This video, published by The
Nation, captures one incident of a kind that occurs about 700,000 times a year to New Yorkers. Except if you're white. The young man in this video, the son of a cop,
was stopped multiple times in one day, for the “suspicious” behavior of wearing
a hoodie and a backpack, and “looking” at the police. In other words, walking while black.
Know any white people this happened to? Anyone on the Upper West Side? According to a New York Civil Liberties Union
report (see here
and here),
90% of those stopped are black (23%
of the population) and Latino (29% of the population). In fact, more young black men were stopped by the
NYPD in 2011 than there are young black men in New York City. Really, let that sink in. Who’s running the NYPD, Mike Bloomberg and Ray
Kelly, or George Zimmerman and Geraldo?
