- Apr 30, 2012
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In the news this past week is the so called "Stop and Frisk", or "Stop, Question, and Frisk" In New York. There is a class action case being tried there now.
"NEW YORK (AP) — Many of the tens of thousands of New Yorkers stopped, questioned and sometimes frisked by police in the past decade were wrongly targeted because of their race, lawyers for four men who claim they were illegally stopped said Monday.
But New York Police Department lawyers countered that officers must go where the crime is — and the crime is overwhelmingly in minority neighborhoods.
A civil trial that began Monday in federal court in Manhattan will examine the police tactic that has become a city flashpoint, with mass demonstrations, City Council hearings and mayoral candidates calling for change. The lawsuit, now a class-action, seeks a court-appointed monitor to oversee changes to how the police make stops."
There are numerous well written articles on the subject and practice in the New York Times:
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/stop_and_frisk/index.html
This was from July/2010:
"These encounters amounted to nearly one stop a year for every one of the 14,000 residents of these blocks. In some instances, people were stopped because the police said they fit the description of a suspect. But the data show that fewer than 9 percent of stops were made based on “fit description.” Far more — nearly 26,000 times — the police listed either “furtive movement,” a catch-all category that critics say can mean anything, or “other” as the only reason for the stop. Many of the stops, the data show, were driven by the police’s ability to enforce seemingly minor violations of rules governing who can come and go in the city’s public housing.
The encounters — most urgently meant to get guns off the streets — yield few arrests. Across the city, 6 percent of stops result in arrests. In these roughly eight square blocks of Brownsville, the arrest rate is less than 1 percent. The 13,200 stops the police made in this neighborhood last year resulted in arrests of 109 people. In the more than 50,000 stops since 2006, the police recovered 25 guns.
Greg Jackson, 58, a former professional basketball player who runs the Brownsville Recreation Center, said the rising tide of stops had left many who wanted a strong police presence here feeling conflicted.
“Do we welcome the police?” he said, “Of course I do. Ninety-nine percent of the people in the area do. But they also fear the police because you can get stopped at any time.”
New York is among several major cities across the country that rely heavily on the stop-and-frisk tactic, but few cities, according to law enforcement experts, employ it with such intensity. In 2002, the police citywide documented 97,000 of these stops; last year, the department registered a record: 580,000."
Bloomberg has some interesting policy positions.
I am interested to hear what others think about this policy. I do know it is used in other places outside of New York.
"NEW YORK (AP) — Many of the tens of thousands of New Yorkers stopped, questioned and sometimes frisked by police in the past decade were wrongly targeted because of their race, lawyers for four men who claim they were illegally stopped said Monday.
But New York Police Department lawyers countered that officers must go where the crime is — and the crime is overwhelmingly in minority neighborhoods.
A civil trial that began Monday in federal court in Manhattan will examine the police tactic that has become a city flashpoint, with mass demonstrations, City Council hearings and mayoral candidates calling for change. The lawsuit, now a class-action, seeks a court-appointed monitor to oversee changes to how the police make stops."
There are numerous well written articles on the subject and practice in the New York Times:
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/stop_and_frisk/index.html
This was from July/2010:
"These encounters amounted to nearly one stop a year for every one of the 14,000 residents of these blocks. In some instances, people were stopped because the police said they fit the description of a suspect. But the data show that fewer than 9 percent of stops were made based on “fit description.” Far more — nearly 26,000 times — the police listed either “furtive movement,” a catch-all category that critics say can mean anything, or “other” as the only reason for the stop. Many of the stops, the data show, were driven by the police’s ability to enforce seemingly minor violations of rules governing who can come and go in the city’s public housing.
The encounters — most urgently meant to get guns off the streets — yield few arrests. Across the city, 6 percent of stops result in arrests. In these roughly eight square blocks of Brownsville, the arrest rate is less than 1 percent. The 13,200 stops the police made in this neighborhood last year resulted in arrests of 109 people. In the more than 50,000 stops since 2006, the police recovered 25 guns.
Greg Jackson, 58, a former professional basketball player who runs the Brownsville Recreation Center, said the rising tide of stops had left many who wanted a strong police presence here feeling conflicted.
“Do we welcome the police?” he said, “Of course I do. Ninety-nine percent of the people in the area do. But they also fear the police because you can get stopped at any time.”
New York is among several major cities across the country that rely heavily on the stop-and-frisk tactic, but few cities, according to law enforcement experts, employ it with such intensity. In 2002, the police citywide documented 97,000 of these stops; last year, the department registered a record: 580,000."
Bloomberg has some interesting policy positions.
I am interested to hear what others think about this policy. I do know it is used in other places outside of New York.
