The New Freedom Riders: A multiracial group of young people are fighting to end the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program
Two things struck William Rivera about the 30 protesters who, after an hour of chanting and speechifying to cameras, cops, and the curious, were now marching deeper into the Bronx on an overcast January afternoon. The first was that somebody was finally speaking out against the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy, a tactic in which officers pat down and question people on the street without a warrant. The second was that a lot of those somebodies were white.
“Hell, yeah, I’m surprised that white people come out here fighting for us,” says Rivera, 24. Police, he says, stop him three or four times a week, and he now automatically assumes the “shirt up” position whenever officers cross his path.
“I know it’s not normal or right that I accept that, but it’s how we have to live,” Rivera says of his South Bronx neighborhood, where talking back to cops, he adds, is not an option. “Maybe if the government or the police see their own people helping out, maybe they’ll pull back.”
In 2011, the New York Police Department (NYPD) recorded more than 680,000 stops—a 14 percent increase over the number of people stopped in 2010, according to data released Tuesday by the department. Last year, 87 percent of the pat-downs involved black and Latino young men in communities of color. Annually, nine out of ten stops end without any charges or summons. Under the policy, police can detain, question, and pat down people they deem suspicious, sometimes based on witness accounts.
The NYPD maintains that stop-and-frisk saves lives and reported that homicides decreased in New York City by 4 percent in 2011, with police confiscating 819 guns for that year alone. The department credits the policy with keeping the murder rate below 600 people a year for the last decade.
This February marks the first wave of trials for a loose-knit group of activists who have been arrested after responding to a call put out last fall by Princeton professor Cornel West and his longtime friend Carl Dix, a national spokesperson for the Revolutionary Communist Party. Inspired by the nonviolent civil disobedience campaign of the Freedom Rides to draw attention to segregated interstate bus travel during the 1960s, West and Dix’s Stop Stop-and-Frisk campaign seeks to raise awareness of what they say is a racist policy that targets and criminalizes black and Latino men.
“We’re always hearing about post-racial America, but if you look at the criminal-justice system, you know that race is still with us,” says Derek Catsam, history professor at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin and author of Freedom’s Main Line: The Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides.
Whether this new tactic will bring about change in the controversial policy remains to be seen. For onlookers along the march’s route through the South Bronx, though, public demonstrations on this issue matter a great deal—and so does the participation of whites.
At the Bronx demonstration, Greg Allen held up one side of a white banner that read, in big, red capital letters, “Stop Stop and Frisk.” The sight of a white man with that message in a neighborhood that is 96 percent black and Latino with a median household income just shy of $9,000 convinced seen-it-all New Yorkers to stop and look at the demonstration. “I’ve seen kids who I’ve known since they were three years old become targets of the police,” says Allen, an active member of Occupy Wall Street who moved to Harlem in the mid-1990s. In the last six months, he has been arrested three times during civil-disobedience demonstrations held in front of city police precincts.