New York City still has a number of daily newspapers, but only one borough has a dedicated daily as far as I know. The Staten Island Advance has been publishing for 125 years, and has a rep for solid local news, even if it's readers tend towards the GOP (check out the comments and you'll see what I'm talking about).
The Advance runs a regular column by former Family Court Judge Daniel Leddy. His most recent column, published today (Tuesday, 5/8/12), is entitled Advance legal columnist: NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy is prudent, lawful.
For those of you who might be unfamiliar with NYPD's policy, official named "Stop, Question and Frisk" and referred to as SQF, the story in a nutshell is that this is an extension of James Q. Wilson's Broken Windows theory. Wilson held that having a police force address minor quality-of-life crimes would both sweep up major criminals and send an overall message (to residents: this is a safe place; to potential perpetrators: this is not the place for you) of orderliness. NYPD's take, informed by compstat, involves having police officers carry out the actions in the program's title: they find suspicious people, particularly in high-crime neighborhoods, to stop, question and frisk. There's ton's of publicly available data on this practice, but the bottom line is that well over half a million stop and frisks occurred - 88% of those stopped were innocent of any wrongdoing, and 91% were non-white.
Leddy thinks SQF is an effective and legal.
I disagree with his conclusion and wrote to tell him so. What I wrote is below the squiggly flourish.
One thing I'll point out is that many people, including the NYC Mayor and Police Commissioner, have contended that SQF results in lower crime. The NYPD spokesperson (who has lost credibility over several other issues) claimed that the City's lower murder rate could be traced in part to SQF. This claim was thoroughly debunked in Forbes, mostly with the use of simple graphs.
Anyways, here's what I wrote:
Good Day Sir,
I read your column defending the NYPD practice "Stop, Question and Frisk" or SQF. I would like to raise several points regarding this piece of commentary.
1. You cite figures indicating that ~90% of people stopped under SQF are non-white.
2. You also cite figures indicating that a similar level of people arrested for murder, rape and robbery are nonwhite.
3. Inasmuch as there are unsolved cases of rape, murder, and robbery, or cases where arrests are not made, or cases where the wrong person is arrested, it is not necessarily the case that the demographic statistics for the sample of people arrested for the crimes you cite matches the true population statistics of people who commit crimes.
4. One point of evidence that suggests the existence of disparities in arrest rates for criminals of different ethnicities is the fact that whites report higher usage rates of many drugs yet are arrested less frequently for possession of said drugs (e.g. marijuana).
5. A more serious concern has to do with the rate of arrests resulting from SQF instances, which your Staten Island figures show never rises above 14% island-wide.
6. This means that 85% of the people stopped and frisked are treated as criminals by the police and forced to go through demeaning procedure, and also are confronted with clear evidence that the police think of them as potential criminals.
7. The result of these SQF events are to raise tensions and reduce trust between the police, who feel they are doing their jobs, and the populace, who feel unreasonably targeted and often indignant.
8. This tension and division is reinforced by media reports of the actions of NYPD officers harming citizens, such as in the cases of Sean Bell, Diallo, Abner Louima, and the the actions of officers Michael Pena, Kenneth Moreno, and Franklin Mata amongst other incidents.
9. Such tension between a police force and the population they serve is completely counterproductive.
10. You quote the Terry v. Ohion decision: " 'when an officer is justified in believing that the individual whose suspicious behavior he is investigating at close range is armed and presently dangerous,' he may properly 'conduct a carefully limited search...' "but it is unclear to me how a success rate hovering between 9-14% indicates that the NYPD is complying with that ruling.
11. In fact, some might argue that such a low success rate constitutes prima facie evidence that NYPD is not appropriately reaching the threshold of their officers are "justified in believing" that individuals are in fact even demonstrating "suspicious behavior", let alone that they're armed.
12. You also wrote, "Ms. Rose also asked some odd questions about those stopped and frisked by the police. 'What are they being arrested for?' she wanted to know." This question is not odd. The violations that result in summons are by definition minor crimes. Compromising the NYPD's relationship with community members and inculcating in people a mistrust for police officers in exchange for mere violations may not be in the best interests of the Department or the City.
As long as I have your attention, I'll point out with relation to your 4/24/12 column "Activist judges meddle in NYPD's discipline" that contrary to your assertion that, "[i]tâs one thing to personally believe that Vecchio should be permitted to retain his pension. Itâs quite another to declare that, as a matter of law, denying him that pension is so outrageous that it shocks oneâs sense of fairness," whether a punishment is "shocking to oneâs sense of fairness" is a clearly subjective matter. It is immaterial whether you agree with the judge in question or not, because the decision he made was (1) entirely within the proper scope of his discretion and (2) obviously not an instance of judicial activism. Judicial activism is taking settled law and overturning it; a great example would be when the 1939 decision U.S. v. Miller, along with decades of jurisprudence and legislation, was overturned just recently by the contentious, obviously politically motivated 5-4 decisions District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago.
Furthermore, with relation to your article "Judge's charge of bias in FDNY test is loony" (10/11/2011), you fail to provide necessary context, which is that in 1973 the United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit affirmed (see http://openjurist.org/... ) a lower court's finding of bias in FDNY's recruitment and directed them to remedy the issue. So the recent case brought by the Vulcan Society, and Judge Garaufis's appointment of a special master in that case, are really in response not just to the lack of diversity in the current FDNY but also the fact that 34 years after being directed to address the racial disparity in its ranks, FDNY still only had blacks as 3.4 percent of its firefighters versus 25% of the city's population. I'll also note that I was sad when the special master threw out the most recent list of potential FDNY call-ups for a lack of racial diversity, as I had a close friend placed so as to virtually guarantee his hiring. Nevertheless, I can see the source of Judge Garaufis' vehemence and feel that your attack on his decision is over the top.
I look forward to any rebuttal you might offer with regard to my presentation.
Cheers,
Joseph Christoff