2 New York officials say racial profiling led police to stop them

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

The detention this weekend of two African American city officials by police has stirred a long seething controversy over the New York Police Department’s ‘stop, question and frisk’ policy, which some claim disproportionally targets young blacks and Latinos.

City Councilman Jumaane Williams and Kirsten John Foy, director of community relations for the Public Advocate’s office — both 35 — say the police never would have handcuffed and shoved them around at the West Indian Parade this weekend if they had been white.

‘If we were elected officials of a different persuasion … we are sure we wouldn’t have been stopped,’ Williams said Tuesday at a news conference on the steps of City Hall.

Williams has said he had showed his council badge to officers at a checkpoint to an exclusive lunch after the parade but was detained and manhandled along with Foy, who was later kicked in the back of the knees. Some of this was caught on video.

Williams, a Bronx councilman who has long dreadlocks and wears an earring, said he had also been stopped recently by police when he was driving a new car with temporary tags in the South Bronx. He said, ‘If I did not look the way I look .... we are sure things would have been handled differently.’

New York Police Chief Raymond Kelly has told reporters the confrontation is under investigation; a department spokesman told the Associated Press that a police captain claims he was hit in the head by a civilian at the scene though no one has alleged that Williams or Foy was involved in the attack.

Williams wrote Wednesday in a column in the New York Daily News that he and Foy encountered a classic case of NYPD racial profiling that would have landed them in jail had Williams not been on the City Council.

‘So what comes next,’ Williams wrote. ‘If I were not an elected official I would have been taken to central booking and charged, no questions asked. While the actions of the select number of police officers involved here do not represent the entire NYPD, they do reflect a stop-and-frisk policy that unfairly targets people based on race and appearance.’

Williams and Foy were joined at their news conference by other city officials, several with interest in running for mayor in 2013, who all called for a reevaluation of NYPD tactics under which 600,000 people were randomly stopped on the streets last year as potential criminal suspects, according to the AP.

ALSO:

Is it time to ‘retire’ Ground Zero?

Nevada gunman’s motive a mystery

Missouri River takes farmland as nation watches fires, storms

-- Geraldine Baum in New York