What's legal for white New Yorkers is often illegal for black and brown New Yorkers.
Take, for instance, this DNAinfo story about 60-year-old Ernest Stroy and his 24-year-old nephew, Waymon Jones. On Sunday night, the pair were playing what they said was a harmless game of dominoes outside a bodega in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.
Then the police showed up.
"Six of them hopped out of the van and the lady said, You guys cant play dominoes, youve got to wrap it up," Jones told DNAinfo.
"And we're all like, were all grown men," he said, "we're not harming anybody, were not doing any drugs. Its not, like, dice. So they left us alone for a little bit."
The pair moved their game to a neighboring plaza. Soon after that, the cops -- seven officers, it should be noted -- came back, surrounded the two men and issued them tickets for loitering and illegal gambling. (A bystander recorded a video of part of the incident, which you can watch above.)
"Its wasting your time taking a day off of work to go fight it," Stroy said of the tickets, adding that he's already "struggling from check to check" as it is.
As hard as I try, I cannot recall ever arraigning a white defendant for such a violation.
Now think of SoHo, in Manhattan, on a Friday or Saturday night. Think of the young and rich, mostly white, spilling out of this art opening or that soiree onto the sidewalk for cigarettes, with glasses of wine in their hands. They won't be ticketed for drinking in public.
Or think of the mostly white revelers at SantaCon or on St. Patrick's Day , openly swigging beer in the streets and getting in fights, often without reprisal.
Then think of Noach Dear, the Brooklyn judge who in 2012 said he was tired of hearing charges against minorities over open alcohol containers. As hard as I try, I cannot recall ever arraigning a white defendant for such a violation , he wrote.
Dear's staff then reviewed public drinking tickets, finding that while white people account for 36 percent of Brooklyn's population, they made up just 4 percent of tickets issued for drinking in public there. Meanwhile, 85 percent of the summonses were issued to blacks and Latinos.
Think of Park Slope, an affluent and predominantly white neighborhood in Brooklyn, where, between 2008 and 2011, police doled out an average of eight tickets a year for riding a bike on a sidewalk. Then think about Bedford-Stuyvesant, a poorer and predominantly black neighborhood a few miles away, where the average number of such tickets is 2,050 per year.
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