My country ’tis of thee,/Sweet land of liberty
“The most striking aspect of the [hidden] recordings is the contempt and hostility of supervisors toward the local population. For example, at a roll call on November 8, 2008, Lieutenant Delafuente states:
‘All right, I went out there [to Howard and Chauncey] yesterday and . . .we’ve got the old man out there with the grey hairs. A loud mouth. He thinks since he’s 55 years old he’s not going to get locked up. Well, guess what? I don’t tolerate shit out there. He went in and two of his pals went in. All right? So we’ve got to keep the corner clear. . . . Because if you get too big of a crowd there, you know, . . . they’re going to think that they own the block. We own the block. They don’t own the block, all right? They might live there but we own the block. All right? We own the streets here. You tell them what to do.'” [From Judge Schindlin’s ruling that “stop-and-frisk” is unconstitutional]
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