Kimani Gray.

Walking east along Church Avenue from Nostrand last Thursday afternoon, The Observer counted two police officers on every corner. At New York Avenue, there were five cops and two squad cars. From a row house just past East 35th Street, three men in bulletproof vests and black topcoats emerged. And once we reached Albany Avenue and saw the Police Department’s outsized Communications Division Command Post vehicle, we stopped counting.

“We’re kind of used to it,” one man told The Observer. “In neighborhoods like this, there are always cops around. It’s just more now.”

More, of course, because of the controversial killing of 16-year-old local Kimani Gray, who was shot seven times late the previous Saturday night by two plainclothes officers after allegedly drawing a weapon, and because of the subsequent nights of demonstrations, which resulted in instances of looting and dozens of arrests.

“It was terrible last night—the crowd, the stone throwing. I haven’t seen anything like this,” said Junior Harrison, owner of Island Pride restaurant. “I thought it was L.A. for one minute. It’s getting worse every day.”

Mr. Harrison remembered Mr. Gray as “nice kid” from the neighborhood. “All the kids around here, they always eat here,” he said, standing outside of his store near East 54th Street, less than a block from the vigil site. “The same day he passed away, he had his meal here. I’m going to miss him. He’s a good kid, from my point of view.”

Near where he was shot, a poster hanging in the window of a hardware store called for an independent investigation into the shooting. Inside, there were three men sitting on overturned paint buckets. Asked about the incident, the man in the middle took off his Twin Towers ball cap, scratched at his skull and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I have nothing to tell you.”

A variety of media reports have blamed outside agitators for stirring up the community’s emotions. While there were a variety of non-locals at the scene of the vigil even when The Observer visited it, at 4 p.m. on Thursday, it was clear that the community’s emotions were real.

“You can’t just take a life!” said the proprietor of an event hall called Extreme Elegance, who declined to give his full name, as we walked with him back down Church Avenue.

“Right now, if I have a problem with you, I wouldn’t call the police,” he continued. “People come inside here and rob me, and I would never call the police. Never!”

“Eleven shots!” chimed in Kevon Julian.

“He got hit seven times, but they shot at him 11. These kids, they’re terrible. But they get older. To me, they targeted him. Out of the crowd, they see him. They know what he’s about, and they said he had something, but he really didn’t have anything that day.”

A group of young teens stood staring at the posters around the neighborhood, which held grieving testimonials to Mr. Gray’s short life, until one said, “I’m out, son. I can’t see this kid anymore,” while two reporters shoved mics into another young resident’s face and grilled him about Mr. Gray.

“He used to do a lot of bad stuff,” the subject said.

“Were you afraid of him?” one of the reporters asked.

“No.”

Community organizer Shamar Thomas, who rose to YouTube fame with his video “1 Marine vs. 30 Cops,” in which he beseeches police officers to stop physically harming members of the Occupy movement, implored others to be constructive.

“We have to channel the anger,” the Brooklyn resident said. “Everyone is out here egging it on. But going to jail, messing with the cops that are right here. These ain’t the killer cops. We yelling at the regular motherfuckers that are on the street. Organizing is our only weapon. Unity is our threat.”

And then, on cue, Mr. Thomas broke away to calm down a middle-aged man who was not a local and was getting himself very riled up.

“They cornered us into a little group,” the man said, reliving the previous night’s demonstrations. “It was like hundreds of us on top of each other, the way they locked us down. You couldn’t breathe ... Then they started arresting the young ones. They threw me against the wall a few times. I didn’t understand. Grown-ups were getting thrown against the wall and they wasn’t getting locked up.”

Ostensibly all these demonstrations were for Kimani Gray—whom one resident described as “a hood star”—but they were rooted in long-standing tensions between residents and police. Many at the scene of the vigil were wearing anti-stop-and-frisk buttons.

“I don’t like how cops pull over black males for no reason. They don’t stop—no disrespect—white males. And then when kids die, people think it’s not a big deal,” said 13-year-old Iziah McPhatter, who hails from Downtown Brooklyn but was here with his twin brother and his father, a former Bloods gang member who founded an organization called Gangstas Making Astronomical Community Changes, or GMACC.

According to Mr. Harrison, it’s important for the community to have some closure. “They know what they’re mad about—it’s about the shooting,” he said, before adding, almost rhetorically: “Where do we go from here?”

Sector E in Brownsville had more stop and frisks than any other corner of the city.

East New York, Brooklyn: amidst the slightly disintegrating buildings and graffiti-filled walls sits NY’s 75th precinct—the precinct that is credited with the most stop-and-frisks of 2011.

While some inhabitants of the area stress the common concerns that police are exercising racial discrimination and brutality in their stop-and-frisk operations, there seems to be more to the story. To often, officers have no real connection to the communities they cover, The Brooklyn Bureau reports. They seem not to care, and the 7-5 is a perfect illustration of that.

However, in this supposed game of good versus bad, things may not be so black and white. Although the 75th precinct is known as the city’s most violent, perhaps it is a necessity. In 2011, the neighborhood had 27 murders and 780 robberies, The Times reported earlier this month, the most of any precinct.

Nevertheless, the neighborhood’s natives stress that the officers that roam their sidewalks are unaware of who the residents actually are, helping to widen the gap between the two sides.

Judah Brothers Boxing Gym is on the first floor of a two-story building at the corner of Liberty Avenue and New Jersey Avenue, a short block from the Liberty Avenue A-train subway station, where 86 people were stopped and questioned by police last year, according to NYPD data.

The men who work out at Judah Brothers know plenty about stop-and-frisk. Young men of color are the prime demographic for stops—according to the NYCLU, over 40 percent of those stopped in 2011 were black and Latino males between 14 and 24.

"I'm used to that. They're always doing it," said Ariel Judah, 35. He's tall, thin, and with a boyish face that makes him look much younger than he is. He says he was stopped recently while walking from the gym down Liberty Avenue, to a nearby corner store.

"'Where are you going? Do you live around here?'" the officer quizzed him.

"When I see a cop, I'm trying to get away from them," Judah says. "I don't have time for that."

Although the NYPD’s CompStat June report for the precinct shows that the crime ratings have decreased by almost 24% in the past decade, for some, it remains a number that is just a number when it comes to the larger issue of the separation residents feel from their police force.

Memo to NYPD: This man is not his character from The Wire.

First it was Breaking Bad's Giancarlo Esposito (or "Gus Fring") who came forward with his story of being stop-and-frisked by the New York Police Department. Over the weekend, while the controversial police tactic was being protested, another actor—this time, from David Simon's inner-city crime epic The Wire—noted his own experience with the policy.

J.D. Williams—who played Preston "Bodie" Broadus for four seasons on The Wire—spoke to Capital New York about his experience with the policy:

"I might get recognized, but [police are] not sure where they know me from. So, a lot of times an officer might think he's arrested me before. But then usually by the time they walk up on me, it's come to them and they're like 'Oh!'"

He also explained he knew many people who had been stop-and-frisked, and was familiar with the practice.

Capital got some video as well:

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

"The police are very fond of saying, 'If you're not doing anything wrong then what's the problem?' Well, we say that back at them," Ms. Donna Lieberman, Executive Director of the NYCLU told The Observer today after a press conference outside police Headquarters.

The NYPD and Mayor Bloomberg stand firm in their belief that their random searches are effective, boasting of the record-low murder rate. (The figures compared the murder rate of the last ten years with the ten years prior.)

Ms. Lieberman calls the figures "bologna," and finds the numbers lack any direct correlation to the stop-and-frisk since most of the arrests that resulted from a search, just one tenth of those stopped charged with even a misdemeanor. She feels that if the practices are saving New Yorkers, then officers should have no problem being filmed.

"Let's put a spotlight on it then. Let's show what a great job the NYPD is doing," she quipped.

The app, which at the time is only for Android phones, allows users to report searches by video or by answering a series of questions (location, age, gender, race of the person stopped) about the incident even if you didn't film it.  The data is sent directly to the NYCLU where it is compiled in hopes to further investigate the nature, integrity and productivity of these stops.

"Although not scientific, it will help put a face to the people who are hurt by these practices and provide safety to this who feel powerless," stated Ms. Lieberman.

Candis Tolliver, an organizer for the Advocacy Department of the NYCLU, was teaching people in the crowd how to use the application and why it is important for people to download and record.

“We could pass legislation. We could sue. We could litigate. We could win, but if communities aren't empowered to create change nothing is ever going to happen when it comes to the power and balance between police and communities,” Ms. Tolliver told The Observer. "People always say, 'There's nothing we can do about it,' but this app allows documentation so it's not just the cops word against yours."

Although it is within constitutional rights to film a police officer, it was hardly discussed whether citizens  would have the courageous fervor to blatantly film a gun wielding, badge wearing lawman.

In an effort to answer that question, we stopped an on-duty police officer nearby to see what he thought about people filming him do his job.

"It wouldn't really bother me—as long as I can still do my job," he said shrugging.

"What's going on here? We don't have time for this," the policeman's superior shouted at him as traffic lined up on Park Row.

If you live in New York, and you've picked up a newspaper, you've no doubt read about the New York City Police Department's pesky problem of stop-and-frisks, the tactic used by police to...randomly stop-and-frisk whoever they feel may or may not be carrying something on them that makes them worth arresting. Does it help? Is it racial profiling? It is a total, outright, so-blatant-as-to-be-downright-impressive-in-scale violation of every fundamental civil liberty you assumed most people to have had but are now coming to realize simply don't?

Some people don't like stop-and-frisk procedures the way they are in New York City. Among them are the city's Public Advocate, Bill de Blasio, who has been all over this; not an easy task, considering the police tactics have the loud support of the NYPD's de-facto commander, Mayor Blooomberg.

Well, de Blasio has put out a nifty little infographic to help understand just how many people are stopping by police in New York City, and where they were stopped, and what ethnicity they just so happened to be when they were stopped. You can even look yourself up by location! Go ahead, give it a try. It's a great time, assuming it doesn't dredge up painful memories of that time everything you held to be true about your freedoms were shattered because a cop didn't like your backwards Mets hat.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

"Maintaining the personal information of these individuals found to be doing nothing wrong and using it in current and future criminal investigations, violates their privacy and due process rights, and thus their civil liberties."

Stop and frisk is an already controversial policy whereby the police can pat down anyone on the street suspected of a crime. Critics say that the practice unfairly targets black and Hispanic men, but backers say it has played a major role in reducing crime.  During last year's campaign, Tony Avella promised to eliminate the practice if he was elected mayor. But a firestorm erupted when it was revealed that the NYPD retains records of those whom they stop. Each year, over half-a-million people are stopped, and nearly 90% of found to be innocent of any wrongdoing.

Robert Jackson, the co-chair of the Black, Latino, and Asian caucus noted that under the current policy, if he were stopped-and-frisked and released, he would immediately become a suspect of another crime simply because the police had his information.

"The civil liberties of the people of our great state are number one," he said. "That is what it is about."

The stop-and-frisk policy began under the Giuliani administration as part of their "broken windows" theory of policing, but has gained added steam under the Bloomberg administration.  Bloomberg officials have been lobbying hard for Paterson to veto the bill, and NYPD commisioner Ray Kelly has personally met with the governor on the matter.

"The information in the database has been useful in solving crimes," said Bloomberg spokesman Jason Post. "Why would you take away something that is working?"

Albany sources say the governor is likely to sign the legislation. He has until next Friday to veto the bill or it becomes law.

Jackson said that if the bill was vetoed, it would harbor a ill dawn in the nation.

"Let's then go to a Big Brother state, where everyone is fingerprinted, where everyone has a microchip inserted in their arm, and put up video cameras everywhere that record you even when you are in the bathroom making number 2, or making love to someone," he said. "Unacceptable. Not in America."

BLA Caucus Letter to Gov Paterson Regarding Stop and Frisk Bill (3)