Residents opposed to the New York City Police Department’s controversial “stop-and-frisk” policy rallied in New York City Thursday as part of a nationwide campaign to “Blow the Whistle” on police abuses. Protesters from Los Angeles to New York sought to draw attention to police brutality and the disproportionate targeting of people of color. Organizer Carl Dix joined dozens of other protesters in Harlem.
Carl Dix: “So, we’ll see how the police respond. They may step back and hope that we’ll stop after a while, and things can go back to normal. But we’re determined not to go back to normal, because normal is people being stepped to by the police, 1,900 times each and every day in New York City, most of them black or Latino, and almost all of them doing nothing wrong. That kind of normal has to be disrupted.”