Trial is scheduled to begin today for 22 protesters of New York Police Department’s notorious “stop and frisk” policy, in which hundreds of thousands of people are routinely stopped on the streets for spurious reasons, most of which have to do with skin color.  Lawyers for the protesters will argue a justification defense. It’s not likely to work.

In an op-ed, Brent Staples writes in the  New York Times of the cost of zero-tolerance toward marijuana arrests.  Most are trivial, even non-criminal but for the NYPDs trick of charging a public display after they take the pot out of a person’s pocket where it wasn’t on display. Many of the cases are eventually dismissed, under what New York calls an “adjournment in contemplation of dismissal.”  though the record of the ACD remains. Many of those arrested flow from the notorious stop and frisk policy.

For many, this means that New York City has a massive population of people with some criminal record, some “smirch” that appears, whether because of a garbage bust, an error in record keeping (it seems that the nice folks who input criminal history stuff are much more diligent about putting bad stuff into the computer than taking it out when the bad stuff turns out to be wrong; same with warrants) or payback from some cop to whom you failed to show sufficient respect during the course of a baseless yet humiliating rousting.

The upshot is that employment forms, which invariably include that little box to be checked which inquires whether you’ve ever been convicted of a crime, mean that a great many New Yorkers (which similarly means a great many whoever and wherever you are) will never find gainful employment.  Add to the little box effect that many corps run background checks through companies that search the internet for bad things you’ve done, whether true or false, and there remains a sub rosa prohibition on employment for very bad reasons, and often no reason at all. 

You were arrested for nothing? You were acquitted? You were never even prosecuted? None of that every shows. The search company reports back that you’re a criminal, and you won’t get the job.  And, you will never know why.

In another editorial, the  New York Times applauds the EEOCs “guidance” on the handling of criminal histories of applicants for employment.

The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has reaffirmed and updated a 25-year-old ruling that bars companies from automatically denying employment to people based on arrest or conviction records. It is must reading for all employers.

Two developments made the new guidance necessary: computer-based arrest and conviction records — many filled with errors or containing cases that are supposed to be sealed — that make it easy for employment screeners to get and sell the reports; and the dramatic increase in the number of Americans who have been arrested for minor offenses, due to “zero tolerance” policing.

The guidance makes clear that an arrest alone is not evidence of illegal conduct or grounds for exclusion. In one hypothetical — a classic “driving while black” case — an African-American couple traveling to church in a predominantly white town are pulled over and questioned by the police. When the husband protests, he is arrested for disorderly conduct. The prosecutor declines to file charges. But when the arrest comes up on a background check, the husband is denied a promotion.

If he filed a discrimination case, the guidance says, the E.E.O.C. could find reasonable cause to believe that the employer had violated the law.

Nothing surprising about it, except to the extent that anyone needed the EEOC to say something so patently obvious.  But then, there’s another level to the problem with neither the EEOC nor the Times is willing to acknowledge or address. 

The confluence of these factors has given birth to a Rube Goldberg system, where cops stop at will on Amsterdam Avenue with the blessing of people who live on Sutton Place, who have done nothing worthy of arrest are nonetheless arrested in vast numbers, only to be cut loose after a day in lockup to teach them who’s boss.  This tidbit of official government information, transparent on the internet (isn’t transparent always the coolest thing ever?) is scarfed up by bots working for companies that check backgrounds. Somehow, only the bad stuff is caught, and the good stuff never seems to make the front page of Google.

The EEOC says it’s wrong to base employment decisions on such a spurious, prejudiced and unreliable system.  And offers those who suffer because of it, as if they either knew or could prove it, the opportunity to pay a lawyer to fight for their minimum wage job.  At this point, it’s all silly enough, but the Rube Goldberg machine, as it’s wont to do, goes on.

What remains unsaid, at least in the New York Times, is that if any employee hired by a bold and fair company ends up driving his company car into a busload of nuns, you can bet your last dollar that the front page of the New York Post is going to scream that they should have known because he had a drunk driving arrest eight years before, which they found immediately on Google.  Liability. Humiliation. Brand-tarnishment.  Thousands of hate-filled comments and twits about how this company could be so cavalier as to knowingly put the murder-weapon into the hands of a known killer.  That the employee/driver copped to a non-criminal disposition just to get the expense and monkey off his back means nothing.

At each stage, a fix is built to cure the consequences of what came before.  That’s how Rube Goldberg machines happen.  Nice as it may be that it’s all intended to put a stop to problem upon problem, the only thing this machine has reliably produced is a need for another fix.

The 22 people who protested in front of a Harlem police precinct confronted the root of the problem, wrongful stops and constitutional rights pervasively ignored.  And these 22 will likely be convicted for their efforts, I wonder whether any business will take the risk of hiring them.  For businesses, there’s no benefit to taking such chances. We’ve made sure of that.