New York’s Finest Reined In On Stop-And-Frisk
Under New York City’s former-Police Commissioner, Ray Kelly, law enforcement insisted NYPD did not engage in ‘racial profiling’ during the troublesome stop-and-frisk scheme. Then federal judge Shira Scheindlin put a halt to the madness by ruling that stop-and-frisk was encouraging police to target young black and Hispanic men and was unconstitutional.
New York’s Civil Liberties Union recently analyzed data received after the judges ruling and found “black and Latino neighborhoods continued to be the target of the draconian tactic.”
In 2012, New York law enforcement stopped over 530,000 persons. In nearly 60 percent of those cases, the suspect was black. The suspect was white just 10% of the time. Ninety-percent of the time the suspect was innocent according to the NYCLU report.
The same thing had happened in 2011 when 54% of New Yorkers who were stopped-and-frisked were black. Just 9% of those suspects were white.
Between 2010 and 2012, 90-percent of New Yorkers stopped were completely innocent.
An NYPD spokesman reviewed the figures used by the NYCLU and verified them against the data NYPD collected from each precinct in the city.
Amidst the first presidential debate in 2016, Trump argued the stop-and-frisk program was effective and claimed the scheme had not been found unconstitutional.
Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City, relied on Trump’s error during an energetic speech at the Republican convention. Giuliani claimed Trump would fight crime just as effective as he [Giuliani] had as Mayor. “What I did for New York, Trump will do for American,” Giuliani shouted.]
During an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, Trump pledged to for America what began in the NYPD during Giuliani’s time in office. “It [stop-and-frisk] worked well, and we have to be proactive and, you, know, you help people sort of change their mind.”
The facts show otherwise. Stop-and-frisk didn’t work out well and studies, in addition to that completed by the NYCLU reveal there is no correlation between the stop-and-frisk habit and the city’s crime reduction.
NYPD Curbs Stop-and-Frisk As Settlement Reached
In February 2017, NYPD agreed to stop the tactics. The announcement ended the last of multiple lawsuits which changed the city’s crime-fighting approach.
Some civil rights attorneys called the practice ‘an especially poisonous element of the city’s crime reduction effort. At one point, the police had gotten so aggressive with stop-and-frisk people were being stopped and searched in the lobbies of their residential buildings.
“The driver was the police officers’ belief that persons in, or near, residential buildings could be stopped without a warrant,” said Christopher Dunn, NYCLU’s legal director and lead counsel in the suit which delivered the change.
Scheindlin said the police had “systematically crossed’ the line between constitutional and unconstitutional activity.
“This will mandate accountability and improve training and oversight to guarantee the changes are meaningful and longstanding.”
