Stop-and-frisk was resurrected by Donald Trump as the key to stopping crime throughout the country last month. Not surprisingly, the Republican presidential nominee 1) doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but 2) it doesn’t matter that much to his supporters who have repeatedly demonstrated they don’t care about facts. But for those who do care, here is what you need to know:
“Stop and Frisk”—randomly stopping pedestrians in particular and searching their person or their belongings—is not necessarily a violation of the 4th amendment or an illegal tactic. IT IS, however, unconstitutional and racially discriminatory the way the New York City Police Department applied it: “without reasonable suspicion of criminal activity and often on the basis of a person’s race.”
A federal court ruled the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” practices unconstitutional in 2013 “and ordered wholesale changes to the NYPD's stop-and-frisk-related policies and procedures, training, supervisory, disciplinary and monitoring systems.”
At one point, the NYPD had stopped and frisked more Black males than actually lived in New York City. If you did a double-take on that sentence, look at it this way: in December 2011, the NYPD stopped and frisked 168,126 young Black men for 25.6 percent of their stops. 158,406 young Black men lived in the city at that time, making up 1.9 percent of the population. In other words, young Black men would be stopped and frisked on numerous occasions.
Darius Charney, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), personally filed the case Floyd v. City of New York which ruled that the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” program was unconstitutional and racially discriminatory. According to Charney’s reading of numerous empirical studies on the practice, “stop and frisk” has had little to no impact on crime reduction in New York or anywhere else.”
In 2012 the New York Civil Liberties Union released a report based on the NYPD’s 2011 stop-and-frisk data. Their analysis found that in the 685,724 times that police stopped and interrogated someone, 90 percent of those people were innocent of any crime; they were neither arrested nor ticketed.
That’s a lot of stopping-and-frisking with very little to show for it. But this is what Donald Trump and his crew are touting as a sound crime-fighting measure.
Go figure.
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