New York police to continue stop-and-frisk onslaught despite new law

[Hannah Bell]

The New York City Police Department will continue stopping, questioning and searching hundreds of thousands of workers and youth in the city’s less-affluent neighborhoods, despite a new state law limiting the NYPD’s power to store information on these encounters in an electronic database...

The NYPD has developed a database of over three million names of predominantly minority workers and youth using this procedure. According to its own statistics, officers stopped 575,304 people in 2009, only 6 percent of whom were arrested. Nevertheless, the police have routinely collected and stored detailed personal information on those who had committed no crime. Eighty-seven percent were black or Latino.

The “250 Database,” so called after the UF-250 form that officers use to file stop-and-frisk reports, is, in effect, a record of the names and addresses of most working-class youth in the largest American city. The use of the stop-and-frisk procedure, which has mushroomed in the past decade, has provoked growing outrage and charges of racial profiling and violations of privacy rights and elementary civil liberties. The new legislation stipulates that the NYPD can no longer store in its electronic database information such as the names, addresses, and social security numbers of those who have been stopped but not arrested. The breakdown of race and gender, as well as the location of the stop, will continue to be recorded electronically...

The new law was strenuously opposed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Police Department. It was signed by the lame duck Governor with some fanfare and undoubtedly represents an effort to appease the outrage over police abuse, but it does nothing to alter the practice of stop-and-frisk as a means of policing and intimidating whole working class communities.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jul2010/fris-j31.shtml

[ixion]

1. Can you imagine the outrage if they pulled this crap in an upscale neighborhood?

Seriously. The outrage would know no end.

[old mark]

2. The guardians of the law often think the law does not apply to them...

Look at the many instances of people being arested for recording videos of cops beating people or performing other brutal and obviously illegal acts...Look an the PA State Police maintaining records of gun sales despite this having been declared illegal decades ago.
Bloomberg is famous for thinking he is above the law, and he usually brings his weight to bear on the lower and middle class people...maybe we have fewer rights than his rich friends?
rec.
mark

[ThomCat]

7. Yes, Bloomberg is definitely a political bully.

He insists on having more rights than everyone else. And under his reign poor people, anyone who is a minority, and people in unions have fewer rights than the law requires just because he says so. :(

That man is very different from Giuliani, but he's every bit as bad as Giuliani was. He's just as dishonest, just as arrogant, and just as authoritarian.

He is even worse than Giuliani in one major way. That is, he's far more effective than Giuliani ever was in destroying the teachers unions and the public schools. :(

[Mnemosyne]

3. My mate was pulled over for DWH yesterday, not NYC - but NY state, and detained for 2.5 hrs.

He was trying to find daughter/grand-kids at a park near their home in Jamestown, NY.

Cop claims he saw him talking to a known drug dealer. Mate hadn't even opened his car window or talked to a soul there.

He had 4 other cops come and they tore the car apart looking for drugs. Called him a liar, but finally let him go because he wasn't doing what cop claimed and no drugs found.

My mate doesn't even smoke pot, but he is a long-haired hippy looking guy.

He was pulled over in NJ once for DWH also, a few years ago.

DWH = driving while hippy

I hate cops more all the time...

[The Backlash Cometh]

4. This is the most blatant evidence of institutionalized racism.

[The Backlash Cometh]

5. Here's the quote:

They need to push this statistics the way they pointed out the crack cocaine statistics to point out the discrepancy of how our policies are skewing the statistics:

New York Times columnist Jim Dwyer observed that stop-and-frisks have resulted in one of the highest arrest rates for marijuana possession in the world, centered almost exclusively on minorities and the poor.

“On the Upper East Side of Manhattan,” Dwyer noted, “where the mayor lives, an average of 20 people for every 1000,000 residents were arrested on the lowest-level misdemeanor pot charge in 2007, 2008, and 2009.

“During those same years, the marijuana arrest rate in Brownsville, Brooklyn was 3,109 for every 100,000 residents.” This incredible ratio of more than 150 arrests for marijuana possession in a working class neighborhood for every single arrest on the same charge in a wealthy district needs no elaboration. Every teenager knows that drug use in the two neighborhoods takes place at roughly comparable rates. The marijuana arrests are, to put it bluntly, a means of criminalizing the poor, and only one means at that.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

6. The law has nothing to do with making the stops, just recording and tracking them

[Hannah Bell]

8. Yes, as the article states:

"The new legislation stipulates that the NYPD can no longer store in its electronic database information such as the names, addresses, and social security numbers of those who have been stopped but not arrested."

[ProgressiveProfessor]

9. Which means the title of the article is deliberately misleading

since it states that the stops are continuing despite the new law, which had nothing to do the stops, just the record keeping.

[Hannah Bell]

11. if you say so, progressive professor.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

13. Words have meaning, your avatar was quite clear about that

Then again with what passes for journalism these days....

[upi402]

10. 87% non-white?

Data on the innocent stored? And there are lawyers looking for gigs???

[ProgressiveProfessor]

12. Apparently one of the reasons it was started was to provide stats and justification

for stop and frisks. NYPD expanded for additional purposes.

Its a classic "data wants to be free" kind of thing....whoever thought that RMS and NYPD would get on the same page.