Jason Williamson is a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project and authored a story in Salon published WEDNESDAY, APR 15, 2015 that clearly explains what one common policing tactic under the "broken windows" banner is doing.
the use of generalized “No Trespass Letters” to justify arrests for criminal trespassing on commercial property. But more to the point, the policy gives police in Michigan’s second-largest city an excuse to stop and search people immediately based on nothing more than a gut reaction to the way someone looks or acts—without bothering to determine whether the person is actually trespassing.
According to Grand Rapids police officials, the signed letter allows officers to stop and arrest people for trespassing at the business in question—even while the business is open—whenever the officer thinks the person is on the property without a “legitimate business purpose.” In other words, cops are given unrestricted discretion to decide who does and does not belong on the property of an open business, without ever talking to the business owner or any employee to find out why the person is on the property, how long they’ve been there, and whether the person is welcome on the premises.
Between 2011 and 2013, the Grand Rapids Police Department either cited or arrested approximately 560 people for trespassing on business property, pursuant to the trespassing-letter policy. In a city in which black people make up roughly 20 percent of the population, 59 percent of those detained for trespassing under this policy were black. Perhaps even more telling is the fact that African-Americans are more than twice as likely as whites to be arrested, rather than simply ticketed,
Miami Gardens’ officers, who embarked on a trespass enforcement spree that contributed significantly to the roughly 99,000 total stops made by officers over the course of five years—in a city of only 110,000 people. One African-American man was stopped more than 250 times for suspected trespassing on the property of the convenience store where he worked. More than 60 of those stops resulted in his arrest.
Another tool that police use routinely for "broken Windows" policing is the License plate readers. These are not innoucuous targeted readers. They are mass surveilence tools whose use is not being monitored or restricted. According to the ACLU:
A little noticed surveillance technology, designed to track the movements of every passing driver, is fast proliferating on America’s streets. Automatic license plate readers, mounted on police cars or on objects like road signs and bridges, use small, high-speed cameras to photograph thousands of plates per minute.
The information captured by the readers – including the license plate number, and the date, time, and location of every scan – is being collected and sometimes pooled into regional sharing systems. As a result, enormous databases of innocent motorists’ location information are growing rapidly. This information is often retained for years or even indefinitely, with few or no restrictions to protect privacy rights.
Bolding is my emphasis
This is a scary technology that few are aware of how powerful it really is.
Alternatively, Brittney Cooper, who teaches Women's and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers asserts in another Salon story that the true definitions of what Robert Bates' reserve police position is.
Bates, a reserve deputy who is allowed to work on cases because he is a big donor to the police department.
In 2012, the United Arab Emirates gave $1 million to the New York City Police Foundation. According to an NYPD spokesperson, the money was used to upgrade equipment and aid in criminal investigations. In both New York City and Tulsa, private funding of police departments significantly impacts the way local policing is done. In Tulsa, it results in the pay-to-play scheme. In New York City, it allows for large infusions of cash donations whose specific uses do not come under public scrutiny because they are private funds.
These are shocking revelations of practices going on in many police departments that the public is unaware of. I think that we intuitively know that something deeper has been happening here, and as these tactics are more deeply revealed and scrutinized, I think that it will become clearly evident that wholesale reform is needed if we are to see the police persecution of people of color ended.
To read either of these two articles in full:
Jason Williamson's article
Brittney Cooper's article
ACLU