisk" policy, which they claim disproportionately affects young black and Latino men.

The protesters—including civil rights, religious, union and gay rights groups—marched down Fifth Avenue from Harlem to Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Upper East Side mansion. The main sounds were the footsteps and an occasional "shush" to keep marchers quiet.

The silent march was the idea of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's president, Benjamin Todd Jealous, who aimed to invoke a quiet protest down Fifth Avenue in 1917 that was meant to draw attention to race riots in East St. Louis, Ill.

"People are coming together here in the biggest city in the country…to draw the attention of the world to what's happening here," Mr. Jealous said.

A record 685,000 stops were made in 2011, the majority of them involving black and Latino men in low-income neighborhoods. Critics have complained that only 12% of the stops have resulted in arrests, thus criminalizing noncriminals and creating distrust of police.

The city defends the tactic, which allows officers to stop, question and sometimes frisk people on the street when there is reasonable suspicion of a crime, as a successful crime-fighting tool.

"All cops are not bad, but then all of us are not criminals," said the Rev. Al Sharpton during a prayer service before the march. "What you are saying is in order to find criminals you have to criminalize all of us. And that is unacceptable.

"You cannot rob me of my civil rights, rob me of my civil liberties, rob me of my presumption of innocence and then tell me you're doing it for my own good."

Before the march, Mr. Bloomberg took to the pulpit of a black church in Brooklyn for a second straight Sunday to defend the policy.

Speaking at the Christian Cultural Center in East New York, the neighborhood with the highest number of stop and frisks last year, the mayor credited the tactic for a 34% drop in crime during his 10 years in office.

"Innocent people who are stopped can be treated disrespectfully," he said, noting that the police department has begun instituting polices to fix the problem. "That is not acceptable. If you've done nothing wrong, you deserve nothing but respect and courtesy from the police.

"Police Commissioner [Ray] Kelly and I both believe we can do a better job in this area," he said.

Reached via e-mail, NYPD chief spokesman Paul Browne defended the policy, saying that "stops save lives and occur in greater frequency where crime is concentrated."

At the march, Rep. Charles Rangel, who represents Harlem, said he has received assurances from Mr. Kelly that "this is the beginning and not the end.

"No one is saying we don't want police," he said. "No one is saying we don't want good police work. As far as I'm concerned there isn't one answer and one side of this."

Army veteran José Garcia, 31 years old, said he marched Sunday because he has been stopped and frisked near his Bronx home at least three times and never arrested or ticketed. "I just don't believe stop-and-frisk is an effective tactic," he said. "It's a way to continue racial profiling. You feel violated. They bust your chops a little and then they let you go."

"I'm a military vet. I'm not a criminal," he added. "How can you fix this? If you allow it sometimes, it's going to occur all of the time. I understand the concept of reducing firearms, but there are other ways to go about it."

Louis Soto, 27, also of the Bronx, said he wants to use his degree from John Jay College of Criminal Justice to highlight the issue. Mr. Soto said he was recently stopped and issued two tickets while waiting for a parking space: one for disorderly conduct because he was blocking traffic and the other for possession of a knife—which he said was less than four inches and was being used for renovating a family property.

"I was within my legal right," he said. "They were just very condescending. It made me feel like a criminal, which I'm not."ISON FOX

 

 

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