News & Commentary

Like many Americans, last Tuesday I found myself first in shock – but then fear for our country and for the civil liberties values we cherish.

This was because of how the campaign of President-elect Donald Trump stoked racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic fears, promising polices that, if enacted, would be an unprecedented all-out attack on the rights of Americans.

The day after the election, the ACLU of Florida staff met first to come to terms with our collective shock at the civil liberties challenges we are now surely facing, then to immediately begin planning how we will deploy our resources and the tens of thousands of ACLU members in Florida to respond to them.

We are now preparing to fulfill the role the ACLU has always played since it was established in 1920: standing up against and challenging any government abuses of rights and liberties.

People understand this about the ACLU. That is why, in the week since the election, the ACLU has received an unprecedented outpouring of support. We are now hard at work putting that support to work.

This morning, Donald J. Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States, and the ACLU has a message for him.

President-elect Trump, as you assume the nation’s highest office, we urge you to reconsider and change course on certain campaign promises you have made. These include your plan to amass a deportation force to remove 11 million undocumented immigrants; ban the entry of Muslims into our country and aggressively surveil them; punish women for accessing abortion; reauthorize waterboarding and other forms of torture; and change our nation’s libel laws and restrict freedom of expression.

IT'S TIME TO FIGHT

Can you imagine what it is like to wake up every day in fear, knowing today could be the last you see your fiancé because of the color of his skin?As an African American woman, I constantly live in fear my fiancé or myself will not make it home to one another every night.I fear that one of us will be stopped by the police for a broken taillight and shot down in fear, like Philando Castile. I fear one of us will be gunned down after heading to the convenience store for skittles, like Trayvon Martin. I fear we will be out together, enjoying our evening, and one of us will be shot down for laughing, like Rekia Boyd. I fear I will call upon a neighbor for help after being in an accident and be shot down, like Renisha McBride. I fear my fiancé will be out celebrating with friends the night before our wedding, and be executed because a cellphone was mistaken for a gun, like Sean Bell.I am afraid that because of how I look, I too could be executed regardless of the circumstances.

The lives of Floridians could be changed forever.

Thanks to the “vigilance” of Representative Lake Ray from Jacksonville, it has come to our attention that our way of life in the Sunshine State is at serious risk of being conquered or destroyed by foreign invaders.

As a precautionary measure, Rep. Ray is trying to pass the ridiculous “Prevention of Acts of War” bill that would secure our way of life based on Florida’s power to defend itself against the imminent threat of surreptitious invasion the state has been facing for the last 15 years.

How is this bill supposed to help us during a time of war? Let’s get into it.

By Nusrat Choudhury, Staff Attorney, ACLU Racial Justice Program

Updated below

Sam Dubose. Walter Scott. Sandra Bland. 2015 showed in terrible and vivid detail how even routine police traffic stops carry the risk of escalating to arrest or the use of force — even lethal force. Traffic stops are not simply innocuous encounters. They can be deadly, particularly for Black people.

When evidence suggests that certain communities are targeted for traffic stops because of their race or ethnicity, we need to take heed. Today the ACLU is releasing a report providing just that. “Racial Disparities in Florida Safety Belt Law Enforcement” is the first report to analyze publicly available seat belt citation data reported by law enforcement agencies across the state to the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles in 2014 and 2011.

This year, the ACLU of Florida is celebrating its 50th anniversary. That’s half a century of defending the rights and freedoms of Floridians.

This timeline examines some of the most significant cases and historic moments in the history of the organization:

1965 – Founding: In response to the anti-Communist scare of the era, ACLU chapters in Miami, Gainesville and Tampa join together to form the ACLU of Florida. As described in the original 1965 charter, the organization’s mission will be “To uphold the guarantees of freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion, and thought, as provided in the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights and to uphold the Florida State Constitution and Declaration of Rights; to uphold due process of law and equal protection under the law as provided by the Constitution; to encourage an appreciation of our basic liberties; to perpetuate, through a program of education and positive action, respect and devotion for freedom and liberty.”

I first started my career with the ACLU as a voting rights attorney with our National office. In that role, I had the privilege of representing African-American voters who were challenging restrictive voter laws, namely voter ID, and most of my clients grew up in the segregated South. They vividly remembered the inhumanity of Jim Crow laws, especially those that made it impossible for African-Americans to vote and elect candidates of their choice.

One of my former clients, Rev. Peter Johnson based in Texas, was one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s foot soldiers. At the age of 13, Rev. Johnson taught other blacks how to read at the bottom of his uncle’s church so they could pass Louisiana’s literary tests to vote. He recounted stories of how more affluent African-Americans would station themselves in front of polling places and pay the poll tax of any citizen brave enough to attempt to vote.

The release of racist, sexist, and homophobic emails primarily authored by two Miami Beach police officers (who have since left the Police Department), further exposes the level of bigotry and violent mentality endemic within the Department. The news regarding the emails also occurred as the City prepares for Urban Beach Weekend, an annual Memorial Day celebration similar to Ultra Music Festival and Pride that attracts thousands of mostly young black adults.

For several years, the ACLU has been meeting with Miami Beach police officers and other city officials to discuss the complaints from visitors and residents about the City’s over-policing during that weekend – heightened presence of police officers everywhere, use of dogs, flood lights, and DUI checkpoints which are almost never used any other weekend. Raymond Martinez, the former police chief, even sat in on some of those meetings and acted as if he saw no problem with his department’s treatment of black youth. All the while, he was one of the main recipients of these emails. Whether receiving these emails caused him chagrin or amusement, we know for certain that, as the head cop in charge, he did absolutely nothing to end this behavior or to punish those who were in direct violation of departmental policies.

By Nusrat Choudhury, Staff Attorney, ACLU's Racial Justice Program

The Tampa Bay Times' recent disclosure that police are targeting Blacks who ride bicycles — including children as young as three years old — for dramatically high rates of stops and searches is the latest piece in the nationwide debate about racial profiling that has followed the police-involved deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, and countless others.

Communities across the country are connecting the deluge of incidents in which police use force against Blacks (or, as in Gray's case, show gross disregard for Black life) to everyday interactions in which police stop, frisk, and search Blacks and Latinos because of their race, rather than evidence of wrongdoing — a practice well-documented in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Ferguson. The latest reports from Tampa underscore just how little progress has been made in rooting out racial profiling and how the routine over policing of communities of color can lead to interactions that tragically devolve into the use of force.