It probably would, but I don’t expect it. As we already went over in extensive depth, New York City isn’t going to revert to what it was in the '70s and '80 just because stop and frisk goes away.
But is it just stop and frisk? Weren’t they also pushing a law that said a subject’s race could not be used in descriptions when alerting the public?
That’s the first I’ve heard of it. And who is “they” in that sentence? De Blasio’s campaign? Judge Scheindlin?
City council. Although I can’t find any source saying what the law actually does. The police unions say it doesn’t allow them to provide racial descriptions of suspects, Christine Quinn says that’s not true.
The way Media Matters describes it, it sounds like a grey area. So if a dude gets robbed, and the only thing he can say is that the guy was black, that means the police essentially have to pretend they’ve got nothing?
No.
Let me explain: guy gets robbed, suspect is a young black male. Does the law still allow police to stop young black males in the area?
Media Matters already quoted the part of the law that answers that question.
This is very simple. The law says the police can’t stop someone just because of his/her race as opposed to behavior or other information the police are allowed to take into account. Earlier you repeated a claim about the police being unable to include a suspect’s race in bulletins, which was absurd. Then you asked if the law someone required the police to ignore information in a bizarre situation where they had a suspect’s race but no other information - where a victim could determine the race of an attacker but couldn’t give them any description of the perp’s age or clothes or anything else. If they have nothing but race, they have nothing. You’re not going to catch a robber or a killer by randomly stopping people who are the same race.
I’d say the police would be better judges of that than a board moderator. If a robbery takes place and the perp fled on foot, the police don’t have to search a huge area. If there are ten black males walking around in the search radius, it’s perfectly reasonable to stop each one.
Also, is a watch bulletin a “police action”? The police seem to think it is. Of course, you can argue that the police union are just a bunch of right-wing fanatics or something. But I consider tehm far more credible than politicians.
You seem very confident in your ability to understand the law even though it doesn’t sound like you’ve read it. Why can’t I understand it?
That depends on how long it takes them to get there.
Says you, I guess. That’s textbook profiling, and it does not make sense to stop 10 people because they’re the same race as someone else who committed a crime nearby. And again, the idea of the police having the suspect’s race and zero other descriptions is unrealistic.
No! This is about “initiating law enforcement action against an individual.” Do you really not understand that they are talking about stopping and arresting people?
No, they don’t. Like almost anyone in power anywhere, they complain when they think their powers are being restricted. In this case they seem to have stopped complaining pretty quickly.
The NYPD have been engaged in racial profiling on a tremendous scale for years, so I don’t consider them credible when they’re explaining why they need to use racial profiling. That’s just ass covering, and in any case, the police don’t get to decide what the law is.
No, but they do get to oppose laws and pit their credibility against the credibility of politicians. I think they come out pretty well in the comparison, personally.
Well, in that case, they’ve got nothing.
:dubious: No, actually, police do not compare favorably to politicians on the index of credibility.
They don’t have much, but they do have something. It also depends on the area. Obviously if it’s a predominantly black neighborhood, it’s pretty close to nothing. In a mixed neighborhood, it’s something though( you know not to stop the Puerto Ricans and Asians), and in a mostly non-black area it narrows it down considerably.
http://www.pollingreport.com/institut.htm
Last time Gallup asked the question, police did better than the President and Congress.
Not the NYPD and not on this issue.
Yes, that’s the exact strain of nonsense that people use to justify this policy. Does it really make sense for the police to stop 10% or 20% of the people they see on the street just because they’re the same race as a suspect?
Spoiler alert: the answer is no. It’s one thing to include race among a couple of other data points. Stopping people just because they’re generally the same color as a suspect does not make sense and it’s highly discriminatory as well as ludicrously inefficient. The bit about “a mostly non-black area” is a big part of the problem because it means black people who’ve done nothing wrong are being told they are automatically considered suspicious if they go into a non-black part of town. And as a reminder, this city is about half black and Latino.
We’re talking about credibility, not popularity. And that’s a three year old poll, but whatever.
That is to say, everybody likes the police, and everybody knows the police lie, but the one approval does not equate to the other.