The voices were louder than ever as New Yorkers took to the streets yesterday as part of a silent march protesting the NYPD’s controversial “stop-and-frisk” policy.
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A group of activists shouted “We’ve got to fight back, we can’t be silent!” as they passed the home of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, just off Fifth Avenue.
According to the Associated Press, nearly 300 civil rights groups were represented in the 30-block walk, from elected officials and labor union members to New York residents angry about how they’re being treated when they walk the streets.
Critics of the NYPD’s policy of stopping, questioning and searching people who police consider suspicious is illegal and humiliating to hundreds of thousands of law-abiding blacks and Hispanics.
Last year alone the NYPD stopped close to 700,000 people, up from more than 90,000 a decade ago.
Bloomberg’s town house on East 79th Street was the proclaimed destination of the Sunday march. The home and sidewalk in front were blocked off by police barricades, and officers would not say whether the mayor was home.
As the march wound down, with a lineup of buses waiting to take protesters away, tensions between police and protesters suddenly escalated into clashes.
A group of them, led by longtime Occupy Wall Street activists, insisted on walking down Fifth Ave. below East 77th Street – apparently the cutoff point where police tried to direct them to side streets.
The Rev. Al Sharpton and his National Action Network, the NAACP and Local 1199 of the SEIU union were the leading organizers of Sunday’s march.
New York City Council member Jumaane Williams said before Sunday’s march began that-
“We are black, white, Asian, LGBT, straight, Jewish, Muslim and Christian…Mayor Bloomberg has been our great uniter. We’ve been screaming loudly, and he hasn’t heard us, but hopefully he’ll hear the deafening silence.”
Last year, the NYPD stopped more than 685,000 people, mostly black and Hispanic young men – up from about 97,000 a decade earlier.
Benjamin Jealous, head of the NAACP, said that-
“In most cities, when you ask who gets beaten up by the cops, the answer comes back: black people, people of color, and the gay community,”
Jealous said that “the notion that this make us safer really defies logic,” noting that other large cities have cut their crime rate without resorting to stop-and-frisk methods.
Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly defends the policy, saying the program keeps guns off the streets and helps stop crime before it happens.
That maybe so, but the fact still remains that a staggering number of black and Latinos are being stopped and frisked unlawfully.
