On a recent Monday morning, 37-year-old City
Councilman Jumaane D. Williams drives from Brooklyn into Manhattan, his radio
blasting Jadakiss, and slides his BMW into a parking space near City Hall. A
few blocks away, the trial of Floyd et al. v. City of New York—the lawsuit
challenging the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policies—is about to kick off another
week of testimony. “This is 2013. It’s not like 1963,” Williams says, walking
toward the federal courthouse in a black corduroy jacket, dreadlocks tied back.
“It’s crazy. I don’t understand why we have to argue in court that you
shouldn’t profile people simply by how they look.”
A Department of Correction van rolls up, and the
officer in the driver’s seat leans out. “Keep up the good work, man!” he
hollers, flashing a peace sign.
“Thank you, brother,” Williams says. “I appreciate
it.”
“There’s a lot of us out there with you!” the driver
shouts before speeding off.
Williams turns toward the courthouse and says, “I
have no idea who he is.”
Since winning his seat in 2009, Williams has become
one of the most vocal critics of the NYPD, arguing that the police have been
overly aggressive in stopping and searching innocent people. (Officers made a
record 685,724 street stops in 2011 and another 532,911 stops in 2012.) Williams
has been pushing a bill he co-wrote with Councilman Brad Lander to create an
independent inspector general for the NYPD.
In recent weeks, Williams, who happens to be the only
member of the City Council with Tourette’s, has watched his profession get
battered in the press. He won’t talk about specific politicians—not State
Senator Malcolm Smith nor fellow councilman Dan Halloran nor anyone else. But
he will say, “Power and money make people act unscrupulously—and that
transcends politics.”
Shortly before 9:30 a.m., he enters the hallway
outside Courtroom 15C only to encounter a security officer who informs him that
every seat is already filled. “What time do you have to get here?” Williams
says, shaking his head. “Goddamn it!”
He rides back down the elevator and walks to another
courthouse. When he steps into the overflow room, he spots a 17-year-old with
tattoos covering both arms. “There’s Aboti!” Williams shouts, hurrying over to
give him a hug. Kasiem Aboti Walters belongs to Williams’s church and works
with a youth group supported by his office. When Williams takes a seat in the
fourth row, the teen sits beside him.
By way of introduction, Williams says, “He learned a
good lesson about having I.D. last year.”
As Walters tells it, two police officers stopped him
on his way to Tilden Educational Campus one weekend afternoon. He recalls,
“They said there had been a robbery in the area.” Walters had just come from a
shoot for a music video he was making about the police, and his bag held the
props: ski mask and handcuffs. After peering inside the bag, the cops detained
him for about three hours—until he thought to mention that he knew Councilman
Williams. “Other than that, I don’t know when I would’ve gotten out,” he says.
Williams, whose district includes Flatbush and East
Flatbush, can relate. During the West Indian Day parade in 2011, he and another
city official entered a sidewalk on Eastern Parkway cordoned off to the public,
only to have cops snap handcuffs on them. (They were trying to get to an event
at the Brooklyn Museum and had received permission from other officers to walk
there.) The NYPD later explained that the police never actually arrested them.
“I don’t know the definition of arrest,” Williams says, “if I’m cuffed and I
can’t leave.”
At 10 a.m., Judge Shira A. Scheindlin appears on the
screen, along with this morning’s witness: State Senator Eric Adams, a 22-year
NYPD veteran and frequent NYPD critic. Williams scoots forward, draping his
arms over the wooden bench in front of him, eyes fixed on the screen.
Fifty or so people now fill the rows, and everyone
watches the trial silently—everyone except Williams. His body hops in place;
his back slams against the bench so hard that the vibrations ricochet down the
row. Watching him is a jarring sight, but Williams appears unfazed. Later, he
explains that he rarely thinks about his Tourette’s anymore—except when he
glimpses himself on TV, and then he’ll say to himself, “Damn, that’s
distracting.”
His tics subside partway through Adams’s testimony.
When the judge and a city lawyer dance around the question of how effective the
NYPD’s use of stop and frisk is in reducing crime, Williams gets fired up,
turning to me and whispering: “You should stop, question, and frisk bankers
coming out of Wall Street and go through their briefcases to see where the next
financial crime is going to be! That would be more effective.”
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