I attended the Silent March to End Stop and Frisk in New York City yesterday. The impact of the March was louder than a million voices chanting down Babylon.
The silence of the March reflected the silence in which Stop & Frisks occur. Hundreds of thousands of times each year young men of color are stopped & frisked in silence, and darkness - out of sight, and out of mind, of the majority of the citizens of NYC.
In silence, and darkness, these young men not only have their constitutional rights violated, they also have their human rights both violated and ignored by being treated as a "thing" and not as a human.
I do not blame the police. I blame Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly for imposing a racist policing strategy that cannot be rationally defended. Though Bloomberg claims that his racist strategy has saved thousands of lives, the truth is quite different:
There were 2,245 murders in 1990. By 2001, the year before Bloomberg hired Kelly, the number of murders had dropped to 649. That total fell to 587 in 2002, the year before the commissioner initiated his aggressive stop-and-frisk regime.
From 2003 to 2011, a period that saw a 600% increase in street stops (from 97,296 to 685,724), there’s been an average of 544 murders per year. That amounts to about 430 fewer murders since the commissioner took office — a far cry from his claim of 5,600 saved lives.
As Donna Lieberman, the author of the above stats, states
"Sounds a little like taking credit for an eclipse."
If by some small chance you have not yet read Denise Oliver Velez's diary on the Silent March then I strongly suggest you do so.
Some photos from the march on the flip side of the Kosschach Ink Blot
This Is What Democracy Looks Like!
Now, for some righteous noise!