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State of the Art
This is how I am alive, or, better, how I am not. -I don't mean anything supernatural, but just that it is possible to die in an everyday kind of way. Life transfigured into something else just as an ordinary course of events. I feel smudged out, not really dead but some state that makes you ask if this is life, after all. Like a title that stays on the screen for so long that when you close your eyes you can still see it, vibrating on the underside of your lids. I walk around earth, taking in the end that won't end.
-- Ava Tomasula y Garcia, "Vidoteca Fin Del Mundo," in press
INTRODUCTION
The New York Police Department's (NYPD) Street Crimes Unit, a commando force of several hundred officers that patrolled at night and in plainclothes, believed that "they owned the night" (Center for Constitutional Rights n.d.-a). In the mid- to late-1990s, this unit stopped and searched tens of thousands of primarily Black men, the overwhelming majority of whom were not arrested for any crime. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a class action lawsuit, Daniels, et al. v. The City of New York, et al. against the NYPD in 1999, contesting the constitutionality of the voluminous, and racially disparate stops. In February of that year, officers from the Street Crimes Unit mistook the wallet that Amadou Diallo held for a gun, and fired upon him forty-one times, killing the unarmed African immigrant where he stood. Although the officers were indicted, they were acquitted of all charges. In the wake of significant community mobilization and protest, and with the lawsuit still pending, the NYPD disbanded the Street Crime Unit and settled the case in 2003. The NYPD was required to make a number of reforms, including a written anti-racial profiling policy, and audits of police officers and their stops (Center for Constitutional Rights n.d.-a).
And yet even as Daniels was settled, Stop and Frisk continued on, increasing unabated year over year. The NYPD defines "Stop, Question, and Frisk" (commonly referred to as "Stop and Frisk") as follows: "When a police officer reasonably suspects that a person has committed, is committing or is about to commit a felony...