Meeting Between Luke, ACLU, City Of Miami Abruptly Ended

Miami, the second haven for the Hip-Hop police, is bracing itself for Memorial Day Weekend. The weekend is one the biggest, brashest of the year in the United States and many have claimed that the city is unfair to revelers with an affinity to rap.The ACLU recently addressed their concerns over the treatment of Luke […]

Miami, the second haven for the Hip-Hop police, is bracing itself for Memorial Day Weekend. The weekend is one the biggest, brashest of the year in the United States and many have claimed that the city is unfair to revelers with an affinity to rap.The ACLU recently addressed their concerns over the treatment of Luke Campbell’s Umoja Festival, the only official outdoor event of the weekend.Campbell alleges the city placed restrictions on his outdoor festival and would not allow him to host an outdoor concert. In published reports, Campbell said the restrictions are unfair because they are not applied to other public events.”The misconceptions of police and city officials [regarding] hip-hop culture are driving the both the permitting process and the deployment of police,” King Downing, the ACLU’s national coordinator of the Campaign Against Racial Profiling, told the Miami Herald Wednesday. “It appears like there is serious discrimination that could amount to racial profiling.”Tempers recently flared at a meeting with local and national leaders of the ACLU, Luther Campbell and city manager Jorge Gonazalez, who removed himself 15 minutes into the meeting.“’We tried to accommodate the request to have an emergency meeting, but it was turned into an interrogation session on topics that were not those they had led us to believe would be discussed,” Gonzalez said. “It wasn’t productive.”At the meeting, the admission of monitoring rappers by the Miami Police Department was to be a topic, but the conversation never happened because Gonazalez left.A police spokesman said that at least 60 officers from the Multi-Agency Gang Task Force were likely to be patrolling the city streets as well.In 2001, hundreds of thousands of people attended the festivities and overwhelmed the police officers, who arrested 200 people, mostly for minor offenses.