I Went to Summons Court and Almost Everyone Was Black or Latino

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/i-went-summons-court-and-almost-everyone-was-black-or-latino

On the same day I bought a new bike off Craigslist, the NYPD wrote me a summons for riding said bike on a sidewalk in my neighborhood. I was on the sidewalk for less than 10 seconds before a cruiser let out a single burst of its siren and accelerated onto the sidewalk behind me.

I knew full well it was against the rules to ride my bike on the sidewalk. I also knew that police prowl for sidewalk bikers in my neighborhood. I’d previously done research that was included in a report on the racially disparate issuance of summonses in New York City. My neighborhood Ocean Hill, which is predominately black, was high up on the list.




“We've been begging the cops to ticket bicyclists who violate the law,” wrote New Yorker Ed Sublette in an email to me after reading a previous article I wrote mentioning the summons. “The present traffic environment [is one where] hordes of bicyclists do any damn thing they want, [and it] has made walking down the street a daily danger… for anyone whose head doesn't spin around 360 degrees.”

Fair enough. Yet it’s impossible to deny that tickets for bike summonses in New York, along with the quota system undergirding it, creates a situation where nonwhites have more interaction with police than other types. This is on purpose. The NYPD is governed by a strategy that demands a high rate of contact between police and people in certain neighborhoods, in order to increase police’s chances of finding people with outstanding warrants for more serious offenses. This is called broken-windows policing.