Jonathan Gartrelle could not stop laughing as he climbed the subway stairs. He was home in Harlem for Thanksgiving break in 2010, and he and a friend had been swapping jokes with a man on the train. Just outside the station, a police officer stopped him.
“For laughing,” said Gartrelle, 27. “I was stopped for laughing.”
The officer demanded to see the contents of his backpack, he said, and found an open container from that evening’s party.
Furious, Gartrelle shouted about his rights. Police called an ambulance, strapped him to a stretcher and told an EMT he was suicidal, he said.
Gartrelle said he lay double-handcuffed to the bed all night and was released the next day with no charges. “They just wanted to create a sense of terror and panic in my family on Thanksgiving,” he said.
Six years later, the incident is on Gartrelle’s mind as Election Day looms. During the first presidential debate in October, Donald Trump called for an increase in stop-and-frisks, a practice that has been severely curtailed in New York since 2011, when police stopped 685,724 New Yorkers. In Harlem, where 82 percent of residents are black or Latino, 97.9% of those stopped were black or Latino. An estimated 88 percent were innocent of any crime, the New York Civil Liberties Union said.
In 2013, a federal court ruled that the way the New York Police Department conducted stop-and-frisk was unconstitutional and racially discriminatory. By 2015, the number of stop and frisks declined to 22,939.
Debate Sparks Reaction
But Trump disputed the court’s ruling during the first presidential debate, saying the practice “worked very well in New York” – a statement that led some Harlem residents watching the debate at the Apollo Theater to jump to their feet in anger.
Now mindful of Trump’s stance on stop-and-frisk, Gartrelle is casting his vote for Hillary Clinton. “A Clinton presidency will allow young men to grow up in a world where a woman is in power,” said Gartrelle. “That could shift the toxic masculinity of police culture. Free women, and other minority groups will rise too.”
He said this election is “a choice between gradual change and breaking the system so badly it has to start over.” He said he would rather see the gradual change.
Other Harlem voters said they were also influenced by Trump’s stance. Chris Foye, 40, said many of the youth in his anti-violence program, SAVE, have been stopped by the police. Foye will also vote for Clinton on Nov. 8, though he is more cautious in his endorsement.
“Trump has come off as ethnocentric, racist, rude, and divisive with no clear plan to lead the country,” Foye said. “Hillary on the other hand comes off as being interested in criminal justice reform, yet she must overcome her past negative comments and her role in supporting policies that resulted in mass incarceration of community members of color.”
For weeks, volunteers walked up and down the streets of Central Harlem registering people to vote. Joseph Hayden,75, said his primary goal was to register as many voters who had been through the criminal justice system as possible.
Policing the black community, he said, “has been in the fabric of our history since slavery.” He started Still Here Harlem Productions, a company dedicated to capturing stop-and-frisk on film, four years ago. Hayden describes Harlem as an “open-air prison.” He said it will only get worse if Trump is elected president.
