Today, 1/21 my group and I met with PROP leader, Robert Gangi for the second time. We discussed our court monitoring project which will take place on Friday 1/22. This court monitoring project lets us go into courts that bring in all the people arrested on little charges. Here we will see the racial prejudice’s that police officers use when looking for their victims, and how bogus most of these charges are. The police officers have to follow a quota system, this system requires a certain amount of arrests every month. The quotas aren’t set in stone but are implied with the job. To fill these absurd quotas police officers must patrol lower income communities, waiting to strike on someone for something small and meaningless better resolved by a ticket. Instead they arrest the person for, jaywalking, taking up two subway chairs, and possessing a small amount of marijuana. All of these people have to show up in court, and often they end up leaving, free of charge, due to unsubstantial evidence. Overall this was a good, lengthy meeting and was incredibly interesting.
