And in those individual cases any charges that came about should be kicked, and NYPD and officers involved should suffer consequences. But this ruling seems to be tying all S&F together and thus tying the hands of law enforcement.
And Der Trihs is dead wrong. Stop and frisk is one of many tools that does work. Some officers just abused it. No need to throw the baby out with the bath water and all that rot.
Some of you are forgetting what a criminal shithole NYC was in the 60’s, 70’s, and part of the 80’s.
But you won’t solve the problem of crime by overly aggressive police tactics. The people then just see the police as an enemy to be resisted. You need to have the people and the police feeling that they’re on the same side not opponents.
It doesn’t work, it is literally worse than nothing, and it existed to be abused.
And the crime rate went down there just as it did all over the country. And you fail to answer why being abused by the police is an improvement.
Non-whites were constantly being stopped and searched, as well as physically abused; so many that it’s pretty much inevitable that many were harassed multiple times. It was simply racist persecution and had nothing to do with crime.
Of course in a sense that’s truth in advertising. The police are the enemy of the non-whites, and are a bunch a of bigoted thugs bent on persecution, and care nothing for the law or for the safety of anyone who isn’t white and at the least middle class.
But if people perceive that they’re more likely to get jacked up for racial reasons than any actual crime preventing purposes, they will see the police as a problem rather than a solution to a problem. And the statistics that have been cited in this thread seem to indicate that would be a valid conclusion.
Heck, I’m a old white guy who grew up in farm country and worked in a prison. If somebody like me thinks the police are unfairly targeting inner city minorities, there’s a problem.
This is exactly the problem. A young latino or black man walking through a more marginal neighborhood does not look suspicious in context. Take that same man and drop him in the middle of Park Slope and you have a target for stop & frisk. He isn’t white, he isn’t upper middle class, and he doesn’t fit in. A cop thinks he is "moving furtively, "pushes him up against a wall, and threatens to break his arm if he doesn’t comply.
This is, among other things, the damage that stop & frisk is doing. It is quite literally keeping people who don’t look like they fit in from passing through certain neighborhoods even if they live there. This is not the sort of city we want to live in. I applaud the federal court’s judgment but do not believe it goes nearly far enough.
And that’s exactly what you can’t do with statistics: say some groups are disproportionally represented, and then start targeting members of that group at random. And guess what targeting black and Hispanic people does to crime statistics? It increases the same disparity by making sure they get arrested at higher rates than whites and others!
Stop and frisk has also brought about a huge increase in arrests for marijuana, and the police aren’t supposed to be arresting people for marijuana possession in the first place. Possession of a small amount of weed is a ticketing offense because New York City recognized a long time ago (as many other places have since) that it’s not worth arresting people for. So the police are overstepping their own guidelines to get us a bunch of useless arrests. Those arrests started to fall off in the last year because people have been complaining about the utter pointlessness. And of course there is also a huge racial disparity in those arrests.
Yes, ignore the statistics and the facts- shouldn’t the judge just take the police’s word at face value? I think we all know very well that the police are able to provide technical justifications for these stops and arrests. The question is whether those justifications stand up to scrutiny and what their broader impact is. The police aren’t going to deal with that issue. I suppose they could, but we know that in this case, they will not. So the judge has appointed an independent overseer to help the NYPD make some necessary changes. She did not throw out the program itself.
Yes, we have judges for that.
Stopping and frisking a young black guy because he’s in a white neighborhood is unreasonable. That’s a bedrock segregationist-type policy. That’s not the intended effect, but it is the kind of results you get with this tactic.
No, they don’t, because that’s an excuse to do nothing about it.
Gee, I’m pretty sure the gun laws here have passed constitutional muster.
Yeah, that must be it. We’re too worried about minority criminals and not worried enough about law-abiding gun owners (notice how you defined those as separate groups?)
The police do not seem to support the idea that we should judge each stop & frisk on its own merits. They have strongly resisted the idea that they should wear cameras when conducting these searches. How else would you propose to judge each stop on its merits then, pkbites?
Bricker, our local perv is not the mayor at least. I am horrified that all Filner got is two weeks of rehab. But how he is being treated is a consequence of much larger issues that I hesitate to have a blanket opinion on. I feel like he deserves worse, but I have no idea what we would need to do to get there.
That’s his own made-up solution. He’ll be forced out eventually, but I guess it’s not a surprise that he’s slimy enough to think he can get away with it.
Yeah, I didn’t mean to imply that it was the outcome of any kind of trial so much as the political process thus far. He needed the two weeks to see who his real friends are and to plan his next moves. Still, it’s a bad situation, and I do not know the details of local politics there at all.
You can’t forget Bloomberg’s freedom-hating soda plan or the forced installation of bike lanes without consulting the communities. It’s almost like he is left wing or something.
I am fairly certain this will be overturned on appeal. I haven’t read the ruling yet, but the commentary I have read suggests the Court found a disparate effect based on race, but no intentional discrimination. Governing precedent is pretty clear: you need both.
Having said that, I think the governing precedent is wrong, and an overwhelming racial disparity should be sufficient to trigger the Equal Protection Clause. That’s what it’s for.
Yes it is. I can’t speak for NYC but in many places loitering is a violation of law. Touch private property, like a car or walking across someones lawn, and now you have prowling or at very least trespass. These are all violations of law and justification for an F.I. stop. Pinching on little things like this prevents bigger things from happening later.
I’ve been doing this for over 31 years myself. I know what I can and can’t do and I’ve never had one of my arrests tossed out on appeal.
I am horrified that all Filner got is two weeks of rehab. But how he is being treated is a consequence of much larger issues that I hesitate to have a blanket opinion on. I feel like he deserves worse, but I have no idea what we would need to do to get there.