The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Highlight

Patrick’s arrest was the essence of stop-and-frisk, which itself was the perfect symbol of the new stats-based approach to city policing. You throw a big net over a whole city region, bounce some heads off sidewalks, then throw back the little fish. Almost as important (and this aspect of it is little discussed), you gather intelligence with each catch. The thing is, this particular ocean, to push the metaphor a bit further, is getting overfished. So they’re trawling more remote waters, the nets being cast are wider. Which is a fancy way of saying that it’s not just blacks from Bed-Stuy or Hispanic workers in rural Georgia or Mexican single moms living out of vans who are getting the treatment. Being white and middle class never meant your kids breezed into Yale with a C average. That kind of privilege was always reserved for a special kind of wealth. But it did once mean that police would think twice before bouncing your head off a sidewalk. Not anymore.