Even celebrities can get arrested, especially if they are repeat protesters. Gbenga Akinnagbe, the Brooklyn native who plays Chris Partlow in the HBO series The Wire, has been a leading activist in the Stop and Frisk movement. And he’s building a rap sheet.
“It was a very interesting day,” Akinnagbe said recently about the time last fall that he was arrested and charged, along with 36 others, with a violation and misdemeanor for protesting Stop and Frisk. That was Nov. 1, 2011, in Brownsville, the 73rd Precinct. Akinnagbe was also among the activists arrested on Oct. 21 for protesting Stop and Frisk in Harlem.
Like so many Brooklyn residents of color, Akinnagbe believes he is subject to the NYPD’s policy of Stop and Frisk due to the color of his skin. He is calling for a broad-based convergence of movements to protest New York City’s random stop policy, which statistics show disproportionately involves men of color, particularly in Brooklyn and the Bronx.
In 2011, a total of 684,330 New Yorkers were stopped by the police. According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, 86 percent of those were without cause—a 14 percent increase from 2010. Since the N.Y.P.D. began publishing its Stop and Frisk data in 2005, the statistics show that 85 percent of those stopped by the police are black and Latino. Those groups make up 59 percent of the city’s population.
“Aside from the fact that stop and frisk targets people who look like me, even if it didn’t I couldn’t support arresting someone who did not commit a crime,” Akinnagbe said. That, he said, includes any minority group. “Whether it’s Muslims, whether it’s blacks,” he said, “basically we justify it until it happens to us. We react out of fear.”
At the protests, Akinagbe lends support to people who don’t have the clout of celebrity—people like Kenny Jean. Tall and bespectacled, Jean is a 26-year-old African-American from Brooklyn, who turned out November 25th for a stop and frisk protest in front of the 103rd Precinct in Jamaica. He said he has been stopped multiple times by the police, and described one stop in particular. It happened last year in Brooklyn:“A friend and I were coming out of a store when an undercover cop pulled up. He got out and pointed the gun on us.” Jean and his friend were stopped because of suspected marijuana possession.
“We were picked up for two dime bags,” Jean added. “By the time we were charged, it became a whole Ziploc bag.” Jean claims the public defender assigned to his case wanted to get him through the system as quickly as possible. “The legal aid made us plead guilty,” he said, an experience which he says impelled Jean to join the 150 other activists and community members to demonstrate against Stop and Frisk on the sixth anniversary of the shooting of Sean Bell, killed by NYPD officers the morning before his wedding on Nov. 25, 2006 in Queens.
“I came in solidarity, because of a systematic problem going on far too long, where the police occupy us like it’s a different country,” Jean said. “Sean Bell is a name on a long list. That’s why I’m out here.” Jean added that many African-Americans have good reason to not want to confront the police at a protest. Jean emphasized that he believes many cops are good ones. “But we have to hold Ray Kelly accountable for training police to act like an occupation force,” he said.
The leading criteria for a stop: being in a neighborhood that is considered a “statistical ‘hotspot’ of criminal activity,” according to a report, “Analysis of Racial Disparities in the New York Police Department’s Stop, Question, and Frisk Practices” supported by the New York City Police Foundation. The low-income neighborhoods Jackson Heights in Queens, which has a high Latino population, and Brownsville, Brooklyn, which has a high African-American population, have the highest incidence rates of Stop and Frisk in New York City.
Supporters of Stop and Frisk point to the murder of Zurana Horton, 34,who was killed in Brownsville by a rooftop sniper on Oct. 21, while picking her daughter up from school, as an example of what unchecked gun violence can lead to. They say that Stop and Frisk is an effective deterrent against gun violence in such neighborhoods, and can save lives. Advocates also stress that the practice has been deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court in Terry v. Ohio in 1968, as long as “reasonable grounds” for a pat down exist.
Opponents, however, contend that “reasonable grounds” is too arbitrary and that Stop and Frisk not only violates Fourth Amendment protections against police searches based on conjecture, but sanctions racial profiling in practice. And critics argue that Stop-and-Frisk does not even fulfill its purported mission of preventing gun violence.
Jeffrey Fagan, Professor of Law and Public Health at Columbia University, found that Stop and Frisk does not recover many street weapons at all when he analyzed the 2008 police statistics for the Center for Constitutional Rights, showing that over all races, weapons were only seized at 0.15 out of every 100 stops.
Akinnagbe welcomes the convergence of the Occupy and Stop Stop and Frisk movements, where people “aren’t just concerned with their class and their race.” The actor encourages his fans to get involved however they can, with a sense of urgency.
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