In a shocking new audio recording, the NYPD called a 16-year-old Harlem student named Alvin a “Fu*king mutt” during a recent racially-charged stop-and-frisk.
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The controversial policy, championed by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and police Commissioner Ray Kelly, has received massive outcry over the disproportionate rate at which the NYPD stop-and-frisk young people of color – as opposed to their white counterparts.
As for Alvin, on June 3, 2011, three plainclothes NYPD officers stopped him, questioned and frisked him while the third remained in the unmarked car. Alvin secretly captured the interaction on his cell phone, and the resulting audio is one of the only known recordings of stop-and-frisk in action.
As reported by The Nation:
In the course of the two-minute recording, the officers give no legally valid reason for the stop, use racially charged language and threaten Alvin with violence. Early in the stop, one of the officers asks, “You want me to smack you?” When Alvin asks why he is being threatened with arrest, the other officer responds, “For being a fucking mutt.” Later in the stop, while holding Alvin’s arm behind his back, the first officer says, “Dude, I’m gonna break your fuckin’ arm, then I’m gonna punch you in the fuckin’ face.”
“He grabbed me by my bookbag and he started pushing me down. So I’m going backwards like down the hill and he just kept pushing me, pushing me, it looked like he we was going to hit me,”
Alvin recounts. “I felt like they was trying to make me resist or fight back.”
This goes to show that the NYPD will always target young people of color during stop-and-frisk. Of the nearly 700,000 people stopped by the NYPD in 2011, 87 percent were either black or Latino.
SOURCE: The Nation
