Fields: It’s Great To Be White
BY SAM FIELDS
We’ve all been reading about the friction between the police and the Black community. The most common Black complaints are car stops (DWB-DRIVING WHILE BLACK) or on foot (WWB-WALKING WHILE BLACK) for no apparent reason without an explanation.
It’s known as police “profiling”.
In New York City they have codified DWB and WWB with their wide reaching “Stop and Frisk “law. In 2012 it resulted in over 600,000 stops. Whites, who are 44% of the population, experienced 12% of the stops. Blacks and Latinos were 87% of the stops. Only about 10% of those stops yielded wrongdoing. Take away simple pot possession and you’re down to low single digits.
There was an interesting Reuters article about interviewing 25 Black men in New York City who described their own “Stop and Frisk” experiences with the NYPD. All but one had been stopped for no apparent reason. Five had guns pulled on them. One had his head slammed on the hood of his car. Complaints to NYPD Internal Affairs were fruitless.
If this sounds like more of the eight million stories in the Naked City; there is a twist. All twenty-five were off-duty or retired New York City policemen!
The chief defenders of Stop and Frisk are former mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. They don’t deny it’s selective enforcement based on ethnicity. They insist that it’s all about their concern for protecting minorities from their own who are the main perpetrators of violent crime.
But, if this is such a good idea, why confine profiling to Blacks and street crime. If we are going to use statistics to sidestep our constitutional rights let’s go all the way.
While Jews are under 2% of the population, they are clearly involved in substantially more than 2% of Wall Street securities violations. So I guess Bloomberg would not have a problem if the Securities Exchange Commission targeted Jews.
Based on high levels of alcoholism, maybe DUI checkpoints should over-test the Irish.
If you have been following South Florida’s Medicare fraud epidemic, you would agree it makes sense to concentrate Medicare auditing on Cuban doctors.
And let’s not forget Giuliani’s peeps. Looking into organized crime? Why not an application for a Search Warrant based on evidence that the target’s last name ends in a vowel.
Blacks Targeted In Fort Lauderdale
In case you think this just a Big Apple problem, consider the Public Defender’s report on the Fort Lauderdale PD.
Using FLPD annual reports, it’s clear that the police use certain city ordinances to go after the 12% of the population that is Black men. Chief among them is the city ordinance requiring bicycle headlights. Ninety percent of the citations were issued to Black males. Many times it’s a ruse to initiate a search of the bicyclist. While the State Attorney’s office has no problem with this, some judges have thrown out evidence for violations of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure.
All this made me think about the times that I have been stopped by the police for no apparent reason and offered no explanation.
I’m talking about my stoner teens and twenties in Dade, my raucous thirties in Washington D. C. and my years in Broward. It’s almost seventy years.
I then called four friends that I have known since high school—North Miami ‘62—and asked them to tell me about all the times that they were stopped by the police without rhyme or reason.
With 350 years among us, I thought I might need a calculator.
When I added them all up—and I am talking about every single one no matter where we lived or traveled—it came to a grand total of…..“zero”. Among us we have lived and traveled through hundreds of police jurisdictions without any of us having been inexplicably stopped by the police…no time, no way, no how, nowhere.
Mel Brooks may have opined: “it’s good to be the king”. But, in America, it’s “great” to be White.
December 29th, 2014 at 7:39 am
Sam,
I think we can all agree, this is a great miscarriage of justice. You should have been locked up years ago.
December 29th, 2014 at 8:39 am
Exhibit A: “Woman drives through suburban Chattanooga neighborhood, clad in body armor, with hand out the driver’s side window shooting at cars and people. After being cornered, Julia Shields, 45, pointed her firearm at police but was taken into custody without injury.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/its-in-the-culture
December 29th, 2014 at 9:22 am
Broward County is a microcosm of our country. It is time that we got serious about bridging the racial divide. Fear is the enemy. When children are made to fear those of other ethnicities, religions, or race, that’s where it starts. Arresting kids in school, rather than seeking an alternative, compounds the problem. We have the power, in Broward, to truly make a difference. What a great resolution for 2015.
December 29th, 2014 at 10:07 am
Dear Sham,
You are absolutley right.
But as long as my misdeeds were not outwardly observable, I had nothing to worry about because I was White.
December 29th, 2014 at 10:41 am
Mr fields like any good lawyer presents arguments only to support his own position and ignores not only all contrary evidence but even facts that show his evidently obvious one sided and yes intellectual dishonesty
December 29th, 2014 at 11:03 am
Sam,
yeah. But it’s all relative, isn’t it.
Would you feel “white” in West Virginia or Alabama in the same way? Or Nigeria?
December 29th, 2014 at 12:25 pm
“This is all bullshit, none of this ever happens. It’s all a liberal agenda.”
– White guy
December 29th, 2014 at 12:41 pm
Kevin,
If feeling “White” means not assuming that I am being watched when I go a department store or that seeing a cop in my rear view window evokes nothing more than checking my speedometer than I would still feel “white” in West Virginia or Alabama.
I regularly vacationed in WV and went to college in Alabama.
I never thought twice about it in WV.
During my time in Alabama (1962) I was thrilled to be White.
As for Nigeria I would guess it is better to be White there than Black in Mississippi.
I wonder if you have any Black friends. I wonder if you have asked them about walking into Macys or a cop in the rear view mirror.
The late Jack Kemp used to lament the lack of conversation between conservatives and Black folks. Based on his years in the NFL, he often joked that he had “taken showers with more Black people than the average Republican has ever spoken to”
FROM BUDDY:
Another gratuitous shot at Republicans, Sam.
One of the candidates the GOP have next cycle for president is Dr. Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon who has been raising huge amounts of money and is exciting the base. He already has ground operations in Iowa and New Hampshire. And he is black.
That said, Republicans have nothing to do with the police targeting blacks. As you have written, its happening in New York City, one of the most Democratic and liberal cities in the nation.
December 29th, 2014 at 5:27 pm
Is God giving Ben Carson the shocker?
***
Christian Broadcasting Network reporter David Brody has been slowly releasing excerpts from his interview with likely Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson, who has told Brody that liberals are responsible for “hate speech” and that he “feels fingers” from God telling him to make a run for the White House.
Today, Brody released another segment from his interview where the conservative activist was joined by his wife, Candy, to describe how God is calling him to make a presidential bid.
“We recognize that we are being instruments in the hand of God, he is the one who really orchestrates all of this,” Carson said.
– See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/ben-carson-thinks-god-calling-him-save-america-stop-putinesque-obama#sthash.2kim8oJJ.dpuf
December 29th, 2014 at 8:36 pm
Sam you really are an out of touch azzhole. Maybe Chaz can be you one day if he tries hard enough.
December 29th, 2014 at 9:53 pm
“Another gratuitous shot at Republicans”
Since the purpose of the Republican Party seems to be defending the powerful against the powerless, I’m not sure that Sam’s post is that far off target.
As for Dr. Carson, I predict his fate will resemble that of Herman Cain — a convenient novelty for the GOP to use as a “some of my best friends are black’ defense. If he runs, he will be discarded early on; I doubt he will still be in the race by the time of the Florida primary.
December 30th, 2014 at 1:17 am
That said, Republicans have nothing to do with the police targeting blacks. As you have written, its happening in New York City, one of the most Democratic and liberal cities in the nation.
—
Pardon me, but weren’t Giuliani and Bloomberg both Republicans?
FROM BUDDY:
Bloomberg was a Republican and has been an independent since 2007. Giuliani is a Republican, but it far out of the mainstream of the national GOP as proven by his utter failure to win the presidency.
So they were hardly Republicans in the sense Fields’ means. Both support a whole range of social issues that the national GOP doesn’t back. If the stop-and-frisk did not have the support of and was a big issue with the largely-Democratic voters in NYC, neither candidate would have won re-election.
December 30th, 2014 at 9:13 am
All you need to know…
From Wiki: Giuliani was a supporter of the Iraq War, later in 2007 Giuliani was described by Newsweek magazine in January 2007 as “one of the most consistent cheerleaders for the president’s handling of the war in Iraq.” Later that year he also supported Bush’s surge in the number of U.S. troops in Iraq.
December 30th, 2014 at 10:14 am
In other news from the Neoconfederate Party, a/k/a GOP:
WASHINGTON — In a revelation that could put a crimp in Republican efforts to reach out to minorities in 2016, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise has acknowledged that he once addressed a gathering of white supremacists, though his office denies any association with the group’s social views.
Scalise, the chamber’s third-ranking Republican, served in the Louisiana Legislature when he appeared in 2002 at a convention of the European-American Unity and Rights Organization. Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke founded the group, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has classified as a hate group.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee criticized Scalise in a statement on Tuesday and questioned why the GOP leadership has remained silent.
“Steve Scalise chose to cheerlead for a group of KKK members and neo-Nazis at a white supremacist rally and now his fellow House Republican Leaders can’t even speak up and say he was wrong,” said DCCC national press secretary Josh Schwerin.
December 30th, 2014 at 11:03 am
Sam,
I wasn’t trolling you. I was simply pointing out that ethnic identities are situational and will often change for the same person depending on where they find themselves.
And it goes without saying, unless one is in complete denial of history and common sense, being visibly white, educated, and middle class in the US has unspoken advantages that are obvious.
And yeah, as someone who lived in a 99.3% black country in Africa for 3 years and has written a book and several journal articles about African politics, is think I might have a “black friend” or two.
Kevin.