In New York, there’s an anti-loitering statute that has come to be known colloquially as the “Walking While Trans” ban. Advocates say that the law, which is ostensibly meant to target sex workers, allows officers to arbitrarily arrest and detain New Yorkers for simply walking around or standing on the street. It allows police to decide, for instance, that a woman’s skirt is too short, or that she’s been lingering too long on one street corner, and to apprehend her based on suspicion that she’s “loitering for the purpose of prostitution.” Trans women — and particularly trans women of color — are disproportionately targeted this way, activists say. “Whether you are ho-ing or not ho-ing, even if you look like you might be trans, you are going to jail,” Tiffaney Grissom, a trans woman from the Bronx who has been arrested multiple times under the law, told The Village Voice in 2016.
The U.S. government collects detailed data on who’s dying in which jails around the country – but won’t let anyone see it. So, Reuters conducted its own tally of fatalities in America’s biggest jails, pinpointing where suicide, botched healthcare and bad jailkeeping are claiming lives in a system with scant oversight.
By setting PSBs at rates unaffordable for many defendants, criminal justice advocates and public defenders say, judges, who have complete discretion, have in effect nullified a program instituted by the legislature to free more poor people from jail.
“The battle for bail reform isn’t over, and right now, combatting PSB abuse is the front line,” said Martin Kaminer, founder of the Emergency Relief Fund, a bail fund that has been working on this issue.
A man charged with running a drug syndicate was offered a plea deal in July if he would name Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old Black woman killed by police in her Louisville, Ky. apartment, as a member of his alleged criminal gang, according to the man's attorney.
The incidents in Chicago and Philadelphia are evidence that American police across the country share a coherent ideology. Armed white boys don’t code as a threat to them; “anarchists” and angry black people do (even if the protesters are the ones at least attempting to engage in constitutionally protected behavior, while the roving white gangs are flagrantly violating the law). That disconnect, the galling image of watching the law so obviously tossed aside under certain circumstances, highlights a fundamental truth about what’s happening across the United States. The police are not using brutality to enforce “the law.” They’re using the law to enforce something else: a particular social order that is, to them, worth fighting for.
But the policing has become more intensive, more invasive, more aggressive. So what I'm calling for is a rethink on why we've turned all of these social problems over to the police to manage. And as we dial those things back, then we can think more concretely about what the rest of policing should look like and how that could be reformed.