Demonstrators stand in front of a Barneys luxury department store of with signs decrying allegations that Barney’s and Macy’s stores have unfair security policies aimed at minorities in New York October 30, 2013.
A group of African American protesters gathered in the US city of New York on Wednesday to express outrage over black customers’ complaints they were stopped by police after making luxury purchases.
The protesters, organized by a local pastor, were angry at what they called racial profiling by the New York Police Department (NYPD) and two department store chains in New York.
The two retailers, Barneys and Macy’s, along with the NYPD, are accused of racial profiling and wrongly detaining some black customers after they made luxury purchases.
Four black shoppers have said they were detained in separate incidents at the two stores and later released without charges in recent weeks.
“We are here today to say that Barneys is wrong because there is no one in the city of New York who is qualified to analyze a person’s dress or manner to determine how much money they have and how capable they are to purchase something,” said Conrad Tillard, senior pastor at the Nazarene Congregational United Church of Christ.
“The disrespect that racial profiling does to us as a people will not be tolerated,” said the Rev. Evelyn Manns, a pastor at Brooklyn Christian Center.
The shopping incidents have been dubbed “shop-and-frisk” after the controversial “stop and frisk” policing tactic by which NYPD officers stop and question thousands of pedestrians annually. The vast majority of these people are African-American or Latino.
The number of searches rose from 160,851 stops in 2003 to 685,724 in 2011, while half of the 2011 searches included physical searches.
AHT/ARA
Source: Press TV