a PTH member's editorial on police harassment

Picture the Homeless's Civil Rights Campaign against police abuse of the Disorderly Conduct statute is on its way!  We're working on building this campaign in alliance with people from other organizations and sectors of New Yorkers, homeless and non-homeless, who face profiling and harassment.

Longtime PTH member-leader Letitia wrote this editorial, on the unacceptable police harassment that she sees every day...

Who Will Protect Us From the Police?

Whatever happened to the good old days when you could walk down the street and feel protected by the police? Nowadays, it’s the police you need protection from.  The last time I felt any real feelings of trust for the police was when Dinkins was in office.  It was with Giuliani and his crazy “quality of life” laws that the police went berserk and started arresting people for any and every little annoyance.  These laws were supposed to improve our quality of life—not ruin it by making us prisoners in our own communities.  Accusations of police brutality and the number of petty arrests have skyrocketed to an all-time high in the last ten to twenty years.

As I walk through my neighborhood, I hear endless complaints of how the police are harassing folks by stopping, frisking, disrespecting, and humiliating them—without provocation or probable cause.  Some people have said that they were just walking along, and all of a sudden they were approached or surrounded by several officers and asked for their ID.  Afterwards they are searched thoroughly—the police going into their pockets, having them take off their shoes, looking in their underwear, and other humiliating acts done to them for no reason. 

What a lot of officers do is search you, and when they can’t find anything in your possession, they then proceed to make up false charges on you—that’s where the disorderly conduct charge comes into play.  To justify this bad arrest, they will often charge you with disorderly conduct—or trespassing, loitering, panhandling—cause the definition for these violations are broad, vague, and difficult for the defendant to disprove.  So they are usually pressured to  plead guilty.  There has been a pattern of this type of police harassment in many minority communities.  Many police officers profile people based on their perceived homeless status, race, and other discriminatory factors.  Every time the police commit these unspeakable acts, they drastically affect people’s lives.  Every time they stop to interrogate someone, they don’t realize the long-lasting psychological and physical affects this abuse has on a person.

The criminal courts are bombarded every day, wall-to-wall with people who have received these petty violations, when there are much bigger crimes that need attention.  The court system has become a mockery of justice for the way it collects fine money from the pain and misery of the poor and already-downtrodden individuals in society.  What’s even worse is that judges also contribute to police misconduct, because they usually side with the officer.  They allow these officers to get away with this nonsense—even if you file a complaint, it goes unheard.  I had this personally happen to me and my husband.  The officer outright lied and said that my husband had a beer, even though five people who were at the scene said he didn’t—meanwhile, the officer let two people with felony warrants go who knew him.  The judge still took his side and found us guilty.

There seems to be no justice for the impoverished—unless we unite and demand that this treatment stop.  People need to contact organizations like Picture the Homeless that fight against these injustices.  PTH’s Civil Rights Campaign is working to combat police harassment in public places, faced by homeless New Yorkers and other poor people.  PTH outreaches in different neighborhoods to find out what problems people are facing by collecting surveys, leafleting and educating people of their rights.  The way to combat this profiling by the police is to pressure government officials and demand they change these laws and practices.

The Wikipedia definition of disorderly conduct states that “the statute gives police officers and other authorities fairly broad discretion to arrest people whose activities they find undesirable.”  The key here is, they find.  What people fail to realize is that the police are human just like you and me.  They are bound to make mistakes.  They have bad days—they can over-react to situations in the wrong way.  They can also lie, cheat, steal, and suffer from greed, jealousy and rage. 

Government officials need to ensure that the individuals they are hiring are able to perform their duties responsibly by implementing proper disciplinary actions.  The Civilian Complaint Review Board and Internal Affairs Bureau are supposed to be there to protect the rights of citizens from these rogue officers, but most of the time when a person files a complaint, it goes unheard and no action is taken against the officer.  These agencies almost never do anything to impose disciplinary action against officers who commit crimes.  They need to be investigated themselves, to find out why nothing is being done.  A lot of officers get away with illegal behavior because they wear this uniform of power, and most of them stick together.  So who will police the police who police the police?  Wee see what happens when we give one group of people too much authority over others.  They will always abuse that power.

With all the other things we have to worry about in this day and age, we shouldn’t have to be afraid to walk the streets in fear of the police.   We should be able to walk almost anywhere we want without being asked, “Where are you going?”  This is a free country, isn’t it?  Or at least that’s what I thought it was.

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