UNITED STATES: South Asian Cab Drivers Complain of Harassment

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Feb 23 1997 (IPS) - For thousands of South Asians in New York City, driving a taxi is the route to a good, steady job, but for many it is also a ticket to harassment.

“We’re in one of the most dangerous jobs,” said a Bangladeshi cab driver who gave his name as Mohammed. “We drive people around in all hours of the night, in bad neighbourhoods, and we don’t get any protection at all from the police.”

Mohammed complains that dozens of drivers have been murdered in recent years, often while driving fares to such crime-ridden neighbourhoods as Brooklyn’s East New York or Manhattan’s Harlem.

In 1994, following a spate of killings of cab drivers, hundreds of taxis blocked Manhattan’s central artery, Broadway, for several hours, to protest what the drivers contended was police bias, including the lack of investigation into beatings and killings of drivers.

Police usually do not respond to drivers’ complaints of harassment by passengers, says Phairavi Desai, who coordinates the Lease Drivers Coalition, a project of the New York-based Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence. “They don’t listen to a driver’s story or a driver’s opinion at all.” Many times, she says, passengers who are abusive toward drivers will only receive a mild complaint from police.

Desai says cab drivers have complained that their ethnicity plays a big part in the treatment they receive.

“They’re literally on the front lines, being out on the streets all day,” Desai says. “It’s a racially marginalised community that’s also religiously marginalised, particularly the Sikh and Muslim drivers.”

“Police officers will stop drivers for absolutely no reason,” Desai says. “If a driver speaks up too much, they will give him a ticket for disorderly conduct.”

One of the most commonly reported forms of police harassment, says Elizabeth OuYang, staff attorney for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, is the issuance of “false summonses,” or charges of driving or parking violations which do not hold up in court.

Many South Asian drivers feel they are receiving a high number of tickets and summonses which they must then argue in court. Most often, Desai says, drivers who complain about unfair police ticketing can spend hours arguing their cases, during which time, she notes, they lose fares.

Sometimes, OuYang says, drivers who challenge false summonses have encountered further harassment. In one 1994 case, she says, a Pakistani driver in Brooklyn challenged summonses that were issued by two police officers he claimed were harassing him, only to be arrested anew two days after filing his complaint.

Last year, all five summonses issued against the driver were dismissed in court. There is, however, little real data on specific problems faced by South Asian cab drivers.

Asked to respond to the complaints, the police spokesman’s office here said that while they may be able to comment on individual cases of harassment, they were not aware that Asians faced special problems.

Neither has the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC), the city agency which regulates the cab industry, received any information of particular problems faced by South Asians, says Allan Fromberg, TLC spokesman.

The TLC, in fact, does not even compile data on drivers by ethnicity. But Fromberg acknowledges that “the greatest preponderance” of the city’s 45,000 licensed cab drivers are Pakistani or Indian, while many Bangladeshis are also entering the trade. Altogether, the Pakistani, Indian, and Bangladeshi licensed cab drivers in New York are estimated at some 30,000.

South Asians have no such representation on the police force. According to the 1990 census, 1.1 percent of cops fell under the Asian/’other’ category (compared to 7.7 percent of Asian/’other’ in the New York population.)

In the meantime, cab drivers are becoming more organised, forming several associations to plead their cases as more complaints of police treatment surface. (The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund dealt with 17 cases of driver harassment for 1994, and most of them were by police officers.) One new group is Pak Brothers, a coalition largely comprised of Pakistani drivers.

Indeed, police harassment is only one part of the problem. Several drivers told IPS that passengers complain regularly about their ability to speak English, and argue with them or pay little or no gratuity as a result. (As the number of immigrant drivers rises, the TLC has tried to ensure that drivers speak adequate English.)

“I have a college degree, and back home, I was an engineer,” says one driver, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But now I come here and make my living driving a cab, and people think I don’t know anything.”