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The Racist Brutality of Stop-and-Frisk

Every day, New York city police commit 1,800 stop-and-frisk searches. Substantially less than one percent turn up guns—the supposed justification for the searches, and the carrying of which is protected by the Bill of Rights. In my piece for the Huffington Post, I noted the racial disparities and threats to civil liberties posed. New audio documentation indicates what many have described. In this perhaps all-too-typical encounter, the police speak abusively, using racially charged and violent language, and threaten injury against a private citizen who only seems to want to know why he’s being harassed repeatedly in the land of the free. …