EDITORIAL: Stop the frisking
Published: Saturday, July 14, 2012
New York City leaders think they’ve hit upon a sure-fire way to prevent violent crime: stop and frisk citizens on the off chance that any individual person frisked might be carrying a weapon illegally.
Relatively few are, but city officials say the inconvenience is worth it because crime is dropping, which they attribute to this policy.
Well, a policy touted for its ostensible power to reduce crime is merely an inconvenience only so long as it’s merely an abstraction.
But when it happens to you it becomes a form of harassment. It’s not hard to appreciate why.
As Americans, we don’t fancy ourselves as living in a police state. Not unreasonably, whether liberal, moderate or conservative, we expect to be left alone as long as we’re minding our own business.
Now, the law says police have to have a reasonable suspicion of a crime to conduct a stop-and-frisk, but the numbers demonstrate no such standard of reasonableness is being applied. Last year, the NYPD conducted 685,274 such frisks, with something like 0.1 percent resulting in the discovery of illegal guns.
Were such an intensive dragnet administered evenhandedly, we suspect it would not have lasted nearly so long.
Stop and frisk some Wall Street banker for no good reason as he steps from a cab and you’ve got a problem.
Stop and frisk a buyer for Bloomingdales for no good reason as she exits a Starbucks and you’ve got a problem.
Bankers, however, don’t get frisked on the street upon the whim of a police officer and neither do women. Not many whites do, either. Continued...
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But if you’re young, male, and black or Latino, your odds of being stopped go up dramatically. According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, about 87 percent of the 685,274 people frisked in New York City in 2011 were black or Latino, many young men. Black and Hispanic men ages 14-24 constitute only 4.7 percent of the city’s population, but were 41.6 percent of stops in 2011, according to The New York Times.
For good reason, there is a growing chorus of community opposition to this policing program and the courts have signaled increasing skepticism about its legality.