Posted on 02/04/2007 12:30:51 AM PST by neverdem
At 14, Rocky Harris knows the routine: You raise your hands high, you keep your mouth shut and you don’t dare move a muscle.
Then the police officer’s gloved hands go up and down each leg, around your waist, across your chest and back, then down your shoulders to your wrists.
When they don’t find guns or drugs, Rocky said, they let you go. He said that he had been searched, fruitlessly, at least three times since last summer, and that he had friends who had been searched repeatedly.
“They tell you that you’re selling drugs. But I don’t do nothing wrong. I just play ball,” he said, walking through the Red Hook East housing development in Brooklyn yesterday morning, headed to a community center for a game of basketball.
On Friday, the New York Police Department released a report showing that police officers stopped 508,540 people on city streets in 2006, an average of 1,393 a day and quintuple the number from 2002. While it was difficult to find a consensus on the significance of those statistics — good patrolling, overly aggressive officers and more faithful recordkeeping are just a few explanations — it was not hard yesterday in Red Hook to find a handful of that number walking around.
More than half of those stopped, and sometimes frisked, by the police were black. The Red Hook projects have a large black population, a history of crime problems and, at least in a few young men, a wariness of the...
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After having a police officer jam a gun in his chest a few years ago, in an incident he said he would rather not discuss, Mr. Jamison said he converted to Islam and is now more conscious of the way the community is affected by such police actions.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Probable cause? What's that?
Welcome to 1984.
Whatever a law enforcement officer swears to, as long as there's no exculpatory evidence.
Good thing for dashcams.
Both exonerates and prosecutes.
Probable cause is 68% of crimes are reported by victims who describe the perpetrator as black, while 51% of the stop-and -frisk's are on young black males.
That is part of the probable cause, and location, dress, mannerisms and who you're with are also cause.
The cops aren't searching the older blacks, the female blacks, the little child blacks, the middle aged blacks...
So maybe it's young, male profiling? That's as crazy as young, male muzzie profiling at an airport in Boston! Sure, it would work, but it wouldn't look good, so go search grannie, and only stop-and-frisk grampa...
"Good thing for dashcams."
Yeah. How else could I watch "World's Wildest Police Videos?"
The trouble with dashcams, is they prevent the cops from kicking ass when it's richly deserved.
I love it when some criminal dirtbag gets his butt kicked after a long, dangerous chase, but you just can't get away with anything anymore.
Oh well, it's probably for the best, in the long run.
That's the courts job.
Ya know... separation of power and all that jazz.
I know it's passe, but I still adhere to the principle.
How bout you?
"...separation of power and all that jazz. I know it's passe..."
Yeah, I have to agree, at least on an intellectual level. It's on a gut level that I would so enjoy seeing a little street justice. Like I said, it's probably for the best that there are dashcams.
But you've got to admit, seeing some of these truly wretched characters get some serious pain, has a certain charm.
"How bout you?"
Unfortunately, letting it happen to the crooks, means letting it happen to anyone. So, yeah.
and cell phones
More blacks are frisked? Are more blacks committing crimes?
And you obviously don't attend English class too often, either.
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