About 30 people, including the civil rights campaigner and Princeton professor Cornel West, were arrested at a police station in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood during a protest of police stop-and-frisks, the New York Times reports. Dozens of activists and people who described themselves as victims of stop-and-frisk began their demonstration on a corner that West, an organizer of the rally, said had been “consecrated by giants like Malcolm X.”
The practice of stop-and-frisk, in which the police stop people on the street and sometimes frisk them, has been criticized by minority and civil rights groups that complain that blacks and Hispanics are unfairly singled out. Last year the department made more than 600,000 of the warrantless stops, and it is on pace to exceed that number this year. While the police say there is a valid reason for the stops, including suspicious behavior, opponents of the practice note that very few stops result in arrests. Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the tactic, saying, “It's used in communities where we have lots of guns and lots of murder victims, and we've brought crime down 35 percent in the last 10 years.”