Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of citizens who've been stopped and frisked by police for no reason are black or Latino, the NYPD insists racial profiling isn't an entrenched problem. Some black officers would beg to differ, primarily because they've been victims of it.
A new report from Reuters cites interviews with 25 black male NYPD officers, 15 of whom are retired. All but one said they'd been racially profiled when off duty and out of uniform:
The officers said this included being pulled over for no reason, having their heads slammed against their cars, getting guns brandished in their faces, being thrown into prison vans and experiencing stop and frisks while shopping. The majority of the officers said they had been pulled over multiple times while driving. Five had had guns pulled on them.
Desmond Blaize, who retired two years ago as a sergeant in the 41st Precinct in the Bronx, said he once got stopped while taking a jog through Brooklyn’s upmarket Prospect Park. "I had my ID on me so it didn’t escalate," said Blaize, who has sued the department alleging he was racially harassed on the job. "But what’s suspicious about a jogger? In jogging clothes?"
Even worse, the officers said that not only was no disciplinary action taken when they reported the incidents, some of them suffered reprisals from their superiors, in the form of reduced overtime and undesirable assignments.
NYPD misconduct lawsuits cost NYC taxpayers $64.4 million in 2012 alone, up 75% from the year 2000.
In the last months of the Bloomberg administration, the City Council passed the Community Safety Act despite scaremongering opposition from the mayor and police commissioner. The law required officers to have "reasonable suspicion" to stop a suspect if the suspect does not fit a specific description. "Since fitting a description was the reason for a stop-and-frisk just 16 percent of the time in 2012, [the Community Safety Act] will force the Department to explain why 90 percent of people stopped are black and Latino," NYCLU director Donna Lieberman said at the time.
The legislation also expanded the legal definition of racial profiling to include age, gender, housing status and sexual orientation, and enabled victims to sue the NYPD in state court. It's unclear what real-world impact any of this has had on racial profiling, but the black officers who spoke to Reuters say Eric Garner's death is just the latest example of the threats minority New Yorkers continue to face every day. "That could have been any one of us," one black cop from Queens told Reuters. Read the whole piece here.
