Depending on who you ask, a drop in crime in one of America’s largest and most populated metropolitan cities, no matter how that drop occurred, would be a good thing, but the New York Police Department’s Stop, Question, and Frisk policy, or Stop and Frisk as it’s commonly known, has civil libertarians incensed.
The reason, they claim the city is engaging in racial profiling and harassment of minorities, and unfortunately, for the City of New York, they have the data to back up that claim. Proponents say this policy is unavoidable, especially in the wake of the 9/11, to reduce crime and increase public safety, and so-be-it if people have to give up some of their civil rights. The question remains; does the end justify the means?
Anyone living in Harlem, Crown Heights or South Bronx in the 1970s and 1980s will tell you how bad crime was, as well as homelessness and racial discrimination, which in part was because of rampant unemployment, the highest in the city since the Great Depression, and the crack cocaine epidemic. Organized crime hit a peak in the 1980s, when the Bloods and Crips street gangs, which originated in Los Angeles, appeared in the city and began battling the Latin Kings, a long established New York City gang, for territory.
In the early 1990s however, New York saw a dramatic drop in crime, 70 percent by some estimates. There are a number of factors that experts say contributed to this, including proactive policing such as “broken window policing,” (a practice that keeps vacant buildings and spaces maintained to give the appearance that they are monitored), and the hiring of extra police officers.
However, those who support the controversial practice of Stop and Frisk say that this policy helped reduce crime another 34 percent in the 2000s, when the declination of crime in the rest of the country had leveled off.
Since 2003, the number of stops made under this policy increased 300 percent to almost 600,000 in 2009; however, only 6 percent of those stops resulted in arrests.
One of the biggest problems for opponents of this practice is that they believe the police are racial profiling. According to data from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Blacks accounted for 54 percent of all the Stop and Frisk stops in 2009, but they only comprise 24 percent of the city’s population. Hispanics are also stopped more frequently than whit
es.
Law enforcement personnel and those supportive of the tactic say that this makes sense since Blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crimes in the city. They also say that combined Blacks and Hispanics commit 98 percent of all shootings, and nearly 70 percent of all robberies in the city.
The rationalization is that since Blacks commit 66 percent of violent crime, they are still being under-stopped since they only make up 54 percent of stops, but combined, Blacks and Hispanics accounted for about 85 percent of all stops made in 2009.
Some law professors and those opposed to the practice say that the city is trying to make it a crime to be a minority. In 6.4 percent of all stops, the officer issued a summons to court. However, they also say that in many instances, the summonses are not filled out completely or properly, and the people stopped have done nothing wrong. If a summons is not filled out properly, it causes those summoned to fail to appear, and a warrant is then issued for their arrest.
Opponents say that often with these types of stops, the summons is thrown out for insufficient cause, but if the person doesn’t show up, they now have a criminal record for, essentially doing nothing more than walking down the street, and the misfortune of being stopped by a cop who does incomplete paperwork.
The John Jay data shows that in addition to the stops of minorities more often than whites, the
police are now concentrating the stops in the poorer areas of the city, like Jamaica, Queens,
Ocean Hill/Brownsville, Brooklyn, East New York, Mott Haven/Melrose, Bronx, East Harlem,
Manhattan, and St. George, Staten Island.
Opponents of Stop and Frisk say it is stacking the deck against minorities. If police concentrate their efforts in the poorer neighborhoods, typically, where lower income minorities live, they say, the only thing accomplished is the harassment of poor minorities simply because they are poor minorities.
Supporters of the policy say that the police concentrate the stops in these areas because the areas have the highest crime rates, and it makes sense to make more stops in areas where there is more crime. Law enforcement experts who are supportive of “Stop and Frisk,” say that those living in these areas must consider the frequent stops, and questioning, as a sort of “crime tax,” simply because they live in a poor area with a higher crime rate.
Until July of 2010, when an officer made a “Stop and Frisk” stop, the police entered the information of the person stopped into a database, which opponents say is how the NYPD is compiling a database of minorities. They feel it could possibly be used when trying to solve crimes throughout the city, a sort of “blame the minorities first,” mentality.
Typically, information is only recorded in a police database when a citation or summons is issued, not just for having an encounter with the police. In this instance, even if the NYPD just stops someone to ask their name and address, that information was being entered into a personal database along with other information such as their race and physical description.
However, in July of 2010, according to a July 22, 2010 article in the New York Daily News, Governor David Patterson signed a bill that outlawed the database, but unfortunately, the NYPD found a way around it by keeping paper records instead of electronic ones, according to an internal memo referenced in the article.
Everyone wants less crime in their neighborhoods, no matter where they live, but the question residents of New York have to answer is whether or not, this tactic of Stop and Frisk is worth it.
Ultimately, the community at large has to make that choice. Until then, both sides of the issue agree that NYPD officers should undergo more training in how to handle these types of stops with respect and sensitivity. Often the person stopped feels as if the police are harassing them.
Sources:
http://www.jjay.cuny.edu/web_images/PRIMER_electronic_version.pdf
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2010/07/22/2010-07-22_write_on_...
http://www.jjay.cuny.edu/forum/SQF_forum_summaryFINALJUNE28.pdf