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| Anti-Stop and Frisk Rally, New York City - June 17, 2012. (Photo by Michael Fleshman) |
'Stop and Frisk' is a trick of the Prison Industrial Complex and white supremacists. Its purpose is to cripple young people of color with arrest and prison records. What do you think would happen if white youth were stopped by the hundreds of thousands and searched? What do you think police would find in their pockets? But the police across America give white youth a pass — their target is people of color, period. —Ronald David Jackson
By Nicole Flatow
Last year, the Miami Herald uncovered a Miami Gardens, Florida, police program that resulted in hundreds of seemingly suspicionless police stops against employees and customers at one convenience store. Employees were repeatedly charged with minor infractions such as trespassing over the objection of the store’s owner, in a “zero tolerance” program that gave police “broad powers to stop and arrest people who appear to be loitering or trespassing at the participating business,” according to the Herald.
Six months later, a Fusion investigation has revealed that the police department stopped 56,922 individuals who were never arrested between 2008 and 2013 — the equivalent of more than half the city’s population — in what was described by one public defender as “New York City stop-and-frisk on steroids.” Thousands of others were arrested after the stops.
Among those stopped without arrest was an 11-year-old black boy on his way to football practice. The police report dubbed him a “suspicious person,” noting only that they had “just cause” because he was “wearing gray sweatpants, a red hoodie and black gloves.”
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