Thousands of people held a silent march in New York City on Sunday to protest the New York City Police Department’s controversial "stop-and-frisk" policies. The warrantless search initiative has drawn accusations of being unconstitutional, while mostly targeting people of color, overwhelmingly black and Latino men. We hear from several voices at the march: Reverend Al Sharpton, Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Benjamin Jealous of the NAACP, and New York City residents who have endured dozens of stop-and-frisk searches.

Transcript:

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Thousands of people took to the streets Sunday to protest the New York City Police Department’s controversial stop-and-frisk policies. Organized by the NAACP, the protest marked only the second time the organization has held a silent march. The last time was in 1917 to protest lynching. Last year, the New York police officers stopped ...

On Sunday, civil rights, faith and community groups will hold a silent march in Manhattan to protest the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy, which permits law enforcement to confront people at will, question them and pat them down for weapons or drugs.

The march, which will begin at 110th Street between Fifth Avenue and Central Park West, will draw hundreds of diverse community and labor groups, faith organizations and elected officials. It reenacts an earlier march in 1917, when the newly formed NAACP silently marched down Fifth Avenue to protest race riots and to foment national opposition to lynching. That march, a powerful symbol of justice and strength, was led by W. E. B. DuBois. 95 years later on Father’s Day, NAACP President Benjamin Jealous, together with 1199 SEIU President George Gresham and Rev. Al Sharpton of the National Action Network will lead thousands down the same avenue, calling for an end to racially-biased policing.

The NYPD has come under increasing scrutiny for this controversial policy, raising concerns of the discriminatory targeting of minorities throughout New York City. In May, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that there was “overwhelming evidence” that the practice has led to thousands of illegal stops. She granted class-action status to a lawsuit challenging the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices as being unconstitutional and racially discriminatory; the ruling will allow anyone unlawfully stopped and frisked since January 2005 to be a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Also last month, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) published a report underscoring the racial disparities that communities of color have long been confronted with: hundreds of thousands of innocent New Yorkers are being targeted and stopped each year by the NYPD, the vast majority of whom are black or Latino.

A significant number of those affected by this practice are immigrants, as ...

A federal judge has granted class action status to a lawsuit opposing the New York City Police Department's controversial stop-and-frisk program, opening the door to legal recourse for hundreds of thousands of people targeted by police. The judge's ruling cited the city's "deeply troubling apathy" toward the constitutional rights of New Yorkers. A recent study by the New York Civil Liberties Union found the NYPD program is racially skewed and largely ineffective, with blacks and Latinos making up 87 percent of people stopped last year. We speak to Benjamin Jealous, president of the NAACP.

The NAACP’s Benjamin Jealous responds to recent attacks on the late Derrick Bell, the first tenured African-American professor at Harvard Law School. Fox News host Sean Hannity played a video showing then-student Barack Obama hugging Bell during a protest over Harvard’s failure to hire minority faculty. Former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Hannity’s program called Bell a “radical college racist professor.” “I think, quite frankly, Sean Hannity was afraid to talk to Derrick Bell directly. Because this [video] has been out there for years,” Jealous says. “If he had, he would have encountered somebody of tremendous compassion, of tremendous intelligence and of tremendous patriotism.”