If you are black and live in New York, or plan to travel there, you may not be able to catch a cab.
After another cab driver was shot and killed in New York by a minority, the spokesperson for the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers urged drivers to racially profile passengers from now on. Especially those who wear “hoodies” or obscure the contours of their physique with multiple layers of clothing.
New York taxi chief Fernando Mateo ignited a maelstrom of opposition and accusations of overt racism in light of the murder of Jamaican taxi driver Trevor Bell, 53, by a Hispanic assailant. He said he has had it with political correctness.
“I’m asking them to racially profile the criminal element that is in our community robbing us, assaulting us, and killing us. I am asking Hispanic and black livery cab drivers that serve our outer boroughs to watch out for those that are wearing “hoodies,” that are hiding their bodies in order to rob them and shoot them and go kill them,” he says. “I’m saying we need to be able to see who we’re picking up. I’m telling them not to pick up those that look and fit the profile of someone who is going to rob them, and usually when you’re going to rob a cabbie, they try to hide their features so the driver can’t identify them.”
Mateo, however, did not go so far as stop taxi drivers from picking up minorities altogether, saying that “we transport over a million Hispanic and black hard-working men and women every single day. They are not our problem,” Mateo told thegrio.com. “Our problem is the criminals that live amongst us, that look like us, that speak our language; their sole purpose in life is to commit crime.”
The taxi chief added that his heart is extremely heavy after another member of his driving squad was prematurely and ruthlessly cut down.
“I am tired of going to funerals, I’m tired of going to hospitals, I’m tired of seeing the pain and the suffering of families that are destroyed by these criminal elements, by these criminals, so the criminals that we are talking about are Hispanics and blacks, so in essence, I’m speaking the truth, I’m laying it out there.”
Mateo said he is just being brutally honest and that his statements can be corroborated by statistics compiled by the New York Police Department. “NYPD has them. All I know is that every time they kill or they rob someone, the figures that we get are of a black man or a Hispanic man.”
As a man who has had to console one too many families, Mateo said he could not care less whose feelings he hurts in articulating his new strategy to protect his drivers. “Exactly, I mean we know who they are. The day after they shot Mr. Bell seven times, two black men got into a cab where the driver was a black man, they robbed him, they beat him, and they stole his car at gunpoint with a knife. … It happens every day, and we need to start protecting ourselves.” –terry shropshire
