NYC: Thousands March to End Stop-and-Frisk

By Li Onesto

June 17, thousands of people marched through the streets of New York City to demand an end to the NYPD's policy of stop-and-frisk. The crowd was very diverse, old and young, and different nationalities, from many different walks of life—reflecting a growing awareness of this issue and how important it is to take an active stand against stop-and-frisk.
There were civil rights groups, labor unions, student groups, teachers, nurses, Occupy Wall Street, immigrant rights organizations, gay and lesbian groups. By Friday, 299 organizations had endorsed the march, including, in addition to African-American organizations, groups representing Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arab, Jewish and other ethnic and cultural organizations.
Some people talked about what stop-and-frisk actually means to the youth. A young Black man from Brooklyn said, "I'm here because of the issue with the cops, stop-and-frisk of minorities, African-Americans and Latinos, for no reason. They take us and search us for no apparent reason, just because they have a quota by Mayor Bloomberg. So I'm here to fight this issue and stop this."
Whole families came to bear witness. Before the march started, a mother and father held a large color photo of their son, beaten so bad his eyes were swollen shut. They spoke out in anger that radiated through the air, of how the cops had done this to their son, putting him in the hospital for four days. Then their son got up to speak out too, barely able to keep back his tears.

The Evidence Is In, The Verdict Is Clear

In 2011: The NYPD subjected people to stop-and-frisk 686,000 times. Nine out of 10 were not arrested or ticketed; 87 percent were Black or Latino. Black and Latino males 14-24 years old make up 4.7 percent of the city's population, but accounted for 41.6 percent of the stops. Since 2002, the number of stop-and-frisks has increased by 600 percent—4,356,927 people have been stopped during the past 10 years. By law, police must have "reasonable suspicion" that someone is carrying a weapon in order to frisk them—but a gun was retrieved in only 2 percent of the stops. (source: New York Civil Liberties Union)
In 2012: The pattern continues. Of the 203,500 people stopped in the first three months, 54 percent were Black, 33 percent were Latino, and 89 percent were found to be innocent. (NYCLU)
The most common reason cops list for stopping people is "furtive movement"—a catch-all term used to basically cover up the fact that the person was stopped for doing nothing.
If you do the math, this means a young African-American or Latino male in New York City will almost certainly get stopped by a cop before he graduates from high school. In this way a database is being created of generations of Black and Latino youths who are being criminalized. Walk down a street in New York City, stop a Black or Latino youth and talk to them. Some of them will tell you they've been stopped 5, 10 or 15 times.
This is a crisis: Hundreds of thousands of innocent people are stopped, interrogated, searched and humiliated by the NYPD for basically living while being Black or Latino. Sitting or standing outside the building where you live—constantly subjected to stop-and-frisk; where will it lead, will you end up in jail? will you end up in the hospital? will you end up dead?
Thousands poured into the streets on Father's Day in New York City to dramatically speak out with one voice that stop-and-frisk MUST END.
Stop-and-frisk is racist. It is illegitimate. It concentrates the kind of racial profiling cops do in big cities and small towns all over this country. And this kind of targeting of Black and Latino people, especially the youth, continues to be a major pipeline feeding mass incarceration. This is how we have gotten to a situation where the United States is the king of the world in locking people up—with its nearly 2.4 million people behind bars and more than 60 percent of them Black or Latino.
A Black boy born in 2001 has a one in three chance of going to prison in his lifetime; a Latino boy has a one in six chance of ending up behind bars. A Black man in the U.S. is five times more likely to be incarcerated than a black man in South Africa at the height of that country's segregation [apartheid] in the 1980s. (Benjamin Jealous, Democracy Now!, June 7, 2012)
A life can be completely ruined in an instant. You're young, you're Black or Latino. One minute you're sitting on your stoop or walking to the store—doing a "furtive movement." You get stopped and frisked. Some bullshit goes down and you find yourself in some crazy courtroom of injustice set up to send you to prison. Once behind bars, the guards can decide the tattoo on your arm means you're in a gang and put you in solitary and subject you to torture. If you ever get out you're marked for life as an ex-con—not able to get a job, kicked out of public housing, ineligible for student loans or grants, not able to vote. Millions of former prisoners are going through this. And if you add the families affected by this, we're talking about many millions more. This amounts to a slow genocide that could easily become a fast one.
At the June 17 march an older Black woman from the Bronx said, "They're killing the young people for no reason at all. And if they continue doing that, where are they going to next? This has to stop."
A young Black woman in the march said, "I believe that stop-and-frisk is all a part of the systematic demise to get young Black people into the system and disenfranchise so they won't be able to vote, they won't be able to make any changes in their future. It's all a part of the system."
Police beatings and murders steal young lives and the cops almost always go free: 23-year-old Amadou Diallo killed in 2003, 23-year-old Sean Bell killed in 2006, 22-year-old Oscar Grant killed in 2009, and 18-year-old Ramarley Graham killed in 2012. And just last week, a cop shot and killed an unarmed 23-year-old woman, Shantel Davis, in Brooklyn after she ran some red lights and crashed into a car. An all-American lynching in Sanford, Florida takes the life of Trayvon Martin. An endless list of lives cut down, taken away from their loved ones who have to get slapped in the face with the "explanation" that this was "proper police procedure" or "justifiable homicide."
Ask yourself: What kind of fucking system is this!!??
As Carl Dix said:
"This system has brutally and bitterly exploited African-American people since Day One. Now it offers no future for many millions of young Black and Latino people except for getting caught up in crime and going in and out of prison or joining the military and becoming a killing machine for this system. Mass incarceration is the system's response to this situation. This alone is reason enough to sweep this system off the face of the earth thru revolution. There is an analysis, a vision and a strategy for such a revolution, concentrated in the works and leadership of Bob Avakian."

Determined Mass Resistance

A "silent march" in 1917 was the inspiration for this year's Father's Day protest against stop-and-frisk. In July 1917, 8,000 Black people marched silently, to the sound of muffled drums, on Fifth Avenue in New York City to protest the increasing violence against Black people, especially against the massacre of at least 40 Black people in East St. Louis, Illinois, earlier in the month. The U.S. had just entered World War 1 and an East St. Louis factory holding government contracts employed Blacks. White people went on a rampage. The NAACP, church and other civic leaders organized the "silent march" to protest the East St. Louis massacre, lynchings, other racist violence around the country, and Jim Crow.
Ninety-five years later, we got a new Jim Crow.
In the face of growing protest against stop-and-frisk, NYPD chief Ray Kelly announced that there will be greater supervision of street cops. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has proposed legislation to reduce the penalty for possessing a small amount of marijuana from a misdemeanor to a violation—which would mean the many thousands now sent to jail for marijuana after being stopped and frisked would only get a ticket and fine. But these are just tweaks to a totally illegitimate policy; they aren't about getting rid of stop-and-frisk. Bloomberg said it himself, the stop-and-frisk program needs to be "mended, not ended."
Stop-and-frisk can't be mended, bended, tweaked or reformed. It must be ended,period. We need to continue to build determined massive resistance to stop-and-frisk, mass incarceration and all their consequences. And this struggle against stop-and-frisk can be a powerful part of the larger fight against mass incarceration.

*****

A Black woman artist talked about what she thought of the day: "It was great. It was a great opportunity to walk down Central Park with all these different organizations of people in silent protest against what's happening, and thinking about what the cops were thinking… These gatekeepers are still standing there keeping the gate… I feel like what I was marching for was the future. Because once we leave, we're going to hand the baton to our children. And do you want your children to be a gatekeeper for the corporations and the system? Or do you want your child to be part of the change?... Part of community and revolution versus part of the system that goes against that."

Photos: Li Onesto/Revolution

Prison Abuse Cover Up

By Richard B. Muhammad, Charlene Muhammad and Starla Muhammad Final Call Staffers | Last updated: Jun 19, 2012 - 10:38:13 AM
Advocates push for access to inmates and ability to scrutinize institutions

Charnel Robinson holds a picture of her son Christopher, while standing with his aunts Charntae Robinson, center, and Chardel Lauchner, right, June 8 in New York. The city has agreed to pay $2 million to Charnel Robinson for the killing of her son at the Rikers Island jail by a cartel of inmates who sometimes acted as enforcers for corrupt prison guards. Photo: AP Wide World Photos

(FinalCall.com) - America’s criminal justice system today amounts to tougher laws, longer sentences, harsher conditions and little oversight. Advocates say there is a combination of almost unlimited power and too little transparency.

Problems range from depriving inmates of religious literature and denying religious practices to denial of medications and treatment as well as serious and possibly deadly beatings. Another issue cited is the use of dehumanizing isolations units, which keep inmates locked down for 24 hours a day with no human contact.

These conditions and billions of dollars spent by corrections institutions demand greater transparency and accountability, advocates say. California activists are backing legislation which would shine light on one of the largest prison systems in the country and end what they call a media lockout.
“Everything is we have to be tough on crime and tough on drugs and we have to be tough on kids and be tough on that, to the point where we’re no longer being tough. We’re just being stupid!” declared Ed Yohnka, spokesperson for the ACLU of Illinois.

Inmates harvest potatoes at Southeastern Correctional Institution Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2009 in Lancaster, Ohio. Overtaxed food banks and underfunded governments are turning increasingly to prisoners for free labor to feed the hungry. Photo:AP/Wide World Photos

Kim McGill of the Youth Justice Coalition sees little hope for changes in prison policies and conditions without media and public scrutiny. California Assembly Bill 1270 would restore the media’s ability to conduct pre-arranged, in-person interviews with specific prisoners under the discretion of the Corrections Department and enable media to report on the prison system with greater balance and accuracy, say its supporters. The intent of the bill sponsored by state Assemblyman Tom Ammiano is to keep the public fully informed, make sure state institutions are transparent and accountable, and increase safety for inmates and system staff through media monitoring.

Prior to 1996, media was allowed into California prisons but an emergency internal regulation change ended access. Since then no reviews have been held or changes made, activists complain.
That means inmates face almost overwhelming odds to expose problems and protests, such as hunger strikes, and charges of torture and hellish solitary confinement, said Ms. McGill.
People need to see what overcrowding does and how bad conditions are, she added.
But the corrections department’s $10 billion prison budget, which has little transparency, is a major cause for someone from the outside to look into what is going on, the advocate argued.
“So the third largest portion of the (state) budget has no ability for taxpayers to monitor what happens to their money?” said Ms. McGill.
Taxpayers are funding prisons through sales and payroll taxes and should know what is going on, she continued. State budget woes are forcing renewed dialogue about prisons, money and resources spent on minor offenses.
With HIV spreading in prisons and other epidemics, family members and the society at large need to know what is happening, Ms. McGill said.
The state legislation, AB170, passed the Senate Public Committee and is heading to the Senate Appropriations Committee. If the bill clears Appropriations, it heads to the Senate floor and then Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk for signature.
Noelle Harahan, director of Prison Radio, which produces pieces from inmates by going into prisons and via phone, says a media blackout was used to help facilitate the explosion of incarceration inside America.
For the prison population to grow as it has, the voices of inmates had to be shut out so the public would go along with the propaganda of the political and ruling elite, she said.

Mumia Abu-Jamal

Consolidation of media and the failure of mainstream media to pursue these stories are also to blame, Ms. Harahan added. Her outlet distributes content to about 200 radio stations and is best known for bringing the voice of death row inmate Mumia Abu Jamal from behind prison walls.

Attacking the First Amendment rights of inmates of the last 30 years meant inmates were deprived of the “ability to educate themselves and to educate us. It had to happen for the state to get what they wanted, and to suppress opposition to mass incarceration and how they were going after communities,” she said.
Many states block inmate access to the outside world and with the complicity of mass media, these stories have been buried, she continued. The few courageous journalists were censored and telling these stories ends careers and shuts off opportunities, she added. But, Ms. Harahan said, with these stories told the public could have made better decisions about public policy—such as education versus public spending.
There is also no way to keep problems behind the walls, people come home and help create the culture of communities, she said. Just look at the negative impact of not having Black men around, Ms. Harahan said.
“We can’t be deluded that we’re separate,” Ms. Harahan added.
Once her group helped make Mr. Abu Jamal’s story public in Pennsylvania, the state banned in-person interviews with any inmate, Ms. Harahan recalled. The ban was really felt beginning in 1996 and 14 states quickly instituted the same rule, she said.
So reporters were denied access to inmates and inmates were moved to keep them away from reporters, Ms.  Harahan explained.
There are still ways to find and get the stories but institutions make it hard and there are negative consequences for inmates and journalists, she added.
Jimmy Thompson spent 22 years in prison and knows firsthand what transparency would mean for the men who prayed for his freedom and were left behind.
He is backing AB1270 as executive director of the Fair Chance Project, which works to free inmates denied parole long after their terms have been satisfied.
Prison officials want to keep the public out as much as possible to continue business as usual, which is to continue overcrowding dormitories and improperly feeding inmates, he said.
A typical breakfast can be a handful of prunes and French toast, “to two pieces of bread stuck in batter, burned and thrown on your plate. Inmates received a small carton of milk and on the way out, a bag lunch for those headed to work. The sacks included a small tube of peanut butter, maybe a packet of jelly and a packet of what inmates called bug juice,” he said.
“They went from bad to worse. Anytime they talk about the budget they take away from the inmates. ... Before I left I heard conditions had changed a little but at Solano Prison we had some 420 inmates living in a dorm designed for 164,” Mr. Thompson told The Final Call.
Dorms had 12 toilets for inmates and had no toilet tissue or paper towels, he added.
The perceptions inmates live well with three hot meals day, clean linen, recreation and watch TV, are lies, he said.
Grassroots activists and advocates also warn changing the way prisoners are treated isn’t simply do-gooding, most of the one million people in local, state and federal institutions are coming home.
The angrier and the more abused they are, the worse it is for the country, neighborhoods and communities.
There is also a trend of institutions to follow one another with policy and if California can change, it could spark other corrections officials to change or other activists to organize.
“We have people who clearly shouldn’t be incarcerated. We don’t really give any care, treatment or skills to people once they’re incarcerated so it just exacerbates problems for people who have learning disabilities or are mentally ill, and many of those people end up being disciplined by this over use of solitary confinement, which has these horrendous impacts,” commented Ed Yohnka, of the ACLU of Illinois.
He spoke specifically of policies at the Tamms Correctional Center in Illinois, which he said are being duplicated across the country.
Inmates are held 23 hours a day in solitary confinement with no human interaction, prompting a federal judge to note long lasting psychological and emotional harm.
Gov. Pat Quinn proposed closing Tamms to cut costs, which are three times more higher than other state facilities, Mr. Yohnka noted. But predictably, political leaders fought the closure, citing job protection and scary rhetoric like “keeping the worst of the worst off the streets.”
A Senate Judiciary Committee was poised to hold a hearing June 19 as The Final Call went to press on the impact and overuse of solitary confinement. 
On May 31, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a federal class-action lawsuit on behalf of inmates held in solitary confinement from between 10-28 years in the Pelican Bay State Prison’s Security Housing Units (SHUs).
According to Solitary Watch, a website dedicated to raising awareness about solitary confinement and other forms of torture in the U.S., at least 80,000 U.S. prisoners are in some form of isolated confinement, including approximately 25,000 in Supermax prisons.
According to Ruiz v. Brown, the lawsuit stemming from the July 2011 Pelican Bay SHU Hunger Strike, human costs are inhumane and debilitating, said the anti-prison group Critical Resistance.
According to the suit, the California Corrections Department reported more than 500 prisoners, about half of the population at the Pelican Bay SHU, have been in solitary confinement for more than 10 years. Seventy-eight of those have been in solitary confinement for more than 20 years.
They are cramped in concrete, windowless cells for 22 and a half to 24 hours a day, denied phone calls, contact visits, and vocational, recreational, or educational programming. 
In California, inmates can be put in solitary confinement merely based on alleged association with prison gangs.
But the media lockout is not just for so-called criminals, there are voices purposely shut out, say advocates and journalists. Guards make it very difficult by threatening prisoners, yanking phones out of the walls, transferring prisons who tell stories about abuses and keeping journalists off approved phone lists, noted Ms. Harahan. There are “real dungeons in the United States,” she said.
“There are people we should be able to hear from that the state is preventing us from hearing from for political reasons because they don’t like what they say,” said Ms. Harahan, whose website is http://www.prisonradio.org/, and an additional site http://www.mumia-themovie.com/.
In Colorado, Imam Jamil Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, is in a Supermax prison, 1,400 miles away from his Atlanta community, and supporters say he is a political prisoner.

Jamil Al Amin

He is locked down because of his history as a leading Black activist in the Black liberation struggle of the 1960s and 1970s, community organizing work in Atlanta, and his Islamic faith, they said.

Imam Al-Amin was convicted in the 2000 shooting of two Fulton County deputies, one died, in Atlanta. But Georgia handed him over to the federal government. He is serving life in federal prison without a federal charge, sentence or conviction, his wife Karima Al-Amin, an attorney, told The Final Call. He was moved without his family’s or attorneys’ knowledge.  Supporters are gathering signatures to have him moved back to Georgia.
The last time Mrs. Al-Amin visited her husband was mid-May. His visits occur behind glass. He receives two phone calls per month, each for 15 minutes. He’s allowed five social visits per month by telephone but absolutely no contact. When he’s in the legal room, they can pass notes through a very small slit, but he is handcuffed for the entire visit at his waist. His recreation is alone in what some would consider a dog pen to walk around in.
“By the time we leave his wrists are swollen.  It’s absolutely inhumane, even for them to have him handcuffed in a room with a little slit that you can get a few pieces of paper through. Even though they may bring food in for him to eat, he can’t even eat handcuffed to the waist,” Mrs. Al-Amin, an attorney, continued.
The Nation of Islam has a proven track record of a transformative work among prison inmates. Perhaps the most well-known example of the power of the redemptive teachings of Islam as taught by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad behind bars is Malcolm X.
Today there are continuous efforts to thwart inmates’ access to the Nation’s newspaper, The Final Call, and DVDs and materials by the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan are ongoing.
Dr. Ava Muhammad, attorney and national counsel for the Nation of Islam, has been actively involved in efforts to make sure inmate access to the newspaper is not restricted or banned.
In 2005 prison officials in Louisiana instituted a statewide ban on The Final Call citing what was deemed “objectionable material,” contained in the Muslim Program, published on the inside back page of the newspaper.
“The fear on the part of these law enforcement agencies, their representatives and correctional facilities is the opposite of what they say it is. Their fear is that Black men and women will convert to Islam while they are imprisoned as did Malcolm X and they don’t want that type of result to take place again,” said Dr. Muhammad.
The case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Henry Leonard, a member of the Nation of Islam incarcerated in Louisiana’s David Wade Correctional Center, was won successfully on the district court level and appellate level in the U.S. 5th Circuit Court. The state asked for the case to be argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Even as we speak, we are all waiting to see whether or not the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case. But there is a general problem coast to coast and the danger and difficulty is that many of the inmates who are in state correctional facilities are subject to the arbitrary decisions of local correctional officials,” said Dr. Muhammad, who also serves as national spokesperson for Min. Farrakhan.
In federal institutions the same problem exists, she said.
U.S. courts ruled decades ago that the Nation of Islam is a religion; but the movement is still characterized and categorized as a separatist hate group. This mischaracterization is often used to justify banning Nation religious materials to men and women in prison.
Dr. Muhammad said it is important for reporters to have access to inmates because of the public need to know what is happening in prisons, especially given high numbers of incarcerated Black men. According to the Justice Department, 1.6 million people were locked away in federal and state prisons in 2010. Over half million are Black men; just under 400,000 are Latino and about 30,000 are Black women and just under 19,000 are Latino women.
“Media attention is essential first of all just on bringing it into our consciousness that they are there. Because the mere fact they are there is a crisis, even if they were being treated well. When you compound that with abuse and mistreatment, we know about the Tuskegee Experiment,” said Dr. Muhammad.
“We heard Min. Farrakhan talk about the fact that when you are incarcerated you have to undergo a physical exam going into prison but you don’t take a physical exam coming out. So you have homosexuality, the spreading of the AIDS virus, drugs. You have all sorts of negative experiences that are contrary to human nature that a prisoner deals with,” continued Dr. Muhammad. Just the mental imbalance alone that comes with confining human beings to a “cage” are many issues that need to be faced, she added.

“It’s very crucial that media access be fought for and achieved, to put it before the consciousness of the community and then secondly to force a correction of it. There is a constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. That’s cruel and unusual punishment, some of the deprivations that take place. So many men are in solitary confinement for no clear reason and the list just goes on,” said Dr. Muhammad.

Bloomberg Admits Stop and Frisk Policy Needs to Change - National - The Atlantic Wire

Bloomberg Admits Stop and Frisk Policy Needs to Change - National - The Atlantic Wire