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What’s legal for white New Yorkers is often illegal for black and brown New Yorkers.
Take, for instance, this DNAinfo story about 60-year-old Ernest Stroy and his 24-year-old nephew, Waymon Jones. On Sunday night, the pair were playing what they said was a harmless game of dominoes outside a bodega in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.
Then the police showed up.
“Six of them hopped out of the van and the lady said, ‘You guys can’t play dominoes, you’ve got to wrap it up,’” Jones told DNAinfo.
“And we’re all like, we’re all grown men,” he said, “we’re not harming anybody, we’re not doing any drugs. It’s not, like, dice. So they left us alone for a little bit.”
The pair moved their game to a neighboring plaza. Soon after that, the cops — seven officers, it should be noted — came back, surrounded the two men and issued them tickets for loitering and illegal gambling. (A bystander recorded a video of part of the incident, which you can watch above.)
“It’s wasting your time taking a day off of work to go fight it,” Stroy said of the tickets, adding that he’s already “struggling from check to check” as it is.
“As hard as I try, I cannot recall ever arraigning a white defendant for such a violation.”
Now think of SoHo, in Manhattan, on a Friday or Saturday night.
