www.nytimes.com/… An attorney for Bronx Defenders (and friend) wrote this letter. He points out that if you got arrested the last time you called 911, you might hesitate to call 911 next time.
As an attorney for Bronx Defenders, I was struck by the article. My office is only two blocks from the Melrose and Jackson Houses, near where Mr. Maldonado was killed, and I often walk past them on my way to and from the office. I have had several clients who called 911 to report a crime or ask for help only to be arrested when the police arrived.
As a former organizer, I have led door-knocking drives in those same buildings to recruit residents to join police-reform campaigns, and heard story after story of aggressive officers patrolling hallways on “vertical sweeps” and harassing residents and their neighbors, demanding identification and a stated purpose for being there.
If you were questioned by officers every time you walked into your own home, got arrested after calling 911 in a crisis, and watched your children grow up being stopped and frisked with the fear that they might be harmed or killed by the very people sworn to protect them, would you want to talk to the police?
Here’s a story from September: Calls to 911 From Black Neighborhoods Fell After a Case of Police Violence
People who argue the opposite want to bring back stop and frisk (which was a policy of Mayor Martin O’Malley in Baltimore)
Police like to blame the victims, but the cause might be:
Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist and the study’s author, concluded that there might be some connection between protests over police violence and increases in murders in cities with large African American populations. Rather than suggesting, as some conservative proponents of a “Ferguson effect” have done, that such might undermine public safety, Rosenfeld focused on the “longstanding grievances and discontent with policing in African American communities”.
“In this interpretation, when activated by controversial incidents of police use of force, chronic discontent erupts into violence,” he wrote.
Exactly how this hypothesized “legitimacy crisis” might work – how frustration over police killings might translate into more community violence, and which individuals might therefore act differently – is unclear, Rosenfeld wrote.
In Chicago on Monday, US attorney Zach Fardon said that though “no one knows for sure” why violence has spiked in the city, the timing of the spike closely followed the release of video of the police killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.
SERPICO
If you want further reading, you can check out what Serpico has to say (he’s 80 now). Hint: it’s nothing that the GOP is proposing. He wants police to be accountable. So let’s DO THIS in BLUE STATES.