On Black streets and public housing, Bill of Rights is dead letter
When
many Americans use the terms “police state” or “creeping fascism,”
their point of reference is the Patriot Act or some other mechanism of
the national security state. But for Black America, the police state is
the daily reality of arbitrary, relentless stops on the streets of
their own neighborhoods, or in the hallways of their own public housing
projects.
When the numbers are tallied, they are expected to show that more than 600,000 people were
stopped by police on the streets of New York City, last year, 89
percent of them Black and brown. That’s almost six times the number of
“stop-and-frisks” in 2002. Philadelphia stopped 200,000 people on its
streets in 2008, twice the number as in the previous year. Los Angeles
stop-and-frisks hit a quarter million in 2008, double the rate in 2002.
And that doesn't count the people stopped in their cars in L.A.
Stop-and-frisk
is the race-based law of the land, the American police state in its
most elemental, predatory form, a system of methodical mass racial
profiling that debases and criminalizes all African Americans, and
which now serves as the primary intake mechanism for the national
policy of mass Black incarceration.
The
legal justification for the mass stopping and frisking of Blacks
roughly dates to the beginnings of modern mass imprisonment of Blacks.
In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police can stop and detain
citizens based on “reasonable suspicion” of involvement in crime,
rather than the higher standard of “probably cause.” Of course, in a
racist society, singling out Blacks for more intensive surveillance and
questioning seems eminently reasonable. And when mass Black profiling
ultimately results in far more Blacks being sucked into the criminal
justice system, then the racist society concludes it was right all
along – that African Americans are more prone to commit crimes. Mass
Black profiling is guaranteed to find what it's looking for: more Black
crime. Mass Black profiling and mass Black incarceration are organic
elements of the same, diabolical system that preys on African Americans
as a group and makes the words “crime” and “Black” synonymous in the
public mind.
Learn more:
Social Bookmarks:
3 stars
FAIR USE NOTICE. This document may contain copyrighted material
whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner.
Greenchange is making this article available in our efforts to advance
the understanding of grassroots democracy, nonviolence, sustainability,
and justice issues. We believe that this
constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for
in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this
copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond
fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
