With Crime Low in DC, the Police Chief's Call for the Use of Stop & Frisk Reveals that "Police Work" is Not Primarily About Safety but Managing Blacks & Controlling Their Freedom of Movement

Sean Blackmon, an organizer and communications director for Stop Police Terror Project DC. wrote in a letter to the [WashPost] that “D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham’s [racist suspect in photo] Feb 24 letter, “MPD: Stop and frisk is essential,” was a mass of inconsistencies, untruths and fear mongering.

In February, Mr. Newsham testified under oath that the Metropolitan Police Department does not practice stop and frisk, then repeatedly used the same term to describe incidents with community members. In his letter, he said, in essence, “Yes, D.C. police use stop and frisk, but in a legal manner.” Yet the public doesn’t know exactly how MPD uses stop and frisk because the department is ignoring the law requiring detailed data collection and reporting.

What we do have is a mountain of evidence suggesting MPD uses stop and frisk in the same racist, unconstitutional manner as in New York. For instance, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan recently dismissed a gun possession case because MPD “randomly trawl[ed] high crime neighborhoods asking occupants who fit a certain statistical profile.” Over six years, courts dismissed about 40 percent of D.C. gun possession cases, suggesting pervasive unconstitutional behavior by MPD. In the nearly 50 years since the Supreme Court allowed for limited stop and frisks, the evidence has shown the practice is racist and ineffective and actually makes people less safe.”

Driven to please her white masters desires Black strawboss Muriel Bowser is oblivious to reality. Violent crime in the District is down overall. [MORE]. The elite white media makes much of the fact that the year 2018 ended with 160 homicides on the books —a 38 percent increase from the previous year. [MORE] However, such statistics are taken out of context: the DC murder rate hit historic lows in 2017 with only 116 homicides. Yet this is nothing compared to what it was; in 1991 there were 482 murders and 443 and 454 murders respectively in 1992 and 1993. These numbers are on a substantial downward decline in general. See Chart below. 

But elite racist suspects have white supremacy & Black inferiority to sell. As explained by Dr. Amos Wilson,

Black criminals function as a negative reference group vital to maintaining the White American self-image. The Black criminal is used to support the White American community's self-serving, self-justifying judgments of itself. White America's preoccupation with Black criminality betrays its own need for reassurance; betrays its own basic insecurity regarding its projected moral purity. Consequently, the higher the incidence of reported Black criminality, the more exceptionally righteous White America feels itself to be. The more righteous it feels itself to be the more intensely and guiltlessly it promulgates and justifies its domination and exploitation of African peoples at home and abroad. [MORE]

The push for stop and frisk while crime low is further proof that our so-called “Constitutional rights” are just mere belief held in our minds. Rights exist if you believe they exist and an authoritarian shares in the illusion. Brazen cops so frequently abuse their power that no Black or Brown motorist, juvenile, adult, professional of any kind—could make a compelling argument that constitutional rights afford any real protection from the state on the street. In so far as Constitutional rights were designed to keep us free of government interference and intrusions as we go about our daily business on the streets in our homes, “your writes” are just words on paper – believe in them at your own risk. What we perceive as rights are really master’s privileges with his free range prison.

The racist suspect police chief’s advocacy as an unelected official to impose unwanted “public services” onto Black people also reveals the true nature of policing and authority in a so-called democracy. Alex Vitale explains “It is largely a liberal fantasy that the police exist to protect us from the bad guys.” He states, racist suspect liberals project 

“a fantasy of color blindness that says the police response is merely a professional technocratic response to where the crime is, but ignore the ways in which our society has been structured along racialized lines and the ways in which poverty in the United States is growing and becoming more entrenched. This includes a lot of white rural communities that are suffering from opioids and other kinds of crime problems.

Our political leaders have chosen to define those communities as criminal rather than as communities that are in deep distress because of entrenched joblessness, discrimination, geographic isolation, etc. If they were to admit that the problems in those communities were the result of market failures, rather than individual moral failures, then they would have to intervene in markets in ways that those who put them in office don’t want them to. To address the problems of inequality in any way other than policing is politically unacceptable in our current political environment. . . . The reality is that the police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviors of poor and non-white people: those on the losing end of economic and political arrangements. [MORE] 

Police “authority” is used to manage the behaviors of non-white people within this free range prison. Any protection or service from cops is incidental and random - making us safe is not their primary goal.

It is also largely a “fantasy” that governments represent us. In the real world, “representative governments” are constantly doing things their subjects do not want them to do. [MORE]

In a system of injustice, Dr. Blynd observes, "people who are awake see cops as mercenary guards that remind us daily through acts of force, that we are simultaneously both enemies and slaves of the Corporate State - colonized, surveilled and patrolled by the desensitized and lobotomized drones of the colonizers." Their authority is not legitimate because none is - it is a main source of your oppression. It is rule through your coerced participation and nothing more.