Last year the NYPD stopped and interrogated enough completely innocent people to fill Yankee Stadium nine times over.
This month, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert called the Police Department's stop-and-frisk practices "Jim Crow policing" because not only are police stopping hundreds of thousands of innocent people every year, but 85 percent of those stopped are black or Latino.
The New York Civil Liberties Union has been leading the fight against the NYPD's racial profiling for years. We have shown that hundreds of thousands of innocent people are subjected to the added injustice of having their personal information stored indefinitely in a sprawling NYPD database. With this vast database, the NYPD has turned more than 1 million innocent black and Latino New Yorkers into criminal suspects.
But the push back has begun.
Last week, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn sent a letter to Police Chief Ray Kelly demanding that the NYPD stop collecting the personal information of innocent New Yorkers stopped by the police, and telling the Department to delete the information it's already collected.
Contact Speaker Quinn to thank her for her important stand and to urge her to keep the pressure on. And call 311 and tell Mayor Bloomberg to scale back the NYPD's overly aggressive stop-and-frisk policy and to stop collecting the personal information of innocent New Yorkers stopped by the police.
We are so close to ending this invasion of privacy. The Police Department is feeling immense public pressure and said - for the first time ever - that it is reconsidering its practice of keeping the personal information of innocent New Yorkers in its database. We need to keep the pressure on.
Contact Speaker Quinn right now, and forward this email to every New Yorker you know. We can win this one - we just need your help.
Thank you for all that you do,
- The New York Civil Liberties Union
7 comments:
The stop-and-frisk practice has taken guns off the street and contributed to crime reduction.
Since about 95% of violent crime in NY City is committed by blacks and hispanics AND only 85% of those stopped are black or hispanic, it appears the police department is acting reasonably.
If by that logic, we should stop and frisk 95 % of whites in turn 85 % would commit the crimes. gotta love illogical statistics.
No slappz do you have a girlfriend? You seem pretty sad and lonely soul. What is it with you. I think I know who you might be. A lonely miserable white guy who walks around cortelyou road with absolutely no personality, you probably haven't have sex with a real women ever unless you paid for it. Sad sad sad.
Funny!
Guilt by association and having a database full with blacks and Latino's who are innocent of any wrong doing is no different then the mark of the star of David during ww2.
Let's see -- last year in NY City there were about 475 murders.
Very close to 100% of the victims were black or hispanic, and very close to 100% of the perpetrators were black or hispanic.
On one hand, it is a sad fact that extreme violence is almost exclusively confined to blacks and hispanics.
On the other hand, in 1990 there were 2,250 murders in NY. Again, the overwhelming majority involved blacks and hispanics. At least the total number of murders had plummeted.
Why did the murder rate drop? The most obvious reason is incarceraton. A lot of bad guys were locked up. In addition, however, a lot of bad guys were dead.
Anyway, it is obvious that taking guns off the street reduces gun violence. And the fear of getting caught with a gun deters criminals from handling them recklessly in public.
As for the notion that searching people for weapons somehow corresponds to the Nazi government policy of oppressing and exterminating Jews, well, that means you believe Jews were enemies of the state who were, in fact, guilty of the crimes Hitler claimed.
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