NYPD data: Whites much more likely to be carrying drugs and guns than minorities

By Stephen C. Webster
Wednesday, May 22, 2013 14:08 EDT

 

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The report’s summary, first spotted by Think Progress, puts this striking divide in no unclear terms, explaining:In a detailed analysis (PDF) of publicly available New York Police Department data on crime in 2012, the New York Office of the Public Advocate revealed Wednesday that white people were much more likely to be carrying drugs and guns than minorities, despite making up a tiny fraction of individuals police subjected to so-called “stop-and-frisk” searches.

• The likelihood a stop of an African American New Yorker yielded a weapon was half that of white New Yorkers stopped. The NYPD uncovered a weapon in one out every 49 stops of white New Yorkers. By contrast, it took the Department 71 stops of Latinos and 93 stops of African Americans to find a weapon.
• The likelihood a stop of an African American New Yorker yielded contraband was one-third less than that of white New Yorkers stopped. The NYPD uncovered contraband in one out every 43 stops of white New Yorkers. By contrast, it took the Department 57 stops of Latinos and 61 stops of African Americans to find contraband.
• Despite the overall reduction in stops, the proportion involving black and Latino New Yorkers has remained unchanged. They continue to constitute 84 percent of all stops, despite comprising only 54 percent of the general population. And the innocence rates remain at the same level as 2011 – at nearly 89 percent.

In a separate analysis by the New York Civil Liberties Union (PDF), also published Wednesday, the group revealed that out of 532,911 stop-and-frisk searches in 2012, just 729 guns were found. By contrast, over 5,000 people were arrested for private marijuana possession, which was decriminalized city-wide in 1977. However, possessing marijuana within public view is an arrest-level offense, leading many officers to demand people empty their pockets during stop-and-frisk searches thereby upping the criminal penalties for simple possession.

As a result of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s insistence upon rampant stop-and-frisk searches, marijuana possession arrests have skyrocketed under his tenure. He attempted a fix last year by announcing that all lower level marijuana offenses would be dealt a ticket instead of a night in jail, in the absence of a law Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) is pushing that would decriminalize possession across New York state.

“In the last decade since Michael Bloomberg became mayor, the NYPD has made 400,038 lowest level marijuana possession arrests at a cost of $600 million dollars,” a 2012 report by the Drug Policy Alliance explains. “Nearly 350,000 of the marijuana possession arrests made under Bloomberg are of overwhelmingly young Black and Latino men, despite the fact that young whites use marijuana at higher rates than young Blacks and Latinos.”

A class action lawsuit filed over the search practice concluded Tuesday in a New York courtroom with city attorneys arguing that even with numbers like these, there’s no evidence of racial discrimination. Clinton-appointed District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin — who said Sunday she is inclined to “treat the government as only one more litigant” without any “deference” to their authority — is expected to issue a ruling on the matter in the coming weeks.
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[Photo: New York police officer on horseback. Stuart Monk / Shutterstock.com.]

Melanie Fiona = Real Talent

Via SoulBounce:

On Tuesday, May 21, 2013, The Notorious B.I.G. would've celebrated his 41st birthday. There were many tributes to the fallen rapper across the Internet, but one that stood out for me was from singer and apparent hip-hop head Melanie Fiona. Instead of the doing the typical social network shout out, Melanie opted to recreate BIG's classic remix to "One More Chance" using nothing but her voice, GarageBand and hours of her time. The results are simply stunning. As Melanie sings through the opening verse and first hook backed by a chorus of only her, you begin to see just how talented the Toronto native really is. But of course, we already knew all that. My only wish is that Melanie would inject the personality and talent we all know she has (and which she exhibits here) into her future musical endeavors. Peep Melanie working her magic below.

The Complexity of the Adrian Peterson Expectation

So this week in sports, the NBA playoffs dominate the headlines. No doubt the quest for a repeat by the Miami Heat is being closely watched as they are led by their polarizing leader and sheer dominant force of basketball nature, a.k.a. LeBron James. After destroying the Milwaukee Bucks in the first round, the Heat took on their eastern-conference rival, the Chicago Bulls. The Bulls are led by, uh, by, well a cast of players I would say. Typically, their leader would be Derrick Rose, but he's out right now after suffering a torn ACL last year during the playoffs. That's where I segue into Adrian Peterson...

In December 2011, Peterson, an all-pro running back for the Minnesota Vikings tore his anterior cruciate ligament (acl) during a game against the Washington Redskins. Now, in human terms an acl tear/injury will have you rehabbing and out of action for at least 7-12 months. Closer to 11 or 12 is typical. An athlete in supreme condition usually does it in 9-10 months, but will still be tentative playing, landing, cutting or accelerating on that knee. Peterson not only rehabbed his knee in 8 months, but he was back for week 1 of the NFL and fell just short of breaking the single-season record for rushing by 9 yards! Peterson rushed for 2,097 yards! This is an amazing feat, to say the least. Most mere mortals are lucky to have full range again after such a devastating injury, and Peterson displayed other-worldly healing status in his triumphant return to the gridiron. Now herein lies the rub for Derrick Rose...

Peterson has now set the bar for his fellow star athletes. That bar is not just to return in a shorter than expected time frame, but to return and be absolutely phenomenal. This is where we find Derrick Rose being unfairly targeted and described in more colorful terms as a "chicken" for not playing yet. Though Rose has been cleared by physicians for close to two months now, he has stated in numerous ways that he doesn't feel ready to play in a game just yet. At 24, no one in their right mind would rush Rose back if he doesn't feel as if he's ready-but that's just it, these fans couldn't be in their right minds to have such high expectations. Especially for someone with this kind of injury, with that kind of expectation-or pedigree of athleticism. Many memes have been floated around the twittersphere mocking Rose's decision to wait.

  

   

Rose finds himself as a victim of the "Adrian Peterson Expectation". Majority of the fans berating Rose for not playing yet are way out of line. The Bulls played well enough in his absence to make the second-round of the playoffs to face the Miami Heat, but apparently that's not enough. People don't see the silver lining in this loss of Rose this season. Not only have the Bulls played well in his absence, but they have been riddled with injuries to their other top players besides Rose and still beat Miami, in Miami in game 1!

Rose states: "There's no pressure at all. I haven't had any pressure from anyone – not in the organization, not from my teammates," he said. "They know I'm put everything I have into trying to come back as fast as possible. But just trying to be smart with the whole situation and just take my time. “It’s definitely hard. I know this will be over with pretty soon. Who knows when it's going to stop? I can't get down on myself."

I'm glad Rose has teammates that don't question his decision or relative indecision at this point. That would serve no point and not further their cause. What if Rose comes back against his better judgment and hurts himself or plays horribly and disrupts team chemistry? Those very same people challenging or questioning his tenacity will be shouting that he shouldn't have returned.

The whole point is, those couch-potatoes or "arm-chair quarterbacks" should trust that this young man who's been nothing but humble and a beacon of hope for the city he grew up in is doing what he feels is best. No two people react to the same situation exactly alike. Our expectations of others can sometimes be other-worldly, or ones that we would never hold or want ourselves held up to. So take a step back before you criticize Rose's decision to not play this year, his future could have possibly been on the line. The one thing that Derrick needs to listen to right now is his knee.

I for one, am glad he's deciding to tune everyone else's opinion out.

Artist Spotlight: Luke James I.O.U.

Every now and then you get someone who comes across the R&B landscape with a kind of voice or talent that hasn't been seen/heard in awhile. I think Luke James has that kind of voice. Though he's actually been around for a little while, he's just now receiving the kind of press that has his name ringing bells musically. Here is the single "I.O.U." accompanied by great visuals as well. Nowadays it seems as if artists don't tell stories in their music videos anymore to compliment the song, so this is a refreshing change. Check it out.

The Evolution of America's Racism

Straight Up: Let's get real -- and start talking -- about the anti-black prejudice that infects the U.S. By: Lawrence D. Bobo | Posted: March 13, 2013 at 4:29 PM

 

Police act out proper stop-and-frisk procedures in new NYPD training. (Daily News archive/Getty Images)

 -- America is not yet done with the illness of racism, the electoral success of Barack Obama notwithstanding. Yet most white folks don't want to talk about or hear about race anymore. And a good many black folks fret that it is strategically wiser for us to let it alone for now.
I am uncomfortable with both prescriptions. Some underlying maladies, to be sure, do heal on their own. Despite its modern subtlety and complexity, however, the current strain of racism infecting the U.S. is unlikely to be self-healing.
Let's be honest: Our culture is still deeply suffused with anti-black bias, despite an African-American president in office. National surveys (pdf) continue to reveal commonly held stereotypes of African Americans as less hardworking and less intelligent than whites. Political resentments of blacks remain a centerpiece -- indeed, a genuine third rail -- of American domestic politics: Do anything to seriously activate these resentments, and you run the risk of immediate political electrocution. The last time we saw any major political figure come close to touching the rail, of activating these political resentments against blacks, occurred when Obama offered his off-the-cuff remarks about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Root's editor-in-chief, by the Cambridge, Mass., police. 
The level of negative stereotypes and attitudes tapped in polls and surveys may only reveal the most easily observable symptoms of the illness. A number of powerful psychological experiments show the extent to which blackness for Americans is intimately tied to images of violence and danger. Indeed, one of the most depressing lines of research suggests a core underlining psychological association of blackness with apes, an ugly, old racist trope from the age of the Great Chain of Being, in which the African was seen as closer to primitive animals in the hierarchy of species (pdf).
To be sure, this whole issue of racism had a more straightforward quality in the past. We did not have to resort to complex surveys and experiments to reveal its depth. There used to be something loud and obvious and terrible about racism -- circumstances with some ironic virtues. A visible and openly declared enemy is so much more directly confronted than one that operates stealthily.
And that is the dilemma of racism in our times. We have hints, suggestions, indications, if you will, of racial bias all around us today. But it is typically unspoken, if not altogether invisible, much of the time. And where it's not invisible, there is often a plausible cover story that can be told as to why racially differential treatment was somehow justifiable or legitimate.
All of this makes waging the fight against racism much tougher. It is now quiet -- or rationalized on some nonracial grounds and thereby hidden in plain view -- and seemingly, as a consequence, perhaps not such a bad thing after all.
But it is a bad thing. Let's be clear: There is plenty of research showing that actual discrimination remains remarkably common. For example, one major study of low-skilled workers in New York found high rates of bias against black job applicants. Princeton sociologist Devah Pager and her colleagues showed that otherwise identical black job seekers were 50 percent less likely to achieve success in a job search (pdf) than their white counterparts.
The discrimination was so subtle that only a systematic experiment could reveal it. This was not the loud de jure discrimination of the era of "no blacks need apply," but instead today's quiet bias of "Oh, we already filled that position" or "We were actually looking for someone with more experience" or "Maybe you'd be better suited to this lower-paying job."


There are few things as sickening as the ongoing, well-known practice of stop-and-frisk policing in New York. Absent a deep-rooted culture of anti-black bias, which is racism, the practice would not be tolerated, given the radically disproportionate intrusion by state police power that it involves in identifiable minority communities.
Records for 2011 show almost 700,000 such incidents, with almost nine out of 10 incidents involving African Americans or Hispanics. In a city where blacks make up just under a quarter of the population, blacks constitute more than half of those so detained by police. Citywide polls show an enormous gap between blacks and whites in approval of the stop-and-frisk practice, with a substantial number of blacks, at 80 percent (and even a plurality of New York's whites: 48 percent), saying that the police are biased in favor of whites.
It is unclear whether the tactic has any meaningful impact on crime, but it is screamingly plain that it adds to racial tension and misunderstanding while deepening minority cynicism about the police. And so we get today's quiet bias of a major-city mayor and police commissioner defending a dubious practice of aggressive state intrusion into the lives of black and Hispanic youths on an astonishing scale.
This quiet bias is a routine feature of our national politics as well. We are all aware of how constrained President Obama is in terms of what he can say or do regarding race. I believe that the culture of racism still alive in the U.S. remains potent enough that Obama must, in fact, routinely accomplish a complex, three-part balancing act.
He must consistently rise above prevalent stereotypes of blacks as less capable and intelligent, thus always standing as the exception to the assumed rule. He must never be seen as openly advocating policies that run against the third rail of resentment against blacks as a sort of untouchable special-interest category in the body politic, who lack legitimate claims on the nation's resources. And he must do all this while somehow keeping African Americans and other people of color highly politically mobilized segments of his constituency.   
But make no mistake, racism remains a living and highly adaptive thing in our times. Yes, Jim Crow racism has effectively been defeated. An insidious quiet bias remains today, however. And in this guise, racism is still distorting American life. The late Stanford University historian George Fredrickson wrote in Racism: A Short History, "The legacy of past racism directed at blacks in the United States is more like a bacillus that we have failed to destroy, a live germ that not only continues to make some of us ill but retains the capacity to generate new strains of a disease for which we have no certain cure."
We will make little or no progress against this underlying illness by becoming complicit in ignoring the deep-rooted character of anti-black bias in our culture and in so many everyday practices and habits. Racism is a powerful word. Using it can quickly shut down a conversation. But such sensitivity cannot excuse silence in the face of a real problem and ongoing injustice.
For me, a key element of the continued quest for racial justice in America is the outing of today's "quiet bias." Like a patient told to take the full regimen of antibiotics or run the risk of the ailment coming back even more strongly in the future, we must remain ready to challenge racism no matter how discreetly or politely it presents itself.
Lawrence D. Bobo is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. 

Ending the Slavery Blame-Game

By HENRY LOUIS GATES Jr.

Published: April 22, 2010

Cambridge, Mass.

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Scott Bakal

THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.
There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture and sale of human beings for immense economic gain.
While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.
For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests, which is why Henry Morton Stanley’s pursuit of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 made for such compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.
How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.
Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.
The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. “The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia,” he warned. “We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”
To be sure, the African role in the slave trade was greatly reduced after 1807, when abolitionists, first in Britain and then, a year later, in the United States, succeeded in banning the importation of slaves. Meanwhile, slaves continued to be bought and sold within the United States, and slavery as an institution would not be abolished until 1865. But the culpability of American plantation owners neither erases nor supplants that of the African slavers. In recent years, some African leaders have become more comfortable discussing this complicated past than African-Americans tend to be.
In 1999, for instance, President Mathieu Kerekou of Benin astonished an all-black congregation in Baltimore by falling to his knees and begging African-Americans’ forgiveness for the “shameful” and “abominable” role Africans played in the trade. Other African leaders, including Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, followed Mr. Kerekou’s bold example.
Our new understanding of the scope of African involvement in the slave trade is not historical guesswork. Thanks to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by the historian David Eltis of Emory University, we now know the ports from which more than 450,000 of our African ancestors were shipped out to what is now the United States (the database has records of 12.5 million people shipped to all parts of the New World from 1514 to 1866). About 16 percent of United States slaves came from eastern Nigeria, while 24 percent came from the Congo and Angola.
Through the work of Professors Thornton and Heywood, we also know that the victims of the slave trade were predominantly members of as few as 50 ethnic groups. This data, along with the tracing of blacks’ ancestry through DNA tests, is giving us a fuller understanding of the identities of both the victims and the facilitators of the African slave trade.
For many African-Americans, these facts can be difficult to accept. Excuses run the gamut, from “Africans didn’t know how harsh slavery in America was” and “Slavery in Africa was, by comparison, humane” or, in a bizarre version of “The devil made me do it,” “Africans were driven to this only by the unprecedented profits offered by greedy European countries.”
But the sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming they had violated her new Christian precepts.
Did these Africans know how harsh slavery was in the New World? Actually, many elite Africans visited Europe in that era, and they did so on slave ships following the prevailing winds through the New World. For example, when Antonio Manuel, Kongo’s ambassador to the Vatican, went to Europe in 1604, he first stopped in Bahia, Brazil, where he arranged to free a countryman who had been wrongfully enslaved.
African monarchs also sent their children along these same slave routes to be educated in Europe. And there were thousands of former slaves who returned to settle Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Middle Passage, in other words, was sometimes a two-way street. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to claim that Africans were ignorant or innocent.
Given this remarkably messy history, the problem with reparations may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted.
So how could President Obama untangle the knot? In David Remnick’s new book “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” one of the president’s former students at the University of Chicago comments on Mr. Obama’s mixed feelings about the reparations movement: “He told us what he thought about reparations. He agreed entirely with thetheory of reparations. But in practice he didn’t think it was really workable.”
About the practicalities, Professor Obama may have been more right than he knew. Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide. He is uniquely placed to publicly attribute responsibility and culpability where they truly belong, to white people and black people, on both sides of the Atlantic, complicit alike in one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization. And reaching that understanding is a vital precursor to any just and lasting agreement on the divisive issue of slavery reparations.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor at Harvard, is the author of the forthcoming “Faces of America” and “Tradition and the Black Atlantic.”

Why the Onion's Crappy Apology Is Worthless

The satirical site's mea culpa to Quvenzhané Wallis makes it OK to take things even further.

• By: Madison Gray

When I watched Quvenzhané Wallis telling the story of a little girl called Hushpuppy and her adventures living in a poor Bayou area in Beasts of the Southern Wild, I was enchanted by how well she articulated her life and the world around her. I had so much hope that she might be the youngest person ever to take home a golden statuette and wanted to believe that everyone else on the planet shared my sentiment.

The best actress trophy went to Jennifer Lawrence for Silver Linings Playbook, and the pervasive thinking for Quvenzhané was probably something like, "It's OK, Princess, you were still wonderful." But that wasn't the case in the offices of the Onion, the Chicago-based satirical news website. Someone, possibly a social media editor, as yet unnamed, decided to place this on Twitter:

"Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but that Quvenzhané Wallis is kind of a c--t, right?"

The tweet was reportedly taken down an hour after it was posted, but not really. Anyone who follows the Onion on Twitter and everyone who doesn't got wind of this tweet, and it spread across the Web like, well, the smell of bad onions!

The controversy has, at least for half a day -- which is equal to months on the Internet -- became to the Oscars what the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" became to Super Bowl XXXVIII. Nobody's even thinking about Argo or Ben Affleck or red carpets or lengthy, tearful speeches now, and anybody with access to a keyboard is pissed, and rightly so (except for those who try to explain that the joke was aimed at Hollywood itself and not the girl, and make themselves sound fugazi in the process).

"How dare they use that kind of vulgar language when referring to a 9-year-old girl?" "This wasn't funny!" "They've gone too far!" ... And on and on it goes. That's until something else catches people's short attention span.

Onion CEO Steve Hannah, betting on short attention spans, quickly whipped up a mea culpa for the tweet, offering his most humble "we screwed up" plea for forgiveness.

But that's why the Onion's half-assed apology for the tweet, while maybe sincere, isn't enough, and nothing they can do ever will be.

Miss Wallis, you are young and talented and deserve better. All of us at The Onion are deeply sorry.
When you put something out there in the media, good or bad, it's out there and can't be taken back, no matter how sorry you are. Just ask Don Imus. His infamous "nappy-headed hoes" quip was heard and never unheard, because the damage was done, like throwing acid in the face of a girl in Afghanistan who is trying to get an education, or a slave owner raping one of his slaves. It's just that sexist and racist, and I'm not sparing the feelings of anyone at the Onion, since they didn't spare Quvenzhané's.
So while an apology is part and parcel when someone says or does something this thoughtless, it only really pushes the envelope a little further for someone else who believes that in order to be funny someone needs to be offended.
Don't get me wrong -- edgy comedy is funny. Hell, Richard Pryor did it for years, and I'll argue that he's the funniest man of all time. But as raunchy as his language was, he never directly aimed it at anyone's child. He was smart enough to know that what he said had to be carefully engineered not only for maximum impact, but to make the social statements that he intended.

So perhaps that's the takeaway from all this: When you try to be funny, be adhesive. What came out of the Onion was the opposite. In fact it was like dress socks on a bamboo floor: It caused the people at the Onion to slip and fall on their unfunny asses.
This is why, as many n-words and M-Fs as Pryor spewed, he never once had to apologize for them, because there was nothing to apologize for. It was just hot, sticky truth.

Madison Gray is a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based writer