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PROBING QUESTION: A panel discusses the controversial stop-and-frisk procedure implemented by NYPD. Legal analyst and host Jami Floyd (L), George Washington University's Associate Dean for Faculty Development Paul Butler (2nd L), WNYC senior reporter Bob Hennelly (C), lawyer and retired NYPD officer Peter Gleason (2nd R), and the Bronx Defenders' Founder and Executive Director Robin Steinberg (R) were on the panel, among others. (Tara MacIsaac/The Epoch Times)
NEW YORK—The NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk policies have attracted scrutiny over the last few years and have resulted in a class-action lawsuit that is still in litigation. The nonprofit organization Center for Constitutional Rights filed the lawsuit in 2008, claiming that racial profiling and unconstitutional stop-and-frisk actions take place without proper NYPD oversight.
Some say stop-and-frisk procedures, also seen as proactive policing, have contributed to falling crime rates. Others say no empirical data exists to prove that stop-and-frisk is an effective method for preventing crime.
“Stop-and-frisk works, but at what cost?” asked former NYPD officer Peter Gleason, who now represents police officers as an attorney.
Gleason was part of a stop-and-frisk panel brought together by WNYC Radio at the Jerome L. Greene Space in SoHo on Monday night. WNYC started with the statistical facts: Approximately 600,000 people were stopped and frisked in the city last year; of those, 87 percent were African-American or Latino; and police confiscated about 700 guns during the process.
“The reason police are in certain neighborhoods in higher concentrations is because that is where crime is happening, and that is where people’s lives need protecting,” said Heather MacDonald, John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal, a national urban-policy magazine.
She brought additional statistics to the fore: Black males are 10 percent more likely to be the victims of a crime than white males, and although crime has decreased in general all over the country, cities that employ rigorous proactive policing have seen a far greater decline in criminal activity.
Robin Steinberg, founder and executive director of the Bronx Defenders, a community advocacy group, called MacDonald’s argument a “misuse of statistics.” She said that falling crime-rate statistics cannot prove that a single policy among several possible causal factors is effective. She quoted the FBI website, which states that such data cannot be used to inform policy-making decisions.
Frisks: Police can pat down the outside of clothing only if they believe the person is carrying a weapon.
Searches: Police can search the person if they note presence of a possible weapon during a pat-down.
“Since crime is a sociological phenomenon influenced by a variety of factors, the FBI discourages ranking the agencies and using the data as a measurement of law-enforcement effectiveness,” read MacDonald.
Paul Butler, associate dean for faculty development at the George Washington School of Law, argued that 700 guns from 600,000 searches is not the most effective use of a scarce resource: police patrolling manpower. Police confiscated approximately 5,000 guns in the same year by other means, said Jeff Fagan, audience member and Columbia University law professor who has extensively researched the topic.
Another audience member, who has served as a criminal defense lawyer in Brooklyn for 30 years, noted that stop-and-frisk procedures mostly result in citations for possession of small quantities of marijuana or for hanging out at the wrong places.
Effective or not, Butler says the current stop-and-frisk policy is not right. “We could reduce crime if the police could just barge into your house whenever they wanted, but the bill of rights doesn’t allow that,” he said.
Butler, an African American who felt racially profiled when police stopped him in his neighborhood, noted that NYPD’s stop-and-frisk procedures alienate the police from the people they are trying to help. A young African-American man who was stopped and frisked yesterday will likely not be willing to cooperate with the officers and give them the requested information today, Butler said.
WNYC reporter Ailsa Chang found in her research that police often pull marijuana or other substances out of a suspect’s pocket or shoe and charge the person for having it exposed, as marijuana possession is only illegal if exposed. Steinberg noted that in documented stop-and-frisk reports, the reasons given by officers are often vague, such as “casing” or “other.”“What we hear over and over and over again,” said Steinberg of the people she works with in the Bronx, “is that yes, the community wants police in the community. … But no, what they do not want is this form of policing, where they come into the communities now as if it is an occupied territory.”
