CRIMINALIZING RACIAL, ETHNIC OTHERS IN CITIES

BY MJ

Throughout the past few years, Mayor Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk policy has received a tremendous amount of opposition from minority groups in New York. For example, in the past month alone, the city of New York was faced with a lawsuit claiming the NYPD carried out unreasonable searches as a result of racial profiling. Although the judge ordered the practice to cease immediately, Mayor Bloomberg publicly announced that an appeal would be filed to continue the program through the end of his administration, claiming it prevents “a lot of people from dying.” It is evident that this is a heated argument, and a solution is far from near (“Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al.” n.d.). However, I plan to explain how this controversial program sheds a negative light on African Americans and leads to the belief that they commit more crimes than that of other races.

Despite the stop-and-frisk program resulting in a decrease in crime, albeit small, it has unjustly done so at the expense of minority groups, especially African Americans. These individuals have been stopped for various reasons ranging from making suspicious movements such as changing directions in their path to holding their pockets when approached by a police officer. When deemed suspicious, they are stopped and subjected to frisks out in the public view, depicting them as criminals when in fact, 90% are innocent (Goldstein 2013). In our criminal justice system, one is considered innocent until proven guilty. However, certain individuals, especially white police officers, often jump to conclusions and perceive these individuals as criminals even before an arrest is made. However, proponents of the practice state that the practice is justified even though only a small number of stops lead to arrest, usually for marijuana possession. Ultimately, this leads to a spike in the number of drug possession charges for African Americans when crime reports are released. On the other hand, white individuals are able to abuse drugs without punishment because white police officers overlook these non-violent crimes. It seems to me that the reason these officers overlook these crimes is because of the flawed racial ideologies they possess. These officers generalize that the white man’s drug use is for pure recreation whereas the black man’s drug use becomes a gateway to a life of crime. The statistics that are released to the public provide individuals with the belief that African Americans are more apt to abuse drugs and thus more likely to commit other violent crimes, even though surveys have shown that white individuals are more likely to use drugs. In fact, according to the NAACP statistics, “five times as many whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at ten times the rate of whites” (“Criminal Justice Fact Sheet” n.d.). It is clear that the NYPD utilizes racial profiling when stopping individuals, and as a result, the NYPD must seek fairer alternatives to combat crime (Robbins 2013).

In Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s book The Condemnation of Blackness, Jeffrey Adler, a criminologist in the early 20^th century discusses at length how “African Americans were violent and deviant and the whites sought various public policy measures to seal themselves off from them” (Muhammad 2011, 55). In my opinion, this ideology strongly relates to today’s practice of stopping-and-frisking minority groups, especially African Americans. According to the NYPD’s Crime and Enforcement statistics, African Americans committed the highest number of violent crimes among other races in 2012 (“Crime and Enforcement Activity in New York City” 2013). As a result, I believe that many police officers stop these individuals with the preconceived notion that they are criminals, even before they have done anything suspicious. In addition, this program calls for placing a large police presence in crime-stricken neighborhoods. In turn, this can cause whites to perceive all African American urban neighborhoods as ghettos marred by crime, when in fact, this may not be the case. As a result of the large police presence, many individuals who live in these areas refuse to leave their homes out of fear of being stopped. Consequentially, through the stop-and-frisk policy, the more conservative and older generation white population has been able to indirectly achieve their goal of separating from the lower-class African American population. Ultimately, the unjust policies of a distinct few (Mayor Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, etc), have negatively impacted the freedoms of the African American population in an era when the courts have upheld that all men and women have equal protection under the law.

References

“Crime and Enforcement Activity in New York City.” New York Police Department.  February 28,   

           2013.   http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/2012_year_end_enforcement_report.pdf.

“Criminal Justice Fact Sheet.” National Association for the Advancement of Colored

People. Accessed September 19, 2013. http://www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet.

“Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al.” Center for Constitutional Rights. Accessed September 14, 2013. http://ccrjustice.org/floyd.

Goldstein, Joseph. “Judge Rejects New York’s Stop-and-Frisk Policy.” New York Times, August 12, 2013.  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/nyregion/stop-   
                and-frisk-  practice-violated-rights-judge-rules.html.

Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Robbins, Christopher. “Stop & Frisk Way Batter At Finding Weed Than Guns.” The Gothamist, May 22, 2013.  
                http://gothamist.com/2013/05/22/stop_frisk_way_better_at_finding_we.php

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