The ‘stop and frisk’ liability - The Washington Post: NEW YORK CITY, home to more than 8 million people, is the nation’s largest metropolitan area. It’s also America’s safest big city.
Last year, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) recorded 419 homicides, nearly a 20 percent decrease from the year before and the lowest rate per 100,000 residents since the department began keeping reliable tallies in 1963. If New York had the same homicide rate as the District, it would be investigating 800 more murder cases per annum; if it had Detroit’s statistics, nearly 4,000 more New Yorkers would be murdered every year. Without question, the Big Apple is doing something right.
Officials say that a large part of that something is its “stop and frisk” policy, under which officers can stop and search anyone on the street they deem to be suspicious. Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) and his police chief, Raymond Kelly, say the procedure has saved upwards of 5,000 lives in the past 10 years. “New York has never been safer in its modern era,” the mayor class action lawsuit because the vast majority of those stopped are young men of color. According to the New York Civil Liberties Union,of those stopped in 2012 were black or Latino, a figure more or less consistent throughout the last decade. This tends to hold even in predominately white, affluent neighborhoods like Brooklyn’s Park Slope, where blacks and Latinos make up barely a quarter of the population but nearly 80 percent of stops, at least in 2011.
