Stop-and-Frisk Desist

A compendium of materials for teaching about stop-and-frisk in its various contexts in service to ending racial profiling by the NYPD and other state actors.

[stopandfriskdesist]

Just because chokeholds are banned doesn't mean these things are not happening. It's clear that use of force is not required in this situation, but it's indicative of the general culture over at the NYPD, and how quickly officers resort to really forceful interactions for things that are routine, nonviolent, quality of life offenses.

Veronica Bayetti Flores, of Streetwise and Safe and Communities United for Police Reform, on the “larger trend” of a police officer’s abusive interaction with a skater back in the fall.

[aboriginalnewswire]

I’ve reported on stop and frisk for two years, and in that time I’ve talked to young men who have experienced stop-and-frisk, and the stories they tell are harrowing. A black teenager in Bedford-Stuyvesant described how embarrassed he was to have “old ladies” watch as his pants landed around his ankles while police searched him. A 17-year-old in the Bronx explained that police, “They go in my pants. You’re not supposed to go in my pants.” Being touched by a female police officer can be especially upsetting for adolescent males. “It’s annoying because it doesn’t matter what kind of cop it is, female or male, they’re gonna frisk you. If you say something to the female about it, the female says something to you like ‘What? I can do what I want.’ And they still frisk you. You can’t say sexual harassment, nothing,” 18-year-old South Bronx resident Garnell told me last year, adding, “And they go hard, grabbing stuff they’re not supposed to.”

How ‘Stop and Frisk’ Is Too Often a Sexual Assault by Cops on Teenagers in Targeted NYC Neighborhoods | Alternet (via aboriginalnewswire)

[stopandfriskdesist]

"One of the pedestrians ticketed Sunday was 84-year-old Kang Chun Wong. He landed in the hospital and needed four staples to close a head wound after his encounter with cops."

Click through for photos of the NYPD's altercation with Wong, including one of his bleeding head.

[stopandfriskdesist]

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a 'more convenient season.' Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter From a Birmingham Jail."

[stopandfriskdesist]

I was asked to speak tonight on one aspect of precarity, and how to resist it, and as this sketch of issues at CUNY indicates, I want to highlight the critical necessity of intersectional analysis and organizing. In other words, there can be no single-issue activism or research. At CUNY, the myriad intersecting issues—and I only briefly outlined a few—make it impossible to address change without also addressing the full complex of problems that jointly maintain the status quo. And this is the case across higher education, given the university's deep entanglement with processes and histories of colonialism, racialized social control, and oppression.

My remarks to the MLA Subconference in Chicago last week.

[stopandfriskdesist]

The decimation of black families and communities by our culture of incarceration will one day be recognized as among the most destructive and inhumane policies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

http://t.co/qObNcsVwYA

[stopandfriskdesist]

Regarding our recent discussion of piracy in the waters off certain parts of Africa, this video for Calvin Harris's track "Thinking About You" (featuring Ayah Marar) depicts pirates as one of a multiplicity of groups. As such, it resists the binary opposition between the U.S. and pirates as the figure of Africa that structures the current Hollywood movie Captain Phillips. (For an indie treatment of Europe's relationship to African sea pirates, see A Hijacking, which also came out this year.)

[stopandfriskdesist]

Tim would call from Shelby County Jail, to answer my questions and to do what anyone facing trial would want to do: air concerns about his case, vent. Sometimes he would call multiple times a week. Because the phone calls were limited to fifteen minutes at a time, a couple of times he hung up and called right back, so we could keep talking....I dealt with Global Tel* Link for only a few months. But for Tim’s relatives, this had been their reality for years. GTL makes more than $500 million a year exploiting families like his, who face the choice between paying exorbitant phone rates to keep in touch with incarcerated loved ones—up to $1.13 per minute—or simply giving up on regular phone calls.

Liliana Segura, "With 2.3 Million People Incarcerated in the U.S., Prisons Are Big Business." (This article provided by a class member.)

[stopandfriskdesist]

A member of the class provides this video in which a Portland, Maine, man refuses to consent to a stop by police and cites the law, including the Terry v. Ohio decision that Michelle Alexander quotes from regarding stop and frisk, as to why he must be free to go.

[nancyleong219]

My short piece in the Harvard Law Review online forum responds to Richard Ford’s critique of my article “Racial Capitalism” and offers some thoughts on the Supreme Court’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

[stopandfriskdesist]

If we conceptualize violence as a historically produced social experience, then Nigerian women are punished in Western prisons by the same global processes that guided the violent upheaval of their traditional way of life and compelled their migration into Western circuits of criminality.

Tryon P. Woods, “The Gender Entrapment of Neoliberal Development"

[stopandfriskdesist]

Flyer.

[stopandfriskdesist]

Flyer.

[stopandfriskdesist]

To respond to high levels of harm in ways that are not derivative of the PIC, we must first and foremost let go of the notion that there are 'good' and 'bad' people—that people who murder, rape, and assault people are 'bad' and that people who don’t are 'good.' We all harm people and are harmed ourselves, in different contexts and conditions and with different levels of power behind us. Accepting this does not minimize violence but actually empowers us to be able to face violence clearly.

Mimi Kim et al., "A World Without Walls: Stopping Harm & Abolishing the Prison Industrial Complex"

[stopandfriskdesist]

In my view, the expansion of prison constitutes a geographical solution to socio-economic problems, politically organized by the state which is itself in the process of radical restructuring. This view brings the complexities and contradictions of globalization home, by showing how already existing social, political, and economic relations constitute the conditions of possibility (but not inevitability) for ways to solve major problems. In the present analysis, 'major problems' appear, materially and ideologically, as surpluses of finance capital, land, labor, and state capacity that have accumulated from a series of overlapping and interlocking crises stretching across three decades.

From same article posted below.

[stopandfriskdesist]

[T]he 'moral panic' underlying prison growth achieved formal U.S.-wide recognition in Nixon's 1968 'law and order' campaign. Mid-sixties radical activism, both spontaneous and organized, successfully produced widespread disorder throughout society. The ascendant Right's effort to gain the presidency used the fact of disorder in persuading voters that the incumbents failed to govern. The claim was true insofar as it described objective conditions. But in order to exploit the evidence for political gain, the Right had to interpret the turmoil as something it could contain, if elected, using already existing, unexceptionable capacities: the power to defend the nation against enemies foreign and domestic. And so the contemporary U.S. crime problem was born. The disorder that became 'crime' had particular urban and racial qualities and the collective characteristics of activists (whose relative visibility as enemies was an inverse function of their structural lack of power) defined the face of the individual criminal.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Globalization and U.S. Prison Growth: From Military Keynesianism to Post-Keynesian Militarism"