U.S. COURT'S SWEEPING DECISION: IF YOU'RE BLACK, YOU'RE A SUSPECT

A Federal Appeals Court Says It's All Right, But It Shouldn't Be.

Here's the lead paragraph from the New York Times story on a decision last
week by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals:

``A federal appeals court ruled yesterday that police officers in Oneonta,
N.Y., did not violate the Constitution when they tried to stop every black
man in town in 1992 after a woman said she had been robbed in her home by a
young black man.''

Every black man in town.

This is New York, mind you, not Mississippi.

After hearing that a black man had committed a crime, the cops went after
every black man they saw walking the streets. They dragooned black men and
boys (and at least one black woman!) who were trying to use public
transportation. They pulled over black guys riding in cars. They went to
the State University of New York at Oneonta and got a list of all the black
students in the school, and they went after them.

These were all innocent people. The cops never did find the alleged
assailant. But that didn't matter. Neither their rights as citizens nor
their humanity mattered. These were black people, and whatever you do to
them is all right. They may have been masquerading as human beings, but
Oneonta's men in blue (assisted by the state police) could see right
through that disguise.

The manhunt began early on the morning of Sept. 4, 1992, when a 77-year-old
woman told police she had been attacked by a burglar. The woman, who was
white, said she never saw the man's face but could tell from his arm and
hand that he was black. She said she thought he was young because he moved
quickly. She said the man had a knife and had cut himself on the hand while
struggling with her. He then fled.

A canine unit tracked the scent of the alleged assailant for several
hundred yards before losing it. Investigators said the path of the scent
pointed toward the university campus. That's all the cops had to go on.

No problem. There weren't all that many black people in Oneonta. Of the
14,000 full-time residents fewer than 500 are black. And only about 2
percent of the 7,500 students at the university are black. So the cops,
smart enough to know a black person when they see one, decided to stop
every black guy in the town to see if one of them had a cut on his hand.

This went far beyond the problem of driving while black. People were being
stopped in Oneonta for breathing while black. Trust me, if some poor guy
had innocently cut his finger while slicing a tomato for dinner he would
have landed in jail.

The cops never did find their man, but they humiliated a lot of people in
the process. In last week's opinion, a three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit
said: ``We are not blind to the sense of frustration that was doubtlessly
felt by those questioned by the police during this investigation.''

But the panel ruled that this police sweep of blacks in Oneonta was OK,
that it was constitutionally permissible, that it was not a violation of
the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment or the Fourth Amendment's
prohibition against unreasonable seizures. Never mind the breathtaking
totality of the sweep. Never mind that the cops were not considering any
other aspect of the so-called description except race. Never mind that this
would never happen to the white residents of Oneonta. The court ruled that
the stops were not racially discriminatory because, in the court's view,
the cops were acting on a description that included more than just the
color of the alleged assailant.

With this ruling, cops are free to harass any and all black people as long
as they have in hand a complaint that a black person has committed a crime.
If you are black, you are a suspect.

The ruling, which upheld a similar ruling by a lower court, grew out of a
lawsuit filed against the Oneonta cops and the state police by several of
the people caught up in the sweep. The case against the plaintiffs was
argued by lawyers from the office of State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer,
who had a statutory obligation to defend the state in the suit, but who
made it clear that he was uncomfortable with the outcome.

``I read the circuit opinion,'' he said Wednesday. ``And I said, `You know
what? We won the case but it makes your skin crawl.'''