Ilya Marritz
Ilya Marritz covers business for WNYC.
Mouths Closed, Marchers Make a Statement on Police Tactics
Sunday, June 17, 2012 - 08:44 PM
No bullhorns. No chanting.
Instead, along upper Fifth Avenue on Sunday afternoon, the predominant sounds were birdsong and the shuffle of feet on pavement as thousands of New Yorkers took to the streets to protest the NYPD's practice of stop and frisk employing an unusual tactic: silence.
The march, which was organized by a coalition of groups including the National Action Network, the NAACP and labor unions, began at Fifth Avenue and 110th Street and continued south to Madison Avenue and 78th Street.
Oscar Sabillon, a doorman at an apartment building along the route, said he'd never seen anything like it.
"Usually you hear all this hootin', hollering, people waving flags, bands, and all that stuff," Sebillon said. "But I think it's still making a statement. You know, you don't need to make a lot of noise to make your point."
Some marchers brought simple home-made signs, others held up stylized portraits of young men killed by police bullets, whose names have become like talismans: Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo.
Many onlookers along Fifth Avenue's Museum Mile expressed support for the marchers. But one Upper East Sider watching the procession from in front of the Guggenheim Museum had a different view.
"I believe in 'Stop and Frisk,'" said the woman, who gave her name only as Helene. "Because I think people are full of arms. They have guns and everything. And I don't mean black or white or green or orange. Everybody."
As the march entered its second hour, people grew fatigued from keeping their mouths closed. After they passed 79th Street, where New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg lives, the crowd got chatty.
Andrew George, who is black and a senior at SUNY-Binghamton, said it felt good to see public acknowledgment of an experience that, to him, usually feels like private humiliation. He said he's been stopped and frisked several times.
"It's just stupid, cause you know you've done nothing wrong, they know you've done nothing wrong, and you can't even get mad, because the second you get mad, then you are making a problem," George said.
The marchers didn't have a permit, and there were many police officers on the streets. But there appeared to be no confrontations between the NYPD and the people protesting its tactics.
More than 600,000 people were stopped and frisked in New York last year, resulting in a relatively small number of arrests and summonses.
Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly have defended 'Stop and Frisk' as critical to keeping crime rates low and guns off the streets.
But in a sign the policy could soon change, many of the likely candidates for Mayor showed up at the march: City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, City Comptroller John Liu, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, and former City Comptroller William Thompson, who was the Democrats' nominee in 2009.
"Back then, I said that 'Stop and Frisk' was being misused in the city of New York, and being abused," Thompson said. "And unfortunately now it's even worse than it was a few years ago."
Comments [7]
This report is inaccurate. My sister was brutally assaulted by several male and female officers, and then abducted. She was literally tossed out of the car 1 block away with no charges. I was then man-handled, arrested, charged with assault, and released last night. 7 other people were arrested. GREAT REPORTING!
I was at the march yesterday, and like the poster above, found it a very strong and meaningful experience. It's the first time to my knowledge that a mass of people have confronted the Mayor about their resentment of his polcies, and I feel that is a very positive thing. I am white, in my sixties, I simply don't believe that any person who has not done anything wrong should be stopped, simply because of his or her color.
"Not sure what, if anything, triggered this response from the NYPD..."
Protesters acting like idiots? That's what usually "triggers" these sorts of responses.
Why is stop and frisk suddenly becoming an issue now when it's been going on for years? Why did the NYPD let them get away with marching without a permit when they don't let anyone else? Why are the main organizers all tied to the Democratic Party? When there's a protest march and I don't see any of the city's many Stalinist cranks or crusty anarchists I get really skeptical...
I was in the march and found the silence very moving and impacting. This may be more effective than making noise with drums and chants. The signs people carried were very effective. There were people of all races. Quite a few whites. I wish the media would give some crowd estimates, so tv viewers at home would realize the scope of this march. I think there were tens of thousands according to a few people I asked. It looked to me like a huge turnout, but i couldn't see all of it. The TV shots show a small section of the crowd but it would be much more effective to get a view of the whole extent of the march--like from a helicopter or the top floor of a building. Is this possible?
One big error in this story: "More than 600,000 people were stopped and frisked in New York last year..."
The reporter has conflated the number of stops with the number of people stopped. These are very different statistics. The numbers released by the NYPD show the number of stops made, but they do not directly show how many people were stopped, as some people get stopped multiple times. It's possible from the data released to make a good guess at the number of people who get targeted, but no one seems to have done the math yet.
The Village Voice made the same error (in spades, by adding up annual totals) in their February cover story about stop-and-frisk.
"But there appeared to be no confrontations between the NYPD and the people protesting its tactics."
While this certainly was true during the majority of the silent march, it was absolutely NOT the case shortly following, at 77th and 5th and the surrounding area. Barricades, netting, officers herding protestors with motorbikes, and I believe I saw more than one arrest. Not sure what, if anything, triggered this response from the NYPD, but it escalated quickly when the (peaceful) protestors didn't immediately 'disperse.' Spoke to some legal observers from the Nat'l Lawyers Guild afterwards and asked them if they thought NYPD's response was legal, and the answer was a resounding 'no,' accompanied by laughter. Most marchers had left the area already, but there was some borderline police-state style crowd control going on there at the end.
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