October 17, 2014

NYPD falsely arresting gays

Salon - If you’re catching a bus at New York’s Port Authority terminal and have to pee, it’d probably be better to brave the gross port-o-potty on the bus. According to a recent New York Times piece, in the past year police have arrested more than 60 men in the building’s second-floor bathroom on charges of “public lewdness,” mostly for masturbation — a sevenfold increase from last year.

Legal Aid lawyers representing a dozen or so arrestees say their clients were merely relieving themselves when an officer in plain clothes came up to the stall next to them, looked over and smirked. Next thing they knew, they were being carried away in handcuffs.

“I wore a leather jacket, fitted clothes. I guess that fits the description of a homosexual male,” one arrestee told the Times. “I was like, O.K., although I’m gay, I wasn’t doing anything.” For anyone who doubts the New York police are targeting gay men, the cops even have a nickname for the upstanding guy hitting on people in the bathroom: “the gay whisperer.”

New York’s chief of police acknowledges his agents aren’t targeting gay men because anyone is complaining. Rather, it’s on account of a law-enforcement strategy known as “broken windows” policing. Begun during the tenure of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, it calls for law enforcement to aggressively prosecute innocuous quality-of-life infractions under the theory that small crimes lead to bigger ones. Together with New York Police Department arrest quotas, “broken windows” has led officers to enforce victimless, essentially harmless crimes to the point of harassment.

“Broken windows” has never been shown to conclusively prevent serious crime. What it does for sure is sow distrust between the police and their targets, in this case the gay community.

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