NY protest against ‘stop & frisk’

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On Father’s Day, June 17, several thousand marched behind a banner demanding that the New York City police “End Stop and Frisk” and “End Racial Profiling.” Said NAACP President Ben Jealous, a central march organizer: “Stop and frisk is the most massive local racial profiling program in the country.”

The ethnically diverse rally marched from the northern tip of Central Park on 110th St. and then proceeded south on 5th Ave., past exclusive homes, to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s mansion at 79th St. At the march’s end, near the mayor’s home, cops strong-armed dozens of mostly young marchers, who had conducted a vocal, im­ promptu rally of their own, and pushed them out of the street. There were no arrests.

Mayor Bloomberg, whose personal wealth is $22 billion, is an enthusiastic supporter of “stop and frisk.” Another proponent is Bloomberg ap­ pointee Ray Kelly, New York’s top cop, who head­ ed the training of Haitian police under a deadly U.S.-led United Nations military occupation.

The mostly silent procession, which avoided central Harlem by pre-arrangement with city officials, according to reliable sources, was mod­ eled on the 1917 NAACP silent 5th Ave. march in protest of a racist riot and the lynching of Blacks in East St. Louis.

Other rally organizers were activist/politician Rev. Al Sharpton of the National Action Network and union leaders loyal to the Democratic Par­ ty—most prominently, union President George Grisham of SEIU 1199. The march was endorsed by nearly 300 community organizations, which included immigrant rights groups, Muslim orga­ nizations, and Occupy Wall Street.

Among the signs carried by protesters were “Skin color is not reasonable suspicion,” “Stop and Frisk: The New Jim Crow” and “Frisk the Bankers.” Another, “He Couldn’t Be Here Today,” showed a drawing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Guinea immigrant killed by a hail of 41 bullets fired by NYC cops in 1999, igniting massive pro­ tests.

Donna Lieberman, Executive Director of the N.Y. Civil Liberties Union, has called stop and frisk an “unconstitutional violation of civil rights.” Ac­ cording to a report released by the NYCLU, police stopped and interrogated 685,724 individuals in 2011, a more than 600-percent increase in street stops since 2002, Bloomberg’s first year. An in­ credible 87% were Black or Latino. Of those, nine out of 10 were found innocent. Less than 2% had weapons. Black and Latino males, between 14 and 24 years old, were 41.6 percent of all stops in 2011, but only 4.7% of the city’s population!

Top cop Kelly maintains that the policy low­ ers street crime. Facts speak differently. For ex­ ample, murder in New York dropped 11% from 2002 to 2011. However, the murder rate dropped by 50% in Los Angeles, 43% in Washington, D.C., and 35% in Chicago over the same period, cities without stop and frisk.

On May 15, Federal Judge Shira Scheinlin granted a hearing for a class-action suit against the policy by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). Said CCR attor­ ney, Darius Charney, “This is not about five or six bad officers;” it affects “hundreds of thousands of people in the city.” Also pending are at least three lawsuits by civil liberties organizations against the NYPD’s patrols of privately owned buildings and the detaining of ten­ ants with the landlord’s permission.

The NYPD has also targeted New York’s Muslim com­ munity through police surveillance on legal antiwar activity, infiltration, and frame-ups on “terrorism” charges. Virtually ignored by the corporate media and organizers who sought to deflect criticism of Obama was a contingent linking attacks on the Muslim com­ munity to the war drive. Participants included Majlis Ash-Shura of Metropolitan NY, the United National An­ ti-War Coalition (UNAC), Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), the NY Board of Imams, Occupy Wall Street, the Muslim Peace Coalition USA, Pakistan USA Free­ dom Forum, the May 1st Coalition for Worker and Im­ migrant Rights, and many others.

Speaking to Socialist Action, Roksana Mun, youth or­ ganizer for DRUM—which brought several hundred, mostly women, low-wage workers of Southeast Asian origin to the march—said, “We have a vibrant immi­ grant community that has showed its solidarity with all communities of color. All communities of color must unite against all forms of police brutality, surveillance Tony Savino / Socialist Action and stop and frisk.” The Muslim Peace Coalition had about 200 marchers, many from the Harlem mosque of Imam Talib, who was invited to march up front with the lead banner.

Testimony of police violence Christopher Chadwick, a Brooklyn college student, told The New York Times, “They talk to you like you’re ignorant, like you’re an animal.” Recently, in Queens, Louis Morales, 15, and Alex Mejia, 16, were shoved into a car by narcotics police. One cop told them, “Say one word and I’m going to make your parents pick you up at the jail. You guys are just a bunch of immigrants.”

Jason Morales, an organizer for the union SEIU 1199, interviewed on Pacifica radio’s “Democracy Now!” pro­ gram, said, “It’s been more than 20 times that I’ve been stopped and frisked in my neighborhood in Brooklyn and never arrested.” When asked why, he replied, “I’m assuming because of the color of my skin. I’m brown. I’m Latino, and we experience that day in and day out. As a teenager that’s all I experienced.”

Tyquan Brehon, 18, an African American high school student, told The New York Times that he has been stopped more than 60 times, several times handcuffed, and detained for hours without charges. His case was made into a short film by Julie Dresser and Edwin Mar­ tinez.

Stop and frisk is similar to other racist policies. The NYPD “Street Crimes Unit,” now disbanded, was re­ sponsible for the death of Amadou Diallo in 1999. In Miami, what are called police “jumpouts,” guns drawn, were responsible for several high profile deaths of Af­ rican Americans over the last decade. At the June 17 Tony Savino / Socialist Action march were the fathers of Ramarley Graham 18, and Trayvon Martin, 17, murdered in South Florida, vic­ tims of racist violence against African Americans.

Ramarley Graham was killed Feb. 2, 2012, in the Bronx by Richard Haste of the NYPD narcotics unit, who claimed Graham had a gun. But Graham was un­ armed. He was shot in his bathroom in front of his grandmother and little brother. At first, cops claimed that Graham was running to his door, but a camera video showed him walking. Cops came into the house, guns drawn, kicking down a door without a warrant. Haste was charged with manslaughter.

Some 500 protesters, many from Occupy Wall Street, rallied outside Graham’s Bronx home. Frank Gra­ ham, father of the slain teen, said, “We are human be­ ings. Stop treating us like animals! My son did nothing wrong. I want justice for my son, my baby.” Protesters then rallied at the 47th precinct, chanting, “NYPD, KKK, how many kids did you kill today?”

Other high-profile murder victims of the NYPD in­ clude the elderly Eleanor Bumpers, killed in her home in 1984; Anthony Baez, whose football struck a po­ lice car in 1994; Sean Bell, killed in his van by police bullets; and Patrick Dorismond, a Haitian immigrant. Abner Louima, also a Haitian, was tortured by police (who stuck a plunger up his rectum), sparking huge protest rallies.

Coincidently, the day of the march carried news of the death of Rodney King, who was savagely beaten in 1992 by seven racist Los Angeles cops. King received 50 blows to the head, was kicked and tasered. Although it was caught on video, the cops were acquitted, which resulted in six days of rebellion and 55 dead. In the end, two were sentenced to two years behind bars.

Socialists support mass mobilizations against cop racism, brutality, and illegal spying. At the same time, we point out that there can be no permanent solution to police violence until we do away with capitalism. n The Gov. Scott Walker victory in Wisconsin’s recall election last month should not surprise us.

The Democrats are incapable of defeating the right.

Don’t the last 30 years demonstrate that? Every vote for a Democrat has meant the success of the “Re­ publican” agenda, based on the loyalty of both par­ ties to the 1%. In fact, Democrats, Obama in particu­ lar, have proven adept at advancing reactionary poli­ cies that would have sent protesters into the streets if George Bush had carried them out. Wisconsin is one more reason we need a fighting labor party!

The root of this election is the treachery of the Democratic Party, which squashed a mass move­ ment of workers in defense of their right to collec­ tive bargaining and a standard of living that they had fought for. The Dems and their union flunkies pulled the plug and sent workers ringing door bells for the Democratic Party’s 1%. What the Dems and their apologists in the union bureaucracy avoid is that the big questions of working-class power are really de­ termined in the streets and in worker action, princi­ pally strikes, and not in the ballot box.

— MARTY GOODMAN SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 2012 3

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Carlos Salmas / Getty Images Susana Gonzalez / Bloomberg (Left) Woman casts vote in Oaxaca state, July 1. (Below) Enrique Peña Nieto addresses media, July 2. had been using a secret unit to promote Peña and to “rub­ bish” his rivals.

More and more evidence July 1 was the day of reckoning for all electoral illusions. As voters went to cast their votes, more and more disquiet­ ing evidence of the magnitude of the fraud began to appear in internet sites run by citizens’ groups who were moni­ toring the elections. Contamos.org.mx, for instance, was flooded with complaints about ballots being stolen in one place or another, all sorts of irregularities at voting stations (especially in PRI dominated districts), and most notori­ ously, the widespread buying of votes. The aforementioned contamos.org.mx has been exhibiting a video taken inside a PRI so-called “raccoon hideout”(an epithet that is very un­ fair to raccoons, of course) where people are shown receiv­ ing money in exchange for their electoral ID cards. In the evening, when preliminary results were announced, with Peña pulling several points ahead of his rivals, López Obrador was stunned. He had no further messages other than he would wait until the counting was over, and that he would abide by his promise to respect the results. On Monday, July 2, people who had received the PRI’s money in the form of pre-paid cards for the Soriana su­ permarket chain, went wild trying to spend their money as fast as possible, and clogged many of the chain’s stores.