Activists: Cops terrorize teens with stop-and-frisk tactics

Yawu Miller

Muse Mohamed was not at all surprised last Friday when the four bicycle cops approached him as he exited his friend’s apartment in the Bromley Health housing development.

Mohamed, who says he’s been stopped more than 30 times since he was 14, just stood in the hallway outside his friend’s door and waited for the officers’ inevitable approach.

“They asked what everybody was doing here,” Mohamed recalled directly after the encounter, clutching a cigarette in the 20-degree air. “Sh—. I was just visiting my girl.”

Mohamed, who is a student at Roxbury Community College and works in the Boston Convention Center’s commissary, says that every time he is stopped by police the routine is the same.

“I always get searched. They ask you if you’ve been locked up. What does it matter when you have nothing on you? When they find nothing on you and that there’s no arrest record, they try to joke with you.”

Activists in black and Latino neighborhood throughout Boston say Mohamed’s experience is common for the black and Latino teenagers and young men who live in high-crime areas. Teens interviewed by the Banner say they are stopped as often as once a day.

Police officials say police cannot stop a civilian or initiate a search if they do not have reasonable suspicion that a suspect is about to commit a crime.

“Once an officer stops a person, they can make an inquiry,” said Deputy Superintendent Bruce Holloway, a sergeant in the Bureau of Field Services.

Holloway said officers can conduct a pat frisk, using their hands on the exterior of a suspect to search for weapons, but cannot go through their pockets to search for evidence.

The official police policy as stated by Holloway may square with contemporary readings of the Fourth Amendment, but according to Mohamed, his own experiences with police do not.

Mohamed said the officers did not ask permission to search him.

“They asked me do I have any drugs on me,” he said. “They took off my do-rag. They made me take off my sneakers. They checked my pockets. They went through my jacket. And they searched me again when I came outside.”

Although judges have routinely ruled such searches unconstitutional, activists in Bromley Heath say they are a routine occurrence for the teens living there.

“It’s an affront to the 4th Amendment, but people ignore it,” said Matt Hudson, a legal assistant with the Judge Richard Banks Community Justice Program. “They don’t know that there are remedies to this problem.”

In 1989, community activists took the legal route to deal with what was then a stated policy of stopping and frisking people in high crime areas. That year, civil rights attorney Margaret Burnham and the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Boston Police, winning an injunction against the stop-and-frisk policy.

According to accounts given by dozens of community residents interviewed by the Banner over the last two weeks, the practice of stopping and searching people without reasonable suspicion appears to be a standard police practice.

“A lot of kids talk about it,” said Barbara Collins, a Villa Victoria activist. “It makes them not respect the police because they feel that the law doesn’t have any respect for them. It’s painful for them.”

Mohamed says police are often disrespectful when they search him. During his encounter Friday, he and his friend, Jason Green, said the officers pointed to his other friend, Touraine Harris, and said, “You can do better than that.”

Although angered by the slight, Mohamed said nothing.

“There’s nothing you can say,” he commented. “I don’t speak when cops come around. Anything you do will get them mad.”

Harris, on the other hand, told the police to stop harassing Mohamed.

“They said, ‘we’re not harassing anyone. Mind your business before I lock you up,’” she recalled.

The level of disrespect Mohamed and his friends experienced is not at all uncommon, according to one Bromley Heath activist who requested her name not be used, citing fear of retribution.

“I’ve heard the officers call them monkeys or n—s,” she said. “You see the kids being beat up sometimes.”

Ironically, the police operation that was taking place when Mohamed was searched is called Operation Home Safe — an initiative Deputy Superintendent Holloway says is designed to “let people know the police are there to support them.”

“It’s by no means an invasion,” he said. “We’re there to work with the people in the communities.”

As Mohamed and Green exited the development and walked across Centre Street, police cruisers were parked in front of the Jackson Square MBTA station with their lights flashing. Walking through the gauntlet of blue lights, Mohamed had had his fill of police.

“It feels like you’re guilty before you’ve done anything,” he said as the blue police lights flickered in his eyes. “It’s just because you’re black.”