Pigs in New York are still racist

As per their training. This story is so fucking old. No matter how many people get shot, beaten down, maimed, violated and locked up for bullshit like selling weed, it doesn't change in meaningful ways. Years and years of the same bullshit for being black and Puerto Rican in New York:

Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped by the police in New York City in 2009, but, once stopped, were no more likely to be arrested.

NINE TIMES. But arrested just the same. They carry the suspicion of being guilty. The police explain it on their reports as looking guilty. Not kidding.

Of the reasons listed by the police for conducting the stops, one of those least commonly cited was the claim that the person fit the description of a suspect. The most common reason listed by the police was a category known as “furtive movements.”

Do you know what "furtive moments" means? Furtive means characterized by stealth or looking shifty. So they got stopped and frisked for looking like they were up to something. Well here's a fact - they were up to something. They were trying to avoid getting hassled by some pig fuck. Cause they know it's coming. It's a self-perpetuating cycle.

The pigs say, "you look guilty of something, so we will hassle you." The people say, "why are you hassling us, we didn't do shit." The people become quickly accustomed to getting fucked with by pigs on the streets, in businesses, in their homes, and on the subways, so they get anxious when the pigs come around, and look hyperaware, because they know they have a good chance (nine times the chance, as it turns out) of getting bothered and violated. Then the pigs use that awareness as a justification to bother them. I'm reminded of Tupac at this time - "Instead of a war on poverty, they've got a war on drugs so they police can bother me." So fucking true.

Here's some more bullshit about how they generally don't even claim to have a legitimate justification for fucking with someone:

In examining the stated reasons for the stops, as checked off by police officers on department forms, the center found that about 15 percent of the stops last year cited “fits a relevant description.” Officers can check off more than one reason, but in nearly half the stops, the category called “furtive movements” was cited. Nearly 30 percent of stops cited a category called “casing a victim or location”; nearly 19 percent cited a catchall category of “other."

Read what the crazy pigs try to sell us about their martial law-style tactics:

The police officials argue that the widespread use of the tactic has forced criminals to keep their guns at home and allowed the department to bank thousands of names in a database for detectives to mine in fighting future crimes.

Forced criminals to keep their guns at home? If you are going out with the intent to commit a crime with a gun, you are going to take your fucking gun. You got your mind on whatever the hell it is you are about to do, not whether or not a pig is going to frisk you. Also, FIGHTING FUTURE CRIMES. Do you understand how troubling that is? They plan on "fighting future crimes" by stopping random people on the street now who look guilty of something. Holy shit.

This is probably the best part. Although they stopped and frisked only 53,000 white people compared to the 490,000 black and Latino people last year, white people were more likely to be arrested and have weapons on them.

But once stopped, the arrest rates were virtually the same. Whites were arrested in slightly more than 6 percent of the stops, blacks in slightly fewer than 6 percent. About 1.7 percent of whites who were stopped were found to have a weapon, while 1.1 percent of blacks were found with one.

Also, there is nothing wrong with having a weapon on you. Self-defense is not a violent act.

I know that people rush to defend this crap. People love pigs, people love the government, or at least the idea of it and its form and ideology, and don't want to talk about how fundamentally flawed the economic and social systems they built are. They say really short-sighted things like "black people commit more crimes," a statement which is problematic for a variety of reasons, such as what counts as "crime" (selling drugs does, gambling people's mortgages does not - that actually gets you rewarded) and the fact that it completely ignores why poor people commit crimes.

After all, that is the issue at hand - poor people who happen to be black committing crimes. Stop looking at them as black for a minute and look at them as poor people in deliberately devastated neighborhoods who have virtually no opportunities for escape. What else should they do when they are bombarded with same brainwash consumer shit as everyone else, starve? Welfare gets cut and nothing pops up in its place. Schools are shit, jobs are either non-existent or psychologically destructive. So what do you do? Rob and sell drugs. Gotta get it however you can. Survival of the fittest, as they've always told us.

Policing addresses none of this. It really only makes it worse. Hassle people, which makes them angrier, more resentful, more alienated and even less interested in trying to join contemporary society. Then you send them to jail, where they learn to get along through violence and vice. It fucks you up invariably, and if you stay long enough, you will be completely unable to get by once you are back out. You have shitty prospects for employment (unless, of course, you are a white-collar criminal, whose individual crimes are far more destructive in terms of number of people affected and severity than any mass murderer) and so you go back to street crime. This is not a good answer to any problem.

Overwhelmingly, poor people commit property crimes and crimes in the pursuit of money because they have none and perceive no other way of readily getting it. That will continue to happen as long as their situations do not change. And changing their situations will have to come from outside, because the deep segregation they face (yes, still, today) precludes people in ghettoes from doing a whole lot themselves. They are isolated and on the lowest end of the political power spectrum. Organize them, and you pay. See what the FBI and local pigs did to the Black Panthers for reference.

What's the overall lesson then? Don't be fooled by ideas of change and progress. Just because a whole lot of different kinds of people collude to obscure ugly realities from us doesn't mean that they aren't there.