Mastering civil rights in Riviera Beach is not an easy task

Frank Cerabino

It’s not easy being a liberal in Riviera Beach.

Consider what the city’s mayor, Thomas Masters, has been saying lately.

“If I had my way, I would stop almost everything moving. Doggone it, everything. Especially if it looked suspi- cious,” the mayor said at a news conference last week. “A good thing to know for our young people and others, you’ll never know when you’re going to be stopped and searched, legally,” he said. “So just don’t do any wrong, then you won’t have to worry about it.” So what “looks suspicious”? Driving while young, black, and male? Traveling in a car with loud hip-hop music? Wearing saggy pants?

Somebody ought to tell civil rights leader Bishop Thomas Masters that the mayor of Riviera Beach is talking about Read Frank Cerabino’s recent columns online at the kind of street profiling of young, black men that falls neatly under the definition of unconstitutional stopping and frisking.

Oh, wait a second. That won’t work, because the mayor Thomas Masters is the same guy as the civil rights leader Bishop Thomas Masters.

The mayor was reacting to a recent spate of shootings, mostly gang-related revenge killings.

Last year, most of the 11 people killed in Riviera Beach were younger than 40. They included Martavious Carn, a 3-year-old boy who was collateral damage in the revenge killing of his mother’s 24-yearold boyfriend in August, and Makayla Dennard, a 15-yearold girl who, two days before Christmas, was shot in the head in her own driveway from a passing car stolen from Boca Raton.

“The drivers of vehicles who scheme to come into our city from other neighboring communities to shoot and kill our youth and others, be warned,” Masters said. “We will take every necessary and legal means to keep you out. Our entry and exit points will be secured.”

If a white mayor had suggested such a sweeping plan for suspicionless searching of people and vehicles in a predominantly black city such as Riviera Beach, he or she might be accused of being racist, or at least promoting an overbroad and racially insensitive solution to a specific and limited problem.