The notion that the checkpoints are in any way "helping" people of color is ludicrous. We could first consider the fact that nothing is done about any of the additional problems that create these very situations in the first place, including the drug war that is packing our jails and prisons with nonviolent drug users who are disproportionately people of color, and which creates the illegal marketplace where armed gangs are the only once in charge of "regulating" the drugs and who buys them. Add to this the other overwhelming evidence of our justice system and law enforcement targeting people of color, and then consider the manner in which poor people of color are driven from their neighborhoods to make way for things like baseball stadiums (which got funding relatively quickly, while our city government can never seem to find enough funds for public schools and housing, for example).

The bottom line is that these communities are ignored, neglected, and targeted by our government every step of the way. Then the government sets up road blocks and checkpoints, turning the neighborhoods into militarized zones, and that these checkpoints serve the additional function of increasing arrests for minor offenses while also having a very strong psychological effect. Citizens of these areas, especially young people in those neighborhoods, getting used to seeing themselves and their families surround by cops, their neighborhoods treated like open-air prisons, their friends and relatives treated like suspects for trying to visit, and their rights against unreasonable searches and seizures treated as unimportant).

You cannot ignore entire groups of people, turn your back on their economic plight, target them for arrest and searches etc disproportionate to their numbers in society as a whole, and then pretend that sending armed police to surround their neighborhoods and search everyone coming to their towns is somehow an example of "concern".

Those who really care about these neighborhoods and people of color in general don't sit around ignoring all of the problems and concerns, and only raise their voices to defend militarizing those neighborhoods in a policy that overtly violates people's civil liberties. It's disingenuous and patently ridiculous.