† Criminal InJustice is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal Injustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm.

                  Crimes of Style ~ Jean-Michel Basquiat
by nancy a heitzeg

“Most Young Kings Get Their Heads Cut Off…”
― Jean-Michel Basquiat, (December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988)

There are 20 trillion pieces of text, 30 trillion more numbers to be deployed in the illumination of criminal injustice. And so, every week we do.

Sometimes, however, it is simply best to let the artists have their say- with brushes, with paint, with exploding imagery. To let them distill that universe of trouble onto the canvass.

Just bring it, as Basquiat himself would say,

” Boom! For real.”

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From ThinkProgress:

The New York Police Department last month arrested and detained in handcuffs a seven-year-old boy over accusations that he stole $5 from a fellow elementary school student four days earlier. The December 4 incident came to light after Wilson Reyes’ parents filed a $250 million lawsuit against the NYPD, alleging the boy was verbally, physically and emotionally abused, intimidated, humiliated, embarrassed and defamed.

His parents snapped a photo of the boy handcuffed to a wall at the police precinct, which was published on the front page of the New York Post. The details of the incident are in dispute, including how long Reyes was detained, whether he actually stole the $5 and whether he physically assaulted the other boy in the incident. But reports confirm that charges were filed against the boy for robbery and weren’t dropped until December 26.

…

The alleged victim, a classmate who says he is frequently bullied by Reyes, told the New York Daily News that Reyes punched the boy and stole $5 as he was walking home from school on November 30, four days before police arrested him in a classroom in the Bronx. School officials told the Post the incident occurred off grounds and it is unclear whether the school solicited police intervention.

But whether or not Reyes was a “bully” does not explain why police allegedly pulled a seven-year-old boy out of class, let alone handcuffed him to a wall, days after the altercation was over and done with. The criminalization of young children, particularly as an alternative means of school discipline, is an alarming trend that disproportionately funnels minority students into the criminal justice system.

Criminal InJustice^† is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal InJustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

The City that Never Stops Frisking
by nancy a heitzeg

New York City has many nicknames — The Big Apple, Gotham, The Empire City, The City that Never Sleeps and more. Since I am here again — in a New York State of Mind – I am going to coin my own -

The City that Never Stops Frisking.

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From CBS News:

Undercover NYPD officers attended meetings of liberal political organizations and kept intelligence files on activists who planned protests around the country, according to interviews and documents that show how police have used counterterrorism tactics to monitor even lawful activities.

…

In April 2008, an undercover NYPD officer traveled to New Orleans to attend the People’s Summit, a gathering of liberal groups organized around their shared opposition to U.S. economic policy and the effect of trade agreements between the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

When the undercover effort was summarized for supervisors, it identified groups opposed to U.S. immigration policy, labor laws and racial profiling. Two activists — Jordan Flaherty, a journalist, and Marisa Franco, a labor organizer for housekeepers and nannies — were mentioned by name in one of the police intelligence reports obtained by the AP.

“One workshop was led by Jordan Flaherty, former member of the International Solidarity Movement Chapter in New York City,” officers wrote in an April 25, 2008, memo to David Cohen, the NYPD’s top intelligence officer. “Mr. Flaherty is an editor and journalist of the Left Turn Magazine and was one of the main organizers of the conference. Mr. Flaherty held a discussion calling for the increase of the divestment campaign of Israel and mentioned two events related to Palestine.”

The document is available here.

From Chicago Tribune:

For the first time in public, Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy promised his department will never conduct blanket surveillance of Muslims like the New York Police Department did in Newark, N.J., when he was chief there.

McCarthy addressed hundreds of Muslims on Saturday at the annual banquet of theCouncil on American-Islamic Relations-Chicago, a civil rights organization. He said police would follow leads in criminal cases, but the department “does not and will not conduct blanket surveillance and profiling of any community in the city of Chicago.”

“We are deeply committed to respecting the civil rights of all Chicagoans,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy and Mayor Rahm Emanuel have tried to reassure Chicago-area Muslims since The Associated Press revealed the NYPD’s spying in Newark. The AP reported last month that in 2007, the NYPD’s secretive Demographics Unit fanned out across Newark, photographing mosques and eavesdropping on Muslim businesses. Earlier, the AP reported that the department was conducting similar surveillance in New York, building databases showing where Muslims live, shop and pray.

From Colorlines:

Since September 11, 2001, AP reported, the “Bush and Obama administrations have provided $135 million to the New York and New Jersey region through the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, known as HIDTA.” Neither the White House nor Congress are given details of how the money is spent. But the AP reports the drug war-era funds have been used at least in some part to pay for “cars that plainclothes NYPD officers used to conduct surveillance on Muslim neighborhoods and … for computers that stored” information of the targets of the NYPD’s Muslim mapping program.

The ACLU and other groups have demanded a federal probe into the legality the spending.

“We’re concerned that federal resources may be used to map Muslims with no evidence of wrongdoing,” said Nusrat Choudhury, an attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project. “There are federal protections against this and what disturbs is that there’s a revelation that the White House may have supported it.”

But the White House money came in addition to a much larger pool of funds from the federal government. According to New York City documents, nearly $1 billion came to the NYPD directly from the Department of Homeland Security in just the last seven years to pay, in part, for the sprawling anti-terrorism program.

From The Root:

This week the big news on the Racism Watch is the New York City cops who have been discussing on Facebook black attendees of Brooklyn’s West Indian American Day Parade in classically unsavory terms: “Animals.” “Savages.” “Drop a bomb and wipe them all out.” And it would hardly be hasty to assume that terms even meaner than those were bandied about; we are only being told about snippets of a thread since erased from the site.

Typically, news like this is classified as evidence that racism in America is still “out there,” and in ways more significant than what is acknowledged by those who claim it is on the wane. People like, yes, me.

I thought it might be useful to spell out how someone like me receives news like this business with the New York cops. I have always stressed that conflict between the cops and, especially, young black men is the keystone reason for a sense among blacks that white America stands united against them. Racism manifests itself in other ways, but most of those cases are not the kind that make healthy people feel as if a nation is set against them. As Ellis Cose has said, “Rage does not flow from dry numerical analyses of discrimination or from professional prospects projected on a statistician’s screen.”

Rage does flow from being pulled over and maybe even roughed up by the cops for no good reason.