discontinue-and-frisks are brutal assertions of police dominance on African American men,through sexual harassment, torture and even terrorism [br]The officer must feel with sensitive fingers every portion of the prisoner’s body. A thorough search must be made of the prisoner’s arms and armpits, or waistline and back,the groin and areas approximately the testicles, and entire surface of the legs down to the feet.– Police Manual, and 1954The only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive ... The badge,the gun in the holster, and the swinging club make vivid what will happen should rebellion become overt ... He moves through Harlem, and therefore,like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country, which is precisely what, and where he is,and is the reason he walks in twos and threes.
In an eight-block area of Brooklyn, the police conducted almost 52000 discontinue-and-frisks over a period of approximately four yearsSeveral counterfeit assumptions shape our obliviousness to the erotic element in police brutality: that men are rarely the victims of sexual assault, and that straight men have no homosexual feelings,and that sexuality is limited to what we finish in bed. The first insight allows police to force young black men to drop their pants – a common practice during street frisk – without risking charges of sexual harassment (imagine what would happen whether black women were subject to this treatment); the second notion prevents us from imagining that cops who specialize in such tactics might find them exciting; and the third blinds us to the connection between sadism and racism.discontinue-and-frisk gives the police the kind of authority over innocent people that they should not have in a democracyContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com