The number of supposedly random “stop and frisk” searches on black men and boys in New York City last year exceeded the total number of black men and boys in the city. There are only 158,406 black males between the ages of 14 and 24 in New York City, but police performed 168,126 stop-and-frisk searches on that demographic—a difference of 9,720.
Such policing is a wholesale violation of civil rights. The stop-and-frisk policy seems to have given law enforcement carte blanche to stop anyone they please, leading to hundreds of thousands of innocent people—largely people of color—being harassed and humiliated by police sworn to serve and protect them.
87 percent of the people stopped under the stop-and-frisk policy last year were black or Latino.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has argued that the program acts as a deterrent to crime, but almost none of these stops achieved anything, apart from creating a humiliating experience for the suspect. Only 10 percent of the people stopped were in violation of any law, leaving a full 90 percent who were harassed by police for no reason.
Other large cities have successfully cut crime without resorting to such extreme policing measures. The violent crime rate fell 29 percent in New York City from 2001 to 2010, but that figure pales in comparison to the 59 percent reduction in Los Angeles over the same time period, or the 56 percent drop in New Orleans or the 49 percent dip in Dallas.
What’s worse, stop-and-frisk is incredibly counterproductive; the program breaks the valuable bond of trust between police officers and the communities they are supposed to protect.
A 2004 Amnesty International study found that stop-and-frisk victims suffer emotional distress and humiliation—the experience is an invasion of privacy and a stinging reminder of how police resources are being diverted to an ineffective and racially biased practice instead solving homicides, rapes and other violent crimes.
Now is the time to demand change; the number of street stops has increased more than 600 percent since Bloomberg’s first year in office. Last year the NYPD alone conducted more than 685,000 street stops. We cannot allow this number to continue to grow.