Yet the available data make a serious case for stop-and-frisk's ability to drive down crime when deployed with targeted precision, as Compstat envisioned. It is also worth remembering that people of color bear the brunt of violent crime. At the peak of New York's crime wave in , the homicide victimization rate in New York was 58 per , for people of African ancestry, 44 for Hispanics and 8 for whites. By , the black homicide victimization rate had declined to Thus, the lives saved by New York's policies were disproportionately those of people of color.
Critics of stop-and-frisk argue that it produces unwarranted and discriminatory stops and point to the evidence assembled in Floyd v. City of New York, in which federal Judge Shira Scheindlin found that New York engaged in a pattern of unjustifiable and racially discriminatory stop-and-frisk policing.
But Scheindlin's reasoning is open to serious question. Any policing tactic can be abused by the overzealous officer, and stop-and-frisk horror stories abound. The Supreme Court has ruled , however, that stop-and-frisk is constitutional when based on an officer's reasonable suspicion that lawbreaking is under way, even though that standard "falls considerably short of satisfying a preponderance of the evidence standard" and "accepts the risk that officers may stop innocent people.
Judged by these constitutional standards, New York's 12 percent "hit rate" — the percentage of stops that Judge Scheindlin acknowledged resulted in an arrest or a summons according to the data before her — does not look so bad. It looks even better when one considers that even an apparently unsuccessful stop-and-frisk can create important benefits by deterring potential offenders and cooling off crime-ridden hot spots.
It is hard to blame New York for using tactics that the Supreme Court has blessed. Scheindlin also ruled that New York had " a policy of indirect racial profiling. Crime rates, however, are largely driven by poverty, and because people of color disproportionately live in high-poverty areas, we should expect that a stop-and-frisk policy properly targeted at hot spots of crime would disproportionately stop persons of color.
In light of differential rates of offending, elevated search rates for minorities may not be troubling as long as hit rates are comparable for whites and people of color. If so, police are acting on comparable evidence regardless of the race of a suspect.
Indeed, a Rand Corp. New York is not beyond reproach. Under Bloomberg, the number of investigative stops by police officers more than doubled, to ,, by This dramatic surge likely pushed stop-and-frisk well beyond statistical hot spots of crime and to the point of diminishing returns.
It would serve those who criticize stop-and-frisk well to consider the successes that it and other forms of proactive policing achieved. In March , New York issued a new directive requiring officers to provide a detailed narrative justifying a stop, which officers interpreted as an indication that their stops would be carefully scrutinized.
That led to a dramatic reduction in stops. Even so, crime did not increase, and the more limited program of stop-and-frisk increased the rate at which weapons were recovered during stops.
In all things, we must seek the middle ground, including stop-and-frisk. That means acknowledging where stop-and-frisk went too far but also where it and other proactive policing measures succeeded in reducing a staggering crime rate that damaged communities far more than the tactics used by police.
Councilwoman Mary Beck, a white Democrat, attacked Cavanagh for being too soft on crime and argued that the DPD needed additional authority to "put terror in the hearts of criminals. Then came the racial unrest of July , which changed the political dynamics again. The Uprising of July led to major changes in how Detroiters perceived crime in their city, especially among white residents, and created great momentum behind get-tough measures and punitive policing.
Although civil rights groups blamed police harassment for triggering the civil unrest, many white Detroiters in particular came to believe that tougher policing and widespread stop and frisk policies might have allowed the police to detain criminals carrying guns. In early , the almost all-white suburb of Detroit passed a local stop and frisk ordinance, which led to more pressure to do the same in Detroit.
For Mayor Cavanagh as well, the political equation shifted toward doing whatever it took to curb crime and disorder. After the Dearborn law, support for stop and frisk increased on Detroit's Common Council, despite strong opposition from African American members.
Police Commissioner Ray Girardin also expressed hesitation and stated that Detroit should await the pending Supreme Court decision in Terry v. Ohio before acting. In January , the Citizens Committee for Equal Opportunity issued a press release right insisting that a stop and frisk law would exacerbate the rift between the African American community and the DPD.
The CCEO argued that police officers should only stop and search a citizen with probable cause, not mere "suspicion," and pointed out that "the 'stop and frisk' practice has primarily been used against Negro citizens and has been in Detroit a cause of conflict between the police and the Negro community.
Mayor Cavanagh received an avalanche of letters from Detroit residents, mostly white people, expressing strong support for stop and frisk and drawing a distinction between the criminals and the "good people," with the police on the side of the latter. White citizens who demanded stop and frisk, of course, did not live in the black neighborhoods that police targeted and generally appeared unable to understand the civil rights position that the policy infringed on the rights of "law-abiding" black citizens.
Cavanagh signed the law on July 9th, making headline news in the Free Press the following day. The events of July and the white backlash against Black Detroit virtually guaranteed the stop and frisk law's passage.
Supporters, as in the above letters, claimed that innocent, law-abiding citizens had nothing to fear and that stop and frisk would bring comfort to communities plagued by crime. While support from the public influenced Detroit's passage of a stop and frisk law, nothing was more influential than the Supreme Court's Terry v. Ohio decision in June The ruling neutralized opposing arguments that the law would be unconstitutional and ushered in a wave of support from many elected officials and a large part of the general public alike.
The Common Council voted 5-to-2 in favor of a formal stop and frisk law on July 2, less than a month after the historic Supreme Court decision. African American councilman Nicholas Hood and progressive white councilman Mel Ravitz were the only opponenrs. One week later, Mayor Cavanagh signed the bill he had first proposed in November The city of Detroit established these parameters to limit the abuse of stop and frisk, and they sound good on paper.
But as history would show, the stop and frisk policy expanded discretionary police powers and oversight, placed minority citizens in a subservient position, led to widespread racial profiling and harassment of innocent people, and represented a major setback for the civil rights movement.
The passage of stop and frisk showed the growing schism between white liberals, as represented by the Cavanagh administration, and civil rights leaders in Detroit.
Public opinion was also deeply divided along racial lines as well. Citizens Committee for Equal Opportunity highlights the racial impact of the stop and frisk law An analysis by the NYCLU revealed that innocent New Yorkers have been subjected to police stops and street interrogations more than 5 million times since , and that Black and Latinx communities continue to be the overwhelming target of these tactics.
At the height of stop-and-frisk in under the Bloomberg administration, over , people were stopped. Nearly 9 out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been completely innocent. Every time a police officer stops a person in NYC, the officer is supposed to fill out a form recording the details of the stop. The forms were filled out by hand and manually entered into an NYPD database until , when the forms became electronic.
The NYPD reports stop-and-frisk data in two ways: a summary report released quarterly and a complete database released annually to the public. The quarterly reports are released by the NYCLU every three months available here include data on stops, arrests, and summonses. The data are broken down by precinct of the stop and race and gender of the person stopped.
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