News & Commentary

If you’ve been following the ACLU of Pennsylvania’s work in recent years, you may have heard about our ongoing settlement with the city of Philadelphia regarding police officers’ use of stop-and-frisk.

As the ACLU of Pennsylvania continues working to decriminalize sex work, we want to take a moment to acknowledge International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.

Despite what you might hear from some candidates for mayor and city council in Philadelphia, one policing tactic that has proven a failure time and again in bolstering public safety is so-called stop-and-frisk.

A 2019 lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Pennsylvania alleged that Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) had a practice of ethnically profiling, stopping, and detaining Latinos to check their immigration “papers.” Three years after filing suit, we have reached a settlement.

If you are regularly stopped by the Philadelphia police, you are probably a Black man. If you are not regularly stopped by police, you should watch this video of a stop by Philadelphia police. Go on, watch it. I’ll wait.

America is in a historic moment. The murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis has blown the lid off of 400 years of white supremacy on American soil.

The job of a police officer is to serve and protect the community, no matter the racial, ethnic, religious, or socio-economic status of that community. Real justice is blind, and police officers are the front-line arbiters of justice in America.