One summer night in 2012, Luis Paulino was walking around his East New York neighborhood when he came upon a group of police officers surrounding a young black man. Onlookers told him that the young man had been stopped for riding his bike on the sidewalk. But what appeared to Luis to be a minor incident suddenly exploded in violence. More officers started arriving on the scene, he recounts. They continued to beat his legs. Then he was thrown in handcuffs. They maced him; they tazed him. Standing on the very corner where his own life had changed forever on the night of that assault, Luis recalls feeling he couldnt walk away. I just wanted to make sure he was all right, he tells me. Honestly the kid could have been my brother. He certainly could have been. n 1999, four police officers shot Amadou Diallo, an African immigrant, 41 times in the doorway of his own apartment after he took out his wallet to show them his identification. Despite huge protests and the blaze of momentary media spotlights, all the officers were acquitted of murder. In downtown Cincinnati in 2001, riots erupted in black neighborhoods after police shot and killed Timothy Thomas, a 19-year-old wanted for nonviolent crimes and traffic citations. Just a month earlier, a judge had ruled that law enforcement there needed to be monitored because they discriminated against black people. A string of police shootings of unarmed black men in Oakland -- Gary King in 2007, Oscar Grant in 2009, Derrick Jones the following year, Raheim Brown the next -- briefly captured the publics attention. A Miami Herald report focused on Earl Sampson, a black man who had been stopped 258 times and jailed 56 times in four years, all without ever being convicted of a single crime. He worked at a Quick Stop and was often charged with trespassing for taking out the trash. He was among 200 others videotaped by the owner of the convenience store who were stopped by police. These are just a few random examples of overly aggressive policing in communities of color over the past 15 years. Practices like stop and frisk, meant to bring down crime in the inner cities, have only helped destroy the delicate fabric of trust between law enforcement and black and Latino communities.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 09:28:05 +0000
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