What if it had happened in New York?

[Os Cangaceiros]

Just as with virtually every U.S. urban rebellion over the past 75 years, the London police set off the violence when they shot to death a young Black man. African Americans would also immediately recognize the institutionalized racism that pervades the British criminal justice system. Black Brits are six times more like than whites (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/oct/11/black-prison-population-increase-england/print) to be stopped and searched on the street by police, and are incarcerated at about seven times the rate of British whites, although studies show that whites are just as likely to commit crimes as Blacks. Racial reformers in the United Kingdom point to many of the same social imbalances as highlighted by their counterparts in the United States. For example, “for every African Caribbean male on [college] campus, there are two in jail.” People of African descent in Britain are heavily ghettoized and clustered in relative poverty.

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/black-britain-revolts-what-if-it-had-been-new-york

[bricolage]

stop and search figures are not 6 times more but 26.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/oct/17/stop-and-search-race-figures

[Os Cangaceiros]

daaay-umm.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Stop and frisk NYC:

In 2010, 601,055 New Yorkers were stopped by the police.
517,458 were totally innocent (86 percent)
317,642 were black (53 percent)
190,491 were Latino (32 percent)
55,083 were white (9 percent)

http://www.nyclu.org/issues/racial-justice/stop-and-frisk-practices


According to the 2006-2008 American Community Survey, the racial composition of New York City was as follows:

White: 44.6% (Non-Hispanic Whites: 35.1%)
Black or African American: 25.1%
American Indian: 0.4%
Asian: 11.8%
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander: 0.1%
Some other race: 16.0%
Two or more races: 2.1%

Hispanic or Latino (of any race): 27.5%

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

BTW, it has happened here. Several times.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Bell_shooting_incident

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadou_Diallo

[Os Cangaceiros]

^oh yeah, that happens all the time. There was a case in my state of a cop shooting a guy simply because he refused to take his hands off the wheel of his car (he maced him first, then pulled out his gun and shot him). Guy died, it was all caught on the car's dash cam, and the cop got a desk job. The police are out of control everywhere.

I think the piece was more about if riots started to spread all across the USA, what the state's reaction would be.