"Black-on-Black": When Bloomberg and Kelly Play The Race Card on Stop-and-Frisk

"Black-on-Black" crime lets Kelly off the hook and acquits the Bloomberg Administration of its failure
to address intense poverty and high unemployment rates in Black and Latino neighborhoods.

 
[Black Star News Editorial]

 
It’s
a shame when the mayor and police commissioner of New York City play
the race card to defend a discredited policy such as “Stop-and-Frisk.” 
 
Already
a federal judge has approved class action status for a lawsuit against
the City by victims of the discriminatory policing. 
 
The
race-game went into full gear when Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly
wrote a bone-headed Op-Ed article in The Daily News, “The NYPD saves
minority lives,” on May 21.

It was tag-team play with the newspaper; there was a pro-stop and frisk editorial in the same issue and another column, justifying the unconstitutional policy, in that edition.

Under
Stop-and-Frisk, any police officer can merely observe a Black or Latino
person, conclude that the person is a suspect and stop and frisk them.
It amounts to illegal arrests and belongs in a police state.

The
policy invites comparison to South Africa’s during the Apartheid
regime. There, police stopped any Black male on the street and demanded
to see his pass-book, an internal identification. The victims were also
subjected to unlawful searches and arrests.

Here in New York,
last year 685,724 people were stopped-and-frisked by Bloomberg’s and
Kelly’s police department. The vast majority of those stopped were Black
and Latino males. Under such a blanket regime even tourists from
Africa, Europe and Latin America are victims since some of the stops are
conducted anywhere in the city.

Police are permitted to stop
Blacks and Latinos illegally without any probable cause except that the
people halted are Black-skinned and Brown-skinned. Police can then
demand that they produce identifications and order them to empty their
pockets. In rare cases weapons have been found; in many cases small
quantities of marijuana have been found in their possession. That’s how
tens of thousands of young Black and Latino males have been ensnared in
the “criminal justice” system.

These illegal and race-targeted
Stop-and-Frisk campaigns have been conducted primarily in Black and
Latino neighborhoods. They are not conducted against Whites in areas
such as Columbia University or New York University or near the hundreds
of bars on the Upper East Side near Mayor Bloomberg’s neighborhood.

Tens
of thousands of young White males and females would also have to be
arrested on possession of drugs, weapons and other contrabands charges. In
predominantly White neighborhoods citizens enjoy the presumption of
innocence. In Black and Latino neighborhoods, the Mayor and Police
Commissioner have perverted the justice system. Blacks and Latinos are guilty
until stopped, searched, and cleared.

Commissioner Kelly in his
Op-Ed did not even use the word Stop-and-Frisk once: The Daily News’
editorial on the same date used the term “stop and question effort.” As
if sanitizing the language would somehow make the reprehensible practice
more palatable.

Commissioner Kelly argued in his article
that over the last few years, New York’s White neighborhoods saw
dramatic drops in crime and offered current stats: Murray Hill (0.7 per
100,000); Borough Park (1 per 100,000); and, Mid-town Manhattan (1.1 per
100,000).

On the other hand the numbers were grave in Black
and Latino neighborhoods: Brownsville (28.9 per 100,000); Mott Haven
(18.4 per 100,000); and Bedford-Stuyvesant (23 per 100,000).

Commissioner Kelly uses these numbers to justify his and Mayor Bloomberg’s racist targeting of Blacks and Latinos.

Kelly
is admittedly not a social scientist or development economist; yet he
must know that his thesis is bogus. Mayor Bloomberg’s bulb shines a lot
brighter than Kelly’s. He knows it’s unfair and disingenuous to point at
the glaring differential crime statistics and claim that disarming
Black and Latino neighborhoods, by any means necessary, would make these
communities as safe as White ones.

What a foolish argument Commissioner Kelly makes in his Daily News Op-Ed.

So
why are the crime rates much higher in Black and Latino neighborhoods
compared to the White neighborhoods? Rather than dealing with the
disease — poverty and unemployment rates that double those in White
neighborhoods  — Bloomberg and Kelly pretend it’s a behavioral or
pathological problem. They have been calling it “Black-on-Black” crime.
 This is as meaningless as saying there’s fighting in Syria due to
“Syrian-on-Syrian” violence or “Arab-on-Arab” violence.

Bloomberg
and Kelly know what they’re up to by using the racially-loaded term
“Black-on-Black” violence. They want to make their illegal
Stop-and-Frisk acceptable to the public, especially White New Yorkers by
portraying Blacks as predicate criminals. So what if Stop-and-Frisk is
unconstitutional? How else do we deal with congenital criminals?

“Black-on-Black”
also casts Black people collectively as “criminals” in the minds of many
White New Yorkers, making police abuses against Black males
acceptable, including incidents such as: the shooting of unarmed men like Amadou
Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, Ousmane Zongo, Tim Stansbury, Sean Bell, and
Ramerley Graham.

Would Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly
prefer that the Black folk who do commit crime travel to White
neighborhoods and commit the crimes there? Would such crimes seem less “irrational”? When White people commit
crimes in areas that are exclusively White are those referred to as
White-on-White crime? When Europeans killed millions of Europeans in
World War II was that also White-on-White crime?

This
“Black-on-Black” race-loaded term is also applied to African conflicts; they become
“tribal” wars. In South Africa during the final years of the Apartheid
regime the government financed and trained African gangs to attack
members of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. The fighting was
referred to as “Black-on-Black.” Media talking heads wondered whether
Africans would be able to govern after Apartheid.

“Black-on-Black” crime lets Kelly off the hook by condoning racist Stop-and-Frisk policing. At the same time it acquits the Bloomberg Administration of its failure to
address intense poverty and high unemployment rates in Black and Latino
neighborhoods. For Bloomberg, Kelly — and The Daily News— to pretend
as if there’s no correlation between poverty/unemployment and crime is
pure lunacy.

The crime and murder rates are much lower
in the White neighborhoods: the average income in those neighborhoods
are also much higher relative to Black neighborhoods and the
unemployment rates lower.  In predominantly White Murray Hill and
Mid-town Manhattan the incomes are, respectively, $78,944; and, about
$50,000.

Income in Mott Haven is $14,271; and in Brownsville, $24,659.

As for unemployment, it’s 8.4% in predominantly White Murray Hill; in Brownsville, it’s nearly 20%.

So
instead of addressing these social conditions of mayoral neglect —
 lack of job creation and work-training programs — Bloomberg and Kelly
would rather focus on discriminatory policing: Stop-and Frisk.

This is the real crime.


“Speaking Truth To Empower.”


Thousands
of New Yorkers will gather on Father’s Day, June 17th, 2012 for the “End
Stop-And-Frisk Silent March Against Racial Profiling.” For more information, please visit
www.silentmarchnyc.org  

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