No, it’s more like it doesn’t accomplish anything.
The point of stop and frisk is essentially to hassle everyone in a perceived high crime area and grab people with warrants, etc.
My dad worked in NYC public housing in the 90s, and these aggressive policing measures were both effective and welcomed (to a point) by the community, as it pushed out people that were ruining their homes and lives.
Like all things bureaucracy, the metrics ended up mattering more than reality. Aggressive policing became systematic harassment and the police go out of their way to not see things. That’s why you can walk through Rockefeller Center and observe scam cartoon characters hustle tourists 6 feet away from police details. Good metrics are valued higher than the public.
I don't think that subway checkpoints and stop-and-frisks were part of the reason that crime went down; in fact, I'm pretty sure that subway checkpoints are a very recent post-911 creation.
And I'd say that public transportation is a pretty essential liberty in NYC.
Yes. Stop and frisk and bag searches are relatively recent inventions of the NYPD, and post-date the massive crime drop in the city.
The massive improvement of NYC quality of life and crime rates is most commonly attributed towards the massive explosion of police presence (the NYPD is larger than some standing armies), as well as the broken-windows policy (i.e., busting highly visible small-time crimes on the theory that it will lead to a drop in large crimes, such as vandalism, shoplifting, etc).
You really cannot walk two blocks in Manhattan and not run into a police officer. Presence helps, and IMO these egregious, unconstitutional additions to the NYPD repertoire are just trying to claim rightful credit for crime reductions they didn't cause.
I lived in NYC in the '70s and '80s. It was an adventure, to be sure. But the crime started going down once the police started nailing people for so-called quality of life crimes. They busted turnstile jumpers and such, which gave them the chance to check for DATs and outstanding warrants. That helped them find people with unregistered guns and lock up actual criminals.
The current stop and frisk and TSA searches are perhaps not doing all that much to increase safety over what was before. It's not a choice between police state and crime sprees.
Some of the reduction on crime may have come at the cost of racially biased stop and frisk.
This data shows 9 out of 10 people stopped were innocent. It also heavily showed that black and latino people were stopped much more frequently.
https://www.nyclu.org/en/Stop-and-Frisk-data
As part of a new strategy called Omnipresence,
the officers now stand on street corners like
sentries, only rarely confronting young men
and patting them down for weapons.
> Previous “slowdowns” by the NYPD have resulted in a drastic reduction in reported crime in NYC.
I couldn't find where that was mentioned in your linked article, but the Occam's razor takeaway is that the crime is still happening and not being reported because people know nothing will be done.
>[...] the NYPD held a work “slowdown” for about seven weeks [...]
>[...] The scientists found that civilian complaints of major crimes dropped by about 3% to 6% during the slowdown. [...]
If we assume that "complaints of major crimes" is a reliable proxy of actual major crimes being committed, as the article suggests, what are we supposed to conclude from this? That within weeks of the police not catching people for minor crimes, that criminals called an armistice stopped committing crimes? Or 3-6% of "major crimes" were only committed because police were doing stop and frisk? I'm aware of arguments about how aggressive policing creates a cycle of broken families and thereby creating future criminals, but that can't explain the effect materializing within weeks.
The homicide division doesn't prevent murders, they solve them.
People generally credit methodology changes under the term 'community policing' for the turn-around. Basically, the idea is that rather than just riding in, cracking skulls, slapping cuffs on once a night, engage with the community more, address more stuff like noise complaints and vandalism, to build relations with the community and coincidentally crack down on the same troublemakers a lot of the time. In theory (and in practice), it turns out to be more effective at stopping crime from happening than the deterrent factor of riding in lights blazing every night.
(This isn't to say that NYC cops are perfect or that stop-and-frisk doesn't happen all the damn time, just outlining the general theory behind community policing)
> The New York Civil Liberties Union today released an analysis of the NYPD’s 2012 stop-and-frisk data showing that the stop-and-frisk program’s stark racial disparities and ineffectiveness in recovering illegal guns continued last year despite a decline in the overall number of stops.
Mayor Bloomberg claims that stop and frisk under-targets blacks and hispanics, given the percentage of crime committed[1]. It will be interesting to see if NY becomes Detroit in its absence. NYC is notable for having a lower level of crime than you would expect given its ethnic makeup.
Depends on what the complaint is about. Remember that stop-and-frisk didn't end because of any changes to the law or formal policies. In principle, police were never allowed to stop someone without reasonable suspicion; in principle, the standards for NYPD police stops are the same now as they were a decade ago.
Only partially. The NYPD was essentially forced by lawsuits and political pressure to shut down stop and frisk. The ACLU lawsuit that parent mentioned, required that police have a valid reason to stop and frisk someone in advance. Think of this as having a business justification for every expense at a company that scrutinizes these requests. Subsequent lawsuits shut down the ability to stop and frisk individuals coming and going from public housing[0]. On top of this, the new NYC mayor, De Blasio, wanted to shut down stop and frisk altogether (one of his major campaign planks).
> In 2011, in New York City, 685,724 people were stopped, 84 percent of whom were Black and Latino residents — although they comprise only about 23 percent and 29 percent of New York City’s total population respectively. 2011 is the highest year on record for stops. The number of stops represent an over 600 percent since Mayor Bloomberg came into office. In 2011, 88 percent of all stops did not result in an arrest or a summons being given. Contraband was found in only 2 percent of all stops. The NYPD claims their stop and frisk policy keeps weapons off the street – but weapons were recovered in only one percent of all stops. [1]
Just the sheer number of stops is pretty crazy. That's an average of almost 1,900 stops per day, which makes the 1% of stops that recover a weapon a substantial number, as well.
landslide blue state + being a citizen doesnt help, apparently.
An analysis by the NYCLU revealed that innocent New Yorkers have been subjected to police stops and street interrogations more than 4 million times since 2002, and that black and Latino communities continue to be the overwhelming target of these tactics. Nearly nine out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been completely innocent, according to the NYPD’s own reports.
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