Stop and Frisk: The Opera

It probably won’t stand up to the artistry of,
say, Three Penny Opera, but librettist Daniel Neer

has teamed up with the music ensemble Two Sides Sounding to
produce a three-part opera titled Independent Eve, which
explores American race relations in three different eras. The first
act, “Stop and Frisk,” based around New York City’s notorious
policing tactic, debuted during the Brooklyn BEAT Festival on
Saturday. The act follows an operatic dialogue between a black man
and his white friend. The former tries to explain the experience of
being targeted by the police for some quickie stop and frisk
action:

I came home from work—dressed in a suit. Walked past three cops
in the lobby. They saw me and nodded—one even said ‘Hi.’ …

When I got to the lobby, those very same cops grabbed me and
asked who I was. They had a ‘reasonable suspicion,’ they said, and
told me they knew I had drugs. . . . I was stripped
and searched because of my skin.

Rousing, if not particularly poetic, words. But his white friend
has a hard time understanding why it’s such a big deal, asking
whether his friend provoked the encounter by acting “strange.” The
composer, Sidney Marquez Boquiren, noted that “the tension is the
fact that [the two actors are] singing the same text, the same
melody, but [they’re] not in the same world.” Historically, New
York police have disproportionately targeted blacks and Latinos for
a rough feel-up, with the two demographic groups often comprising
well
over 85 percent of those stopped from 2003 to 2012.

Neer says that he was inspired to write the piece during the
heightened scrutiny of the Michael Bloomberg administration’s
support for the tactic. Bloomberg and his police commissioner Ray
Kelly couldn’t shield stop and frisk from later getting
constitutionally roughed up, however: In August 2013 a U.S.
District Court judge ruled stop and frisk unconstitutional and

another judge in July of this year denied the police union’s
challenge of the ruling.

Although police stops have declined dramatically in 2013
and so far in 2014, blacks and Latinos nevertheless continue to
make up the lion‘s share of stops—this
despite the evidence that stopping and frisking
dark-skinned men has little impact on
crime.