“STOP AND FRISK” ON TRIAL IN NYC
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, skype name halpep,
“peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com
April 4, 2013
Critical
criminologist Jeffrey Fagan is testifying today at the class action trial on
behalf of young latino and black young men in NYC against NYPD for violation of
their civil rights under the post-civil war federal law that criminalized
violation of people’s constitutional rights “under color of law.” I have just finished listening to
democracynow.org’s live daily news hour.
Segments of the show and the entire show will be available for viewing
and downloading by the time I post this blog.
At the end of the second segment, noting that today is the 45th
anniversary off MLK’s assassination, she introduced the break: an excerpt of
MLK delivering a speech in August 1967, on the tragedy of the predominantly
white military-industrial mass bombardment driven tragedy of mostly “colored”
US troops and “we see children burned to death with napalm”…Eloquent. This break ties into the first segment, in
which a Korean American UC Santa Cruz professor traces the history of the
never-ended (N Korea wants it; US hasn’t given it since 1953) aerial threat to
North Korea, starting with indiscriminate overflight of B-29 bombing runs
killing 3.5 million North Koreans, 70% civilians, alone, through the recent
joint US-S Korean military simulation of an air-led invasion of the North when
the regime “topples.” She calls for
acknowledging the inevitable that North Korea will have nuclear weapons, a
peace treaty, and the withdrawal of US troops from their 40 bases in the South
(vs. China, which complied with the 1953 armistice agreement and withdrew its
troops forthwith). Thank goodness at
least one US network is telling US history like the rest of the world feels it. But I digress.
The 3rd
segment focuses on the trial, the most compelling part to me is a lawyer from
the center for constitutional rights outlining the presentation of evidence,
including testimony by a former police eyewitness that Commissioner Kelly said
NYPD policy was to strike fear into black and Latino folks so they wouldn’t
even think of committing crimes. There
is a lot of talk in the segment about the pressure from the top to make the
numbers look good precinct by precinct.
What they don’t mention is that 20 years ago, NYPD instituted a policy
designed to guarantee that arrests would go up and reported offenses including “murder”
would go down. It was called a
statistical evaluation system called Compstat.
If you go to my 2001 “book”—A
Criminologist’s Quest for Peace—under “peacemaking” in “Archived Papers” at
critcrim.org, you will find my account of Compstat’s effects in chapter 1 on “living
criminologically with naked emperors,” the very effects cited by the plaintiffs
in this case. Compstat reaffirmed my
faith that criminologists ought to abandon trying to explain what gets counted
as “crime” or “criminality.”
The
second democracynow.org segment in today’s show is also well worth watching, on
how a not-for-profit group has moved the Associated Press to change its style
manual to forbid the use of the “I” word for “immigrant” as an adjective unless
it refers to acts, not to people. All in
all, this is show is outstandingly newsworthy and timely! Love and peace--hal
No comments:
Post a Comment