Stop-and-Frisk Trial and Bogus Police “Reform”-New York City

Workers Vanguard No. 1022	19 April 2013

Racist Cops: Guard Dogs of Capitalist Rulers

Stop-and-Frisk Trial and Bogus Police “Reform”

New York City

With black neighborhoods still simmering over the cop killing of 16-year-old Kimani Gray last month in Brooklyn, testimony in the “stop and frisk” class-action lawsuit Floyd v. City of New York continued this week in Federal District Court in Manhattan. Filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in 2008, the suit seeks to have aspects of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policies ruled unconstitutional. On April 1, New York state senator Eric Adams, a former cop, testified that Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told him in a closed-door meeting that stop-and-frisk is intended to “instill fear” in black and Latino youth. Earlier, the court heard a tape recording submitted by Bronx police officer Pedro Serrano in which a deputy inspector told him to target “male blacks 14 to 21.”

None of this is news to ghetto and barrio youth in this city, who already know that they are overwhelmingly the targets of cop terror on the streets. It is right to fight against stop-and-frisk, which recalls the “black codes,” derived from slavery, that were central to Jim Crow—the earlier form of the segregation that is embedded in American capitalism. It’s degrading and humiliating, and deadly. Last year Bronx teenager Ramarley Graham was gunned down in his own home after he tried to elude cops to avoid jail time for the small amount of marijuana he was carrying. Cops said Kimani Gray adjusted his waistband “in a suspicious manner” before they shot him in the streets of East Flatbush in Brooklyn.

With a pretext of searching for guns and drugs, police routinely harass minority youth who, if they so much as ask why they are being stopped, find themselves screamed at with racist slurs and slammed against the wall or forced to the ground, often enough with guns pointed at their heads. Since Michael Bloomberg became mayor in 2002, there have been more than five million stop-and-frisks. How this goes down can be seen in eight blocks of Brooklyn known as the Brownsville Houses, where police blanket the streets every night. Between January 2006 and March 2010, the NYPD made nearly 52,000 stops there—that’s nearly one stop per year for every one of the 14,000 residents of the area. The name of everyone stopped—arrested or not—was logged into a police database.

Judge Shira Scheindlin, who is presiding over the Floyd case, ruled in January that elements of stop-and-frisk as practiced in the Bronx are unconstitutional but then lifted her ban shortly afterward. If she rules for the cops, they will no doubt feel more emboldened as they mete out their daily dose of racist brutality. If she rules against the NYPD, stripping this practice of its legal license, the cops will no doubt move to repackage their systematic abuse. As William Bratton recently blurted out: “For any city to say they don’t do stop-and-frisk…I’m sorry, they don’t know what the hell they are talking about. Every police department in America does it.” Bratton ought to know. He ran police departments in Boston, New York and Los Angeles and now is acting as a “consultant” to the Oakland cops.

The history of the CCR suit itself shows that there should be no illusions in judicial restraint of the cops. Floyd is a sequel to the Daniels, et al. v. the City of New York suit brought by the CCR in 1999 after New York City erupted in protest over the slaying of Amadou Diallo, a black African immigrant gunned down by the cops in a hail of 41 bullets. That suit challenged NYPD racial profiling and sought to disband the Street Crime Unit (SCU) that killed Diallo. The case was settled in 2003 when the City agreed to break up the SCU and to require that the NYPD “monitor” itself and have officers fill out forms documenting all stop-and-frisk encounters. It was because the cops showed “significant non-compliance” with the settlement that the CCR filed the new suit.

The New York Spartacist League joined with those who poured onto the streets of East Flatbush last month in outrage over the gunning down of Kimani Gray and in the face of a cop lockdown of the area. We demand the dropping of all charges against those who have protested stop-and-frisk, including Revolutionary Communist Party supporter Noche Díaz, who faces more than four years in prison. We also demand that all charges stemming from protests against the killing of Kimani Gray be dropped. As we explained in “Kimani Gray Killed in Cold Blood by NYPD” (WV No. 1020, 22 March), the police are the guard dogs of racist American capitalism. There will be no end to the terror they mete out until the working class carries out a socialist revolution that overturns the entire system of capitalist exploitation, and with that the special oppression of black people that lies in its bedrock.

In the five weeks of the Floyd trial so far, a variety of protesters have packed the court, including gay rights activists and Muslims who have themselves been victims of NYPD harassment. Also turning out are the four leading Democratic candidates in this year’s mayoral race—in other words, those running to be the cops’ top boss as Bloomberg ends his reign. Their concern is the tarnishing of the NYPD’s credentials, requiring the application of some cosmetic “reform” to appease public anger and to make the cops more effective as a force of repression.

At a March 19 mayoral forum in Queens, the leading Democratic contender, City Council speaker Christine Quinn, trumpeted a proposal that had been raised by councilmen Jumaane Williams and Brad Lander for a police inspector general to “help the NYPD work more efficiently and effectively.” A spokesman for Communities United for Police Reform claims that this “would be an important first step in ensuring New Yorkers have faith that the NYPD is accountable for their actions” (Amsterdam News, 11 April). NYC already has a 13-person civilian review board (that goes back decades), a police corruption commission and other “control” mechanisms. Yet racist killings of minority youth continue unabated, as does the coast-to-coast mass incarceration of those the racist rulers consider a “surplus” population.

The cops and courts work together as part of the bourgeois state apparatus that represses the working class and the ghetto and barrio poor in order to maintain capitalist rule and profits. This elementary Marxist understanding is obscured by the reformist leftists and liberals who peddle fantasies of police behavior modification. Thus an article on the International Socialist Organization’s SocialistWorker.org Web site (26 March), titled “Stop-and-Frisk on Trial,” breathlessly reports that the Manhattan trial “could possibly set legal precedent in regards to racial profiling.” What the cops think about such “precedent” was expressed a few decades ago by the notorious Frank Rizzo, who told a court magistrate when he was chief of the Philadelphia police, “All right, you’re the boss in here, but we’re the boss on the street.”

In “End Stop and Frisk Now!” Socialist Alternative (June 2012) raised the timeworn reformist call to “place law enforcement and public safety under democratic community control.” The working class and the oppressed will never “control” the police, who are the instruments of the capitalist class that rules this society. The Socialist Alternative outfit tramples on this truth by portraying the cops, whose job is to suppress class and social struggle, as part of the working class.

This suicidal notion is also sold by the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy. When NYC’s Transport Workers Union Local 100 defied the New York state Taylor Law and went on strike in December 2005, then-president of Local 100, Roger Toussaint, invited Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch to speak on the union platform. The cops showed their true colors by enforcing a court injunction against the strike, leading to the arrest of Toussaint himself. The multiracial membership of Local 100 is no stranger to stop-and-frisk and other facets of police terror. The father of Sean Bell, a young black man who was killed in a firestorm of cop bullets in 2006 on the night before his wedding, is a TWU retiree.

Unions like the TWU have enormous potential social power that could be unleashed in defense not only of its own members but of the ghetto and barrio masses. But that potential is sapped by the loyalty of the union officialdom to the capitalist profit system and the state power that enforces it, particularly in its Democratic Party face. Current Local 100 officials helped build a rally in March for greater gun control, denouncing “gun violence.” This campaign gives credence to one of the cops’ major pretexts for stop-and-frisk harassment—purported gun possession—while also reinforcing the notion that the capitalist state must have a monopoly on weapons. In the face of the drive to strengthen gun control following the December killings in Newtown, Connecticut, we stress the importance for working people to defend the population’s right to bear arms. We fight as well to decriminalize drugs as a necessary part of the struggle against the racist “war on drugs.”

Stop-and-frisk is no aberration but a particularly glaring expression of the systematic, organized violence that defines the capitalist state. The working class needs a leadership that understands that this machinery of racist capitalist rule cannot be reformed to serve the interests of the workers, minorities and the poor but must be smashed through proletarian revolution. The Spartacist League is dedicated to building the revolutionary workers party that is the necessary instrument to lead the exploited and oppressed in the fight for workers rule.