Watching Certain People: Does this have a familiar tune?

3-10-2010 New York:

From 2004 through 2009, in a policy that has gotten completely out of control, New York City police officers stopped people on the street and checked them out nearly three million times, frisking and otherwise humiliating many of them.

Upward of 90 percent of the people stopped are completely innocent of any wrongdoing. And yet the New York Police Department is compounding this intolerable indignity by compiling an enormous and permanent computerized database of these encounters between innocent New Yorkers and the police.

Not only are most of the people innocent, but a vast majority are either black or Hispanic. There is no defense for this policy. It’s a gruesome, racist practice that should offend all New Yorkers, and it should cease.

Police Department statistics show that 2,798,461 stops were made in that six-year period. In 2,467,150 of those instances, the people stopped had done nothing wrong. That’s 88.2 percent of all stops over six years. Black people were stopped during that period a staggering 1,444,559 times. Hispanics accounted for 843,817 of the stops and whites 287,218.

While crime has been going down, the number of people getting stopped by the police is going up. Last year, more than 575,000 stops were made — a record. But 504,594 of those stops were of people who had done nothing wrong. They had committed no crime, were issued no summonses and were carrying no weapons or illegal substances.

Still, day after day, the cops continue harassing and degrading these innocent New Yorkers, often making them line up against walls, or lean spread-eagled on the hoods of cars, or sprawl face down in the street to be searched like criminals in front of curious, sometimes frightened, sometimes giggling, sometimes outraged onlookers.

If the police officers were treating white middle-class or wealthy individuals this way, the movers and shakers in this town would be apoplectic. The mayor would be called to account in an atmosphere of thunderous outrage, and the police commissioner would be gone.

But the people getting stopped and frisked are mostly young, and most of them are black or brown and poor. So Police Commissioner Ray Kelly could feel completely comfortable with his department issuing the order in 2006 that reports of all stops and frisks be forwarded and compiled “for input into the Department’s database.”

“They have been collecting the names and all sorts of other information about everybody who is stopped and frisked on the streets,” said Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which is fighting the department’s stop-and-frisk policy and its compiling of data on people who are innocent. “This is a massive database of innocent, overwhelmingly black and Latino people,” she said.

Police Commissioner Kelly has made it clear that this monstrous database, growing by a half-million or so stops each year, is to be a permanent feature of the department’s operations. In a letter last summer to Peter Vallone Jr., the chairman of the City Council’s Public Safety Committee, the commissioner said:

“Information contained in the stop, question and frisk database remains there indefinitely, for use in future investigations. Therefore, there are no existing Police Department guidelines that mandate the removal of information once it has been entered into the database.”

He added, “Information contained within the stop, question and frisk database is used primarily by department investigators during the course of a criminal investigation.”

So the department is collecting random information on innocent, primarily poor, black and brown New Yorkers for use in some anticipated future criminal investigation. But it is not collecting and storing massive amounts of information on innocent middle-class or wealthy white people. Why is that, exactly?

Councilman Vallone is a supporter of the stop-and-frisk policy, but he is concerned about the innocent people in the database. As he told me on Monday, “I don’t support the indefinite keeping of this information regarding people who were not arrested or charged with any crime.”

The Police Department has no intention of changing its policy. A spokesman for Commissioner Kelly told me that information collected when the police stop an innocent individual “may be useful” in future investigations. The stored data may become useful “in the same way” that license plate information is useful, he said.

He cited the hypothetical example of someone in the course of a criminal investigation saying that he or she was at “a certain place at a certain time.” The information permanently stored in the stop-and-frisk database, he said, could help the police determine if “they were or they weren’t.”

His example would suggest that the innocent people stopped are nevertheless permanently under suspicion, which is, of course, the case. ..Source.. Op-Ed Columnist BOB HERBERT