Genocide Watch: Like NYC/Arizona 4th Amendment Rights of Blacks & Latinos Vanishing in Philadelphia

From [HERE] Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York was dismissive when asked if his police department, under siege for the way it uses the stop-and-frisk tactic, might take a lesson from Philadelphia’s response to a similar challenge.

“Why would any rational person want to trade what we have here for the situation in Philadelphia — more murders, higher crime?” Mr. Bloomberg said in May, referring to an epidemic of gun violence that in 2010 pushed Philadelphia’s homicide rate up for the first time since 2007, an increase that continued last year.

City leaders here see it differently. A year after they settled litigation by agreeing to institute a host of safeguards to make sure police stops were conducted legally, they say they are simply doing what is needed to make sure that aggressive crime fighting is accompanied by a respect for civil rights. As part of the agreement, the Police Department has set up an electronic database to track the legality of stops, adopted new training protocols and accepted oversight by an independent monitor.

Philadelphia’s willingness to put police procedures under the microscope has won praise even from the civil rights lawyers who in 2010 filed a class-action lawsuit, accusing police officers of disproportionately stopping African-American and Hispanic men without sufficient cause.

“The city agreed almost immediately after we filed suit to come to the table and discuss an amicable resolution,” said Paul Messing, one of the lawyers, adding that he thought Mayor Michael A. Nutter and other officials “understood that this presented serious constitutional concerns.”

Yet finding the right balance has not been easy. City officials have watched in frustration as homicides have continued to climb. As of late Tuesday, 189 people had been killed in the city this year, compared with 169 at the same time in 2011.

In most cases, Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey said, both the victims and the perpetrators have been black or Hispanic men.

“I think we have to face some realities,” said Commissioner Ramsey, who is black. “We certainly do not want to be stopping people without the reasonable suspicion that we need to conduct a stop. But just because someone is complaining and they want to play the race card doesn’t mean it’s an inappropriate stop.”

The total number of stops, he said, is not the issue. “The question is: Are you stopping the right people for the right reason?”

Philadelphia, like New York, increased the use of the stop-and-frisk tactic, arguing that it would help remove guns from the streets and serve as a deterrent. In his 2007 mayoral campaign, Mr. Nutter promised to use the strategy to help combat a “crime emergency” in some neighborhoods. That year, police officers made 136,711 pedestrian stops. Two years after Mr. Nutter was elected, in 2009, the number nearly doubled to 253,276 — higher proportionally, in a city of 1.5 million, than the 685,724 stops made by police officers in New York last year.

Commissioner Ramsey said many factors could be driving the increase in homicides, including reductions in police department staffing and the fact that “we have an enormous problem with guns in Philadelphia”; the penalties for possession of an illegal firearm in New York are far tougher than in Pennsylvania, he noted.

But he also said that after Philadelphia increased the use of the stop-and-frisk tactic a few years ago, gun violence decreased. There was a 22 percent reduction in homicides from 2007, a year before the policy began, to 2009, “and our shootings went down.” he said.

From [HERE] This NY Times article is about the stop and frisk policy in Philadelphia, which is racist. Nevertheless, this article is written with a sympathetic tone towards police and justifies the racist idea that Blacks & Latinos are inherently dangerous persons who are not entitled to the full protection of the Constitution or dependening on where you are, a Brown person's Constitutional rights can be somehow comprromised and balanced against racist fear. As with Arizona, when the police can stop, detain & put there hands on persons based on nothing but skin color, a pre-condition of genocide exists. Mr. Messing, the civil rights lawyer, said the problem was that as the number of stops escalated, the number of complaints he received grew even faster. “We were seeing huge numbers of stops being made without legal cause,” he said, adding that very few arrests were made and that guns were seized in about only 1 in 1,000 stops.

Mahari Bailey, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, said that when he returned to Philadelphia after graduating from Georgetown University’s law school, he was repeatedly stopped by officers who often behaved aggressively. “It just became too much,” Mr. Bailey said.

In one instance, Mr. Bailey said, he was standing with friends outside a house in West Philadelphia when an unmarked car screeched up and two men in plain clothes jumped out, guns drawn, and told them to put up their hands. “We thought we were being robbed,” he said.

Two other cars arrived. Mr. Bailey was handcuffed and placed spread-eagle against a police car. When Mr. Bailey said he was a lawyer and asked why he had been stopped, he got no answer, he said. But the officers threatened to call his employer “and say I was hanging with drug dealers.”

In North Philadelphia, one of the poorest areas of the city, distrust of the police runs high. Police stops are frequent. In one neighborhood, Police District 25, where 32 of the city’s 324 homicides took place in 2011, 9,181 pedestrian stops were recorded in the first half of last year. The number of stops dropped to 5,842 in the second half of the year.

Anthony Glenn, 32, said he had been stopped six times on Susquehanna Avenue in North Philadelphia over the last few months as he walked home at night from his job at a Walmart.

“They ask you questions, ask you where you’re going and what you’re doing,” he said. Sometimes the officers are polite, Mr. Glenn said, but others tell him to “shut up and be quiet.” He has recently taken to getting rides from co-workers.

Shelly Chappelle, 46, who sat rocking her 2-month-old granddaughter at a playground on North 15th Street while young men played league basketball on the neighboring court, said of the police, “Honestly, we don’t like them at all.” Instead of stopping people on the street, she said, “they should be doing something more constructive, like going to catch the murderers.”

Fernando Montero, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania and a plaintiff in the lawsuit who said he had been stopped nine times while conducting research in North Philadelphia, said some residents he had interviewed expressed more fear of being stopped by the police than of any violence they might encounter on the streets.

The stop-and-frisk tactic, he said, “actually makes the interactions with the police more hostile and more full of suspicion.”

But not everyone in North Philadelphia thinks the policy is misguided. Ange Johnson, 63, who was visiting her parents at the house where she grew up, said aggressive policing had made the neighborhood safer.

“Their presence is very important,” she said of the police, adding that in the encounters she had seen, the officers had been friendly.

Commissioner Ramsey acknowledged that the way some officers behaved during stops was a bigger problem than the stops themselves.

“I would say if there is a real, valid issue in this debate, that’s it,” he said, adding that he was aware of the distrust pervasive in some neighborhoods.

After a homicide a few weeks ago, Commissioner Ramsey said, the police were unable to elicit any information from residents in the neighborhood.

“We’ve got the yellow tape and so forth, pools of blood, and directly across the street a bunch of kids are playing on the front porch,” he said. “Everybody’s acting like nothing happened.”

His goal, he said, is to change that dynamic, “but we can’t do it if we’re being perceived as harassing the community.”

To try to address the issue, the police department has developed new procedures for handling first-time complaints about verbal abuse, hoping to turn what has traditionally been an adversarial proceeding into a teaching opportunity. But Commissioner Ramsey fiercely defends the continued use of the stop-and-frisk tactic as essential.

“The sense that I get from some is that they want to get rid of this tool completely,” he said, “and that would be a huge mistake.”