 |
| Photo Credit: Sam Grace Lewis on Flickr |
This Saturday, May 12, in New York
City, an alliance of more than 100 community activists, mothers, city
councilmembers and religious leaders marched from Foley Square to One
Police Plaza, demanding an end to police tactics they say have resulted
in two New Yorks -- or as the action was appropriately titled, “A Tale
of Two Cities.”
VOCAL-New York,
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), the Drug Policy Alliance,
and other groups organized the event to demand an end to the racial
segregation they say Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray
Kelly actively enforce. The demonstration hinged tightly on the power
of a united New York. Nine white New Yorkers attempted civil
disobedience at the police headquarters, but were (ironically) not
arrested.
Fearing for their
children’s futures, many mothers in the crowd considered the action -- a
day before Mother’s Day -- a timely mechanism to defend their children
from injustice at the hands of the NYPD.
Lynn
Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women,
said criminal justice is a mother’s issue. “Reproductive justice doesn’t
just mean the right to decide to end a pregnancy or to continue to
term,“ Paltrow said. ”It means the right to go to term, to have
children, and not have to worry that when they are born, they will be
arrested because of the color of their skin.”
For
the NYPD's stats to add up, they'd have to have stopped every young,
black man living in the city once--and then some. Both marijuana arrests
and street stops are soaring under Bloomberg’s administration, but the
data shows that rise in aggressive policing is only apparent in certain
communities. Demonstrators stressed that pot arrests and stop-and-frisk
have come to epitomize a city-wide problem requiring urgent redress. READ MORE
No comments:
Post a Comment