It’s a delicate balance for Harlem’s Youth
By Darius Dixon
October 15th, 2009
“You have the right to remain silent,” said 24-year-old Clarence Jackson. He was dressed in an untucked, button-down shirt overlain with a neat argyle sweater, loose jeans and fashionable Velcro shoes. “You’re not getting it. You have the RIGHT to remain SILENT,” he repeated with more intensity.
After reciting the statement two more times, the phrase finally started to sink in for his small audience. “Oh, you don’t have to say anything to the cops,” said one young man with cornrows and a blue sweatshirt. The names of the workshop attendees were withheld due to the sensitivity of the material.
“The police are trying to get you riled up,” added Jackson. Then he repeated his other mantra: “Just five minutes,” he said, holding up his right hand to illustrate his point. “Stay calm,” Jackson continued, “It’s either five minutes out of your day [cooperating with a police officer] or a night in the tombs.”
Despite only being 24 years old, Jackson, a native of the Highbridge area in the South Bronx, has been at this for about 10 years. The workshop only had 10 high school and college-aged students, eight boys and two girls. Jackson said it had been six years since he last taught this particular hour-long workshop instructing young people on how to handle themselves around police officers but it was difficult to tell if he was rusty.
Jackson is a “graduate” of the 1999 inaugural class of the summer program, Students Taking Action Towards Empowerment. The STATE program is an initiative within the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem (NDS), which has provided legal representation for low-income residents of upper Manhattan since 1991. STATE, however, focuses entirely on young people, from 10 through their early twenties.
“If we have the funding,” said Emily Gold, 27, the new director of STATE, “we like to bring back graduates of the program to intern with us and help us with the workshops and programming.” Jackson not only interned after going through the program, he helped run some of the workshops and the afterschool program. Gold added that STATE was designed to be a preventative measure, reducing the number of youth arrests to save time and the group’s meager resources for more serious cases. And save young people from an unnecessary arrest record.
Since the beginning of 2003 there have been 3,536 homicides in New York City, according to police data and court records compiled by The New York Times, earlier this year. In 46 percent of those cases the suspect was 24 years old or younger. Over the last five years (2004-2008), the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board received 53,893 complaints. In 36.3 percent of the complaints, the alleged victims were 24 or younger, according to the Board’s most recent status report.
And, New York City’s “stop-and-frisk” policy was responsible for patting down more than half a million residents in 2008, a new record, according to data collected by The Associated Press. About half of those “frisked” were black, 32 percent were Latino, but only 6 percent were actually arrested. STATE attempts to teach young people how to be part of the 94 percent that can go about their day.
For most of the young men and women in Jackson’s workshop, being stopped by police officers often turned into more than a simple frisk. One young man, thin and easily over six feet, dressed in a burgundy-colored hoodie, described an experience where, after exiting a train, four officers approached and asked him to put down the shopping bags in each of his hands. The young man refused. He said, the next thing he knew, his face was planted against the floor of the train platform. He was being taken into custody for “resisting arrest,” mainly, he said, because he was wiggling around on the ground as they cuffed him. He claimed that he also received bruises on his forehead during his arrest but after spending two days in holding, the swelling of the bruises had subsided.
“Can a police officer search your pockets when they stop you on the street?” Jackson asked. “Yeah, cause they do it all the time, anyway,” said a young man sitting directly in the front of him. “If a cop asks you to go into your pockets, do you have the option to say no?” Jackson said, rephrasing his question. “Yes [you have a right to refuse],” Jackson said, answering his own question. There were expressions of disbelief on the faces of every workshop participant.
A lot of STATE’s work involves informing young people about their rights so that they can protect themselves against a police officer who may be overzealous but the group also tries to show young people about how to conduct themselves in public.
STATE interns and organizers travel around different parts of the city giving similar presentations, but very different audiences. On this particular occasion the Abyssinian Development Corporation, an arm of Abyssinian Baptist Church housed on 125th Street between Lenox and Fifth Ave., requested the workshop. Jackson said he had been invited to speak on panels with judges, law enforcement officials and school administrators, he said he was always the youngest participant. After the hour-long workshop with the Development Corporation, Jackson said, “I tailor how I talk by who my audience is. I knew as soon as I walked into the room, I saw the looks on their faces, and knew I had to be real with them.”
“Kids are doing most of crimes now,” said a police officer at the 28th Precinct who asked not to be identified. The precinct’s jurisdiction covers roughly half of Central Harlem between Morningside Park and Fifth Ave., south of 127th Street to the top of Central Park. The building’s dreary concrete exterior was broken only by tinted windows, lightly rusted, built into its massive grey blocks. It was reminiscent of a fallout shelter. “The kids are nastier than the adults,” Butler added.
Despite all the recent trends in the 28th Precinct showing steep decreases between 1998 and 2008 for every crime except grand larceny, the officer said that youth crime was of particular concern. “They snatch up cell phones and sell them for fifty bucks at the pawn shop,” she said, “They have no respect.”
Older Harlemites attributed youth crime to poor parenting and that it was part of the reason why young people were treated the so negatively by the police. “When I was growing up, we were taught that unless you were headed to the store or some other place, you stayed indoors,” said Edna Blackman, 65, “We were homebodies. Young people today are out a lot.” Blackman, a retired labor service representative for the state, operated a flea market across from Harlem Hospital. “Parents are trying to be the best friend to their kids,” instead of disciplining them, she added. A friend standing nearby, Tommy Walker, also retired, said that though not true of all young people, she believed this was the “lost generation.” “If there weren’t cops,” Walker said, “this would be a jungle.”
A lot of young people are not interested in living in the jungle either. “I thought gangsta life was cool,” said Dagoberto Velasquez, 17, who goes by “Dee,” and graduated from the STATE program in 2007. Now, he attends Long Island University in Brooklyn and helps out with STATE’s afterschool program when he has the time. Dee grew up in the St. Nicholas housing projects at 127th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard—clearly visible from NDS’s tenth floor conference room at 126th and Lenox Ave. He said he “could give like 300 stories” about being stopped by the police. A cousin who went through STATE in 2006 encouraged Dee to apply the following year. “I came in as a little boy but STATE made me a man,” he said. Dee described how he originally wanted to be a dancer or a music producer but he recalled seeing a movie that described his housing project as “one of the worst” and knew he needed to do something different. “I started wearing collared shirts, and neater clothes,” he continued, it’s all about presentation. STATE emphasized education and responsibility. He said he hoped to transfer to Baruch College to study business management.
Despite the sentiments at Jackson’s Tuesday workshop, statements like, “There’s no winning with the police,” and “Look what happened with Sean Bell,”—the 23-year-old Queens resident killed in 2006 after five police officers fired 50 bullets only to later have the officers acquitted—the students did not slander the conduct of the entire NYPD. Many spoke highly of the officers that treated them with respect, and were courteous. But as Jackson repeatedly explained, for young people living in so-called “high crime areas,” the best they can do is to stay calm and politely ask two questions: “Am I under arrest? May I please go?
