COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

STOP & FRISK HAS GOT TO GO! Solidarity with #occupyharlem.

A new uncompromising movement against NYPD's notorious Stop & Frisk program began yesterday as hundreds of demonstrators marched from the Harlem State Office Building to Harlem’s 28th precinct. At the station, Cornel West, author and Princeton professor, Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party, Rev. Stephen Phelps, interim senior minister of Riverside Church, and dozens of others were arrested in an act of non-violent civil disobedience. Among those arrested and protesting was a large contingent from downtown’s Occupy Wall Street.

'We are here today to put our bodies on the line to stop this racist, immoral, illegitimate and unjust ‘new Jim Crow’ from the gateway of stop and frisk to the wholesale mass incarceration of Black and Brown people,' said Dix to the assembled marchers. 'We are serious and we will continue until we Stop Stop & Frisk!” The crowd chanted, “Stop & Frisk don’t stop the crime, Stop & Frisk IS the crime,” as arrestees were carried to waiting police vans. A solidarity march to 33rd Precinct ensused, where arrestees were said to be held.

The fight continues with Saturday’s 2:00 pm rally at Union Square, part of a National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation.

According to a New York Civil Liberties Union study, the NYPD is on pace to stop and frisk over 700,000 people in 2011, or more than 1,900 people each day. More than 85% of those stopped and frisked are Black or Latino, and more than 90% of them were doing nothing wrong when the police stopped them.

The action was organized in solidarity with #occupyharlem, which will begin on October 28th.

Cornel West speaks before his arrest in Harlem 10/21/11