Papers Please - NYPD profiling, stopping and frisking with no probabale cause!

I wonder if NYPD is searching guys in suits on wall street, or just blacks? This is what happens when we let the police state get out of control.

The guys in this video don't look like cops to me! Anyone can hang a badge around their neck. If this happened in Idaho I would not cooperate unless I could positively identify them as police officers. With all the people posing as cops I could articulate my reasoning court. All such stops should be made by uniformed officers by procedure. Also if they are undercover and not in uniform why are their weapons visible? If I were a law abiding citizen in NY I would feel fear not knowing if they were police officer. When they conclude the stop why are they speeding through the lot in a residential setting? a child may dart from in between parked cars....



NEW YORK (Reuters) - Telly Hudgins has been stopped and frisked by the police too many times to count in the Brownsville, New York, public housing
project where he lives. One occasion sticks in his memory. "I had my
pajamas on and my slippers on and I'm emptying my garbage" at the trash
chute. "They asked me for ID to prove I lived there. Who walks around in
their pajamas with ID?" asked the black, 35-year-old counselor for the
mentally handicapped. He says he complained about the search and was
issued a summons for disorderly conduct.

Deborah Richardson,
60, a black postal worker, has delivered mail in east Brooklyn's
Brownsville for 14 years. She takes a different view of the New York Police Department's
contentious Stop, Question and Frisk policy. "I'd like to see more
stops and frisks," she said, leaning out of her postal truck. "This is a
dangerous neighborhood. I won't even go up in those monstrosities
anymore," she said, gesturing toward one of the towering housing
complexes where she once pushed a mail cart. After four years of what
she says was harassment from residents, many waiting for welfare checks,
she got a transfer to a parcel truck delivery route.

For nearly two
months the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy has drawn New York City into an
emotional debate about race, policing and Fourth Amendment rights. Mayor Michael Bloomberg
and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly have fiercely defended the program
against an onslaught of criticism from judges, civil rights leaders and a
vocal block of Democratic politicians. It has become a defining issue
for next year's mayoral election.

For Bloomberg, an independent who will be stepping down
next year after three terms, the question is central to his legacy.
Having presided over an historic reduction in violent crime, he boasts
that New York is "America's safest city by far," a place where tourists
and residents can safely roam any neighborhood, even those traditionally
considered dangerous, by day and most by night.

WHAT PRICE SAFETY?

Critics, though, charge that this has come at a
precious cost - the civil liberties of hundreds of thousands who are
stopped and searched each year. Police stops in New York City have
climbed steadily to more than 685,000 last year from nearly 161,000 in
2003. Only 12 percent of those stopped were arrested or ticketed. More
than 85 percent were black or Hispanic, while they make up 51 percent of
the city's population.

A Reuters analysis of more than 3 million stops from
2006 through 2011 shows that by far the densest concentrations fell in
areas of public housing, home to many of the city's poorest families and
where 90 percent of residents are black or Hispanic. Although one would
expect a heavy concentration of police stops in these densely populated
areas, the stop rate is disproportionate: In 2011, police stopped
people in these areas at a rate more than three times higher than
elsewhere in the city, the analysis found.

The study also shows that more than half the searches
happened not on the streets and paths around these buildings but inside
them - in stairwells, lobbies and corridors.

The analysis used
mapping software to plot six years' worth of data and identify areas
where stops were clustered the most. The software also helped identify
stops that occurred in public housing areas, so the nature of those stops could be analyzed and compared with stops that happened elsewhere in the city.

In some of the city's safest neighborhoods, police make
dozens of stops each year. In the most stubborn pockets of crime and
poverty, police make thousands. Many residents there feel as if they are
under siege - both from the high levels of crime that prompt aggressive
policing and from the police activity itself.

The controversy over stop-and-frisk is playing out in
neighborhoods like Brownsville and a number of other high-crime public
housing communities across the city's five boroughs, where dense
clusters of red-brick public housing towers rise up across hundreds of
acres. This isn't the same pleasantly untroubled New York that millions
of tourists flock to see - the New York of Fifth Avenue museums and
boutiques, of Times Square lights and Greenwich Village restaurants.

Neither is it anything like the neighborhoods where New
York's prosperous and middle class live. The average family income in
the public housing areas is just over $20,000, almost two and a half
times lower than the city median income for 2010. According to city
data, 53 percent of households have no one who is employed.

The policing contrasts are stark. In the 28-block heart
of Brownsville, the stop rate was 572 per 1,000 residents last year.
For young black men, the rate is far higher and can easily translate
into several stops per year. Four miles away in upper-middle-class Park
Slope, Brooklyn, police stopped people at a rate of 35 per 1,000
residents.

For police, the focus on public housing is elemental.
One in five murders in the city last year occurred in or on the grounds
of public housing, as well as one in five shootings and one in nine
reported rapes. One in every four guns were seized there.

WHOSE DISORDERLY CONDUCT?

Brownsville is in NYPD Precinct 73, which last year had
14.1 violent crimes per 1,000 residents. Among the city's 76 precincts,
its violent crime rate was a close second to Precinct 41, in the Hunts
Point-Longwood area of the Bronx. The rate may be significantly lower
than its crack-cocaine-driven peak in 1990, but it is still almost three
times the citywide rate.

Precinct 78, which encompasses most of Park Slope, had
4.1 violent crimes per 1,000 residents, 17 percent below the city rate.

Long the epicenter of NYPD stop-and-frisk activity, Brownsville was the subject of a New York
Times report two years ago that found police were conducting stops
there at a rate unmatched elsewhere in the city. (Disclosure: Co-author
Janet Roberts worked on the New York Times story.) The Reuters analysis
shows that is still true two years later.

Residents tell stories of cops peering down from
rooftops, monitoring movement with a ubiquitous network of security
cameras, patrolling halls and occupying lobbies.

In interviews
conducted in the past few weeks, many Brownsville public housing
residents claim they are regularly questioned, ticketed, often frisked
and sometimes arrested on little or no pretense. They say police can be
abusive, unnecessarily aggressive and indiscriminate. To these
residents, civil liberties have withered with declining crime rates.

Last spring, years after the pajama incident, Hudgins
stepped out of an elevator in his building as a pair of cops were
getting in. As it often does on Mondays, Hudgins said, the elevator
smelled of alcohol. Police stopped him, saying they suspected he was
drinking alcohol from the cup in his hand. They insisted he hand over
his drink, sniffed it, and told him it smelled like alcohol, Hudgins
said. No, he insisted; it was a mix of iced tea and lemonade. There in
the lobby of his own building, at the age of 34 and with no criminal
record, Hudgins was issued two tickets - one for disorderly conduct and
another for having an alcoholic beverage in an open container.

Hudgins had had enough. He filed a formal complaint
with the city's Civilian Complaint Review Board. Both summonses were
eventually dismissed, according to court records provided by Hudgins.
"You can be stopped on any given day, for anything," he said. "It's
humiliating."

Police patrolling public housing enforce housing
regulations, which dictate that to be inside one of its buildings you
must either live there or be visiting someone. Among the almost 600,000
stops police made in or around city housing in the past six years, they
conducted more based on suspicion of trespassing than for any other
suspected crime, according to the Reuters analysis.

Vanessa Chandler, 47, who is black, said she has lived in city housing on Brownsville's Sutter Avenue since she was a child, and that aggressive policing in the area is intrusive.

"If I go back to my building in the morning because I
forgot my bus pass, they are on you with, ‘Why did you go into that
building and back out again?' Or if I walk outside to check the weather
and go back in, it's the same thing," she said. "I mean, don't you step
outside to check the weather where you live, officer?"

Residents acknowledge the need for a strong police
presence to counter violent crime. This is, after all, a place where
many adults say they don't leave their homes after dark. Still, the way
in which the stop-and-frisk program is used weighs on them heavily.

"It's not the stop-and-frisks that we're upset about,"
said Jay Bradley, 49, another black woman. "It's the stupidity of the
stops."

"COMMUNITY" GUNS

For the police, stop-and-frisk is a vital tool on New
York City's final frontiers of gun violence, gang activity, murder and
drugs. They say policing in and around places like Brownsville, where
gangs engage in frequent gun battles, is a struggle. The NYPD floods
areas where they detect crime spikes - known within the department as
impact zones - with hundreds of officers fresh out of the police
academy, energetic young cops who move through the ranks based on their
performance on these early career tours.

The locations for
low-level drug sales float, ghost-like, from building to building. Kids
commit burglaries and robberies to prove their mettle. Teen gang members
share "community" guns: The same weapon jammed behind a trash compactor
one day is camouflaged in a courtyard leaf pile the next. Finding and
seizing these weapons is the top priority.

For NYPD Captain Joseph Gulotta, the Italian-American
commanding officer of the 73rd Precinct, stop-and-frisk is part of a
larger strategy to solve crime and prevent its spread.

"This is without a doubt one of most violent precincts
in the city of New York, hands down," he said. "Has it gotten better?
Absolutely. But we're averaging a shooting a week here, and that's way
down from before."

Gang investigators said the ranks of the larger, more
structured gangs have been decimated by precisely the kind of policing
that's now under scrutiny. What's left are fractured crews of young
thugs who form and dissolve alliances weekly and square off against each
other with guns - housing project versus housing project, and within
each project, building versus building.

In January, Brooklyn prosecutors indicted 43 members of
the Hoodstarz and Wave Gangs on second-degree murder, weapons and
conspiracy charges. For 18 months, police said, their 10-block
Brownsville turf war resulted in six homicides, with 38 people wounded
in 32 shooting incidents. Prosecutors said the crews paid for guns by
stealing and reselling cell phones.

The takedown of those two crews made Brownsville feel safer, residents and police agreed. Peace was short-lived.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, VERTICAL PATROLS

For five hours last month, on Father's Day, gunfire
crackled through the streets of Brownsville again. When it was over,
five people had been shot and a sixth murdered in three separate
incidents in the area, blocks apart. The 25-year-old man who died that
night was found riddled with 23 bullets in a public park.

Then, last Thursday night, three young men were rolling
dice on a Brownsville corner around midnight when two other men
approached them. One of the two fired a shot into the chest of one of
the three players, killing him. Another was shot in the back as he tried
to flee, and a third was slightly wounded. The attack remains unsolved.

These are the scenarios that trouble people like
Gulotta and NYPD Deputy Inspector Vincent Patti, a housing unit
commander.

Patti oversees 42 of the city's most violent housing
complexes - there are 334 in total - stretching from Brownsville to East
New York, Brooklyn. "I don't think we've ever had a day when there
hasn't been a call about a firearm," he said.

Patti has heard the complaints from residents about
police abuses. He said housing police are unique within the NYPD because
they spend a lot of time inside residents' homes, hallways and lobbies
as part of their patrols.

Almost a third of the calls his unit responds to are related to domestic violence.

"That means we're coming into your home, and we're
possibly arresting mom or dad, or brother or sister," he said. "That
alone leaves a bad taste in people's mouths."

Patti said his police have good reasons for the stops
they make. They do "vertical" patrols of most city housing structures on
each shift, starting on the roofs and descending through stairways and
halls, to track drug dealing and prevent burglaries.

When police see drug vials or envelopes in a stairwell,
he said, they are likely to find drug sales on a nearby floor. When
they stop an individual they believe is acting suspiciously, they often
find there are outstanding warrants.

Patti acknowledged that infractions such as littering
are enforced more aggressively on city housing grounds than in other
parts of the city but said it is a quality-of-life issue the police
pursue as part of their partnership with the housing department.

"I'm not saying every person needs to be ticketed," he
said. "But I've seen kids finish a Snapple, standing directly in front
of a garbage can, and throw the bottle on the ground."

For Gulotta, whose grandfather grew up in
turn-of-the-century Brownsville when the neighborhood was populated by
Italian immigrants, stop-and-frisk is a tool, not a question for debate.

"The people I'm talking to are the people behind closed
doors at night … the good people who work hard and own businesses here,
the clergy, the people that own private homes here, and they are not
saying, ‘We're living in a police state.' They are saying the exact
opposite, that we need more police work, not less.

"Violence is absolutely my first priority. I have no
other choice. We can say, you know, it's better than a previous year,
but one shooting is too many," he said. "The baseline is zero."

CRIME, NOT CENSUS REPORTS

The practice of stopping to question and sometimes
search citizens has been a policing tool for decades, but it was first
evaluated by the Supreme Court in 1968, in Terry v. Ohio.

In that case, the court came down on the side of
"reasonable suspicion," a lower standard than the Fourth Amendment's
probable cause. To stop someone, an officer must have a reasonable
suspicion that a person has committed or is about to commit a crime; to
search, a reasonable suspicion the person is armed.

Last month a federal judge granted class-action status
to a lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York
on behalf of four black men who said they were racially profiled by
NYPD officers who stopped and frisked them without cause. In granting
the status, the judge said NYPD performance standards that have driven
stop rates up in recent years may have led to "thousands of unlawful
stops."

Critics say the program constitutes racial profiling.
They point to the NYPD's stop-and-frisk data, which shows that 58
percent of blacks and Hispanics stopped last year were subsequently
frisked by police, an escalation that was true for only 44 percent of
whites.

They also say heavy-handed policing can result in rough
justice in places like Brownsville. Community leader Andre Mitchell,
who runs an outreach program for young blacks called Man Up!, says that
too often a stop-and-frisk can turn into multiple charges. Challenging a
trespassing or loitering charge can lead to a disorderly conduct
charge, and then just a few more wrong moves can add a charge of
resisting arrest or even assaulting an officer, a felony. "These things
can spin out of control easily," Mitchell said.

Police deny they punish people with extra violations
for questioning the validity of a stop and say the city's high-crime
populations are predominantly minorities.

Earlier this month thousands of New Yorkers marched in
silence from lower Harlem down Fifth Avenue to Bloomberg's townhouse
across from Central Park, demanding an end to the practice.

Bloomberg and Kelly have acknowledged criticism of the
program in recent weeks and have pledged to retrain officers and hold
precinct and borough commanders to account in regular crime statistics
meetings with NYPD brass. On two successive Sundays last month,
Bloomberg took his defense of stop-and-frisk to black churches in
Brownsville and East New York.

At the Brownsville church, Bloomberg said that "in
order to prevent crime, police officers have to be able to make stops
based on crime reports, not census reports." He then read the names,
ages and neighborhoods of the 10 New Yorkers murdered during the first
week of June. "All 10 were young men. All 10 were black and Hispanic,"
he told parishioners.

All the recent Brownsville shooting victims and
suspected perpetrators both on Father's Day and last Thursday were
black, police said.

The mayor's relations with the city's black population
are also going to be part of his legacy. In his first few years in
office he worked hard to ease tensions among the city, its police force
and black residents. Nearing the end of his term he has more often been
accused of favoring the city's wealthy population, which is
predominantly white.

Police say they no more relish confrontational
encounters with residents than those who are stopped. But they are
almost unanimous in their refutation of claims that the program is
racially motivated.

"It's not a black thing," said a young black officer
who has patrolled Brownsville for two years and who was granted
anonymity in return for speaking freely. "Every single day our lives are
in danger. Everybody out here is in danger."

Mitchell, who has been working as a liaison with local
police here for 22 years, said both police and residents are in a
difficult position.

"These guys, these
new faces," he said, referring to rookie police officers assigned to
high-crime neighborhoods like Brownsville, "they are scared. They're
nervous. It's their probationary period. And they don't have a clue as
to how to deal with the members of our community. Honestly? I worry
about them too, sometimes."

Stop and Identify States listed below where you MUST show Identification by statute if stopped by a police officer while on foot, and ID is requested. In ALL states you must show ID if there is an investigation and there is probable cause to believe you may be a suspect and ID is requested. Also in all states if you are operating a motor vehicle and you are stopped you must produce a valid driver's license when requested.

Alabama Ala. Code §15-5-30

Arizona Ari. Rev. Stat. Tit. 13, Ch. 24-12 (enacted 2005)

Arkansas Ark. Code Ann. §5-71-213(a)(1)

Colorado Colo. Rev. Stat. §16-3-103(1)

Delaware Del. Code Ann., Tit. 11, §§1902, 1321(6)
Florida Fla. Stat. §856.021(2)

Georgia Ga. Code Ann. §16-11-36(b) (loitering statute)

Illinois Ill. Comp. Stat., ch. 725, §5/107-14

Indiana Indiana Code §34-28-5-3.5

Kansas Kan. Stat. Ann. §22-2402(1)

Louisiana La. Code Crim. Proc. Ann., Art. 215.1(A)
Missouri Mo. Rev. Stat. §84.710(2)

Montana Mont. Code Ann. §46-5-401

Nebraska Neb. Rev. Stat. §29-829

Nevada Nev. Rev. Stat. §171.123

New Hampshire N. H. Rev. Stat. Ann. §594:2

New Mexico N. M. Stat. Ann. §30-22-3

New York N. Y. Crim. Proc. Law (CPL ) §140.50 (1)

North Dakota N.D. Cent. Code §29-29-21 (PDF)

Ohio Ohio Rev. Code §2921.29 (enacted 2006)

Rhode Island R. I. Gen. Laws §12-7-1

Utah Utah Code Ann. §77-7-15

Vermont Vt. Stat. Ann., Tit. 24, §1983

Wisconsin Wis. Stat. §968.24