"Stop and Frisk" has been the defacto policy in low-income areas for as long as I can remember. On Chicago's South Side (where I grew up) many young black males walking or driving could expect to be stopped and searched one or more times per week, in some areas.
For those who have never lived what I'm talking about you might doubt it exists, but it's real and it's in your backyard.
I'm glad that activists are taking up the cause. It's long overdue.
Unless you're white and live in a predominantly white, upper-class neighborhood in NYC, in which case it's in someone else's backyard.
Which is the entire problem. If NYPD tried that around Carnegie Hill, you bet the practice would stop instantly. But it's in East New York, etc., so the right people don't care.
New York has a ridiculous number of stop-and-frisks, but they're so unevenly distributed that some neighborhoods have more stop and frisks annually as they have people - ie, on average, each person is stopped and frisked more than once per year.
(Sidenote: It's not a matter of changing the law: stop and frisks, as they are practiced, are already illegal by law. The problem is that the victims rarely take the issue to court, for obvious reasons, and so NYPD has no reason to stop.)
stop and frisks, as they are practiced, are already illegal by law
If that is the case, how can anything found in those frisks be admitted as evidence in court? If the search is illegal, anything found would be poisoned and therefore inadmissible. Or do the people being stopped never actually fight any charges being brought against them (understandable, given whom the PD targets)?
Regardless, it is a disgusting practice that needs to be stopped. Along with all the other practices of our para-militarized police departments.
> Or do the people being stopped never actually fight any charges being brought against them (understandable, given whom the PD targets)?
For those who aren't found to be in possession of drugs (the main excuse here), that's exactly the problem. For the rest:
> If that is the case, how can anything found in those frisks be admitted as evidence in court?
They're only legal if the police have reasonable suspicion[1] of illegal weapons. Not drugs. Not prostitution[2]. Just weapons.
Of course, given the neighborhoods they target, it's easy for them to fabricate an excuse after-the-fact. So most people don't bother to challenge it, because they know it's, at best, a case of one person's word against the other.
[1] It may be probable cause instead; I'm fuzzy on the details, but I know the general idea is correct.
[2] In New York, having many condoms in your possession is evidence enough to charge you with prostitution.
Stop and Frisk is based on so called Terry stops. There doesn't have to be suspicion of a weapon to stop a person, just to frisk them. However, such stops (even before a search) must be based on specific and articulable facts... basically if a cop stops a person, they have to be able to say why, exactly, they stopped them. Further, those facts have to be enough to make a reasonable person believe a crime has been, is being, or will be committed by the individual.
That's just to stop a person. The pat down is if they believe the individual has a weapon. If they can plainly tell that the item found by feeling it is contraband (by feel), then that's legit.
Now in practice, this isn't what seems to be happening in NY. The stops and the searches don't meet the requirements that courts have set. However, young poor people don't generally get their day in court. Instead, they get plea agreements, which are substantially lighter then what they would get if they went to court. Public defenders and pro bono lawyers for the urban poor often don't have enough resources to do much else but advise their client to take the plea.
There is good news however, in that class action status has been granted to a law suit (or at least one) against the NYPD. Class actions can mean that the NYPD can be forced to change their policy.
Anyway, if you are stopped while driving, that is also an extension of the Terry stop doctrine, save that police have the power to make people exit their vehicle in most cases.
> We held a community rally and march through Jamaica, Queens, which ended at the 103rd Precinct. As our march arrived at the precinct, it was completely barricaded on all sides – on lock-down in anticipation of the protest. An officer slides open one of the metal grates and motions us inward so that we may protest at the precinct doors. After minutes of chanting and singing outside of the precinct steps, 20 of us were arrested, quite quickly, but held for hours late into the next day. For less than ten minutes of protesting stop-and-frisk outside of the doors 103rd precinct, which houses the NYPD officers who put fifty shots into Sean Bell, 12 co-defendants and I now find ourselves facing two years of jail time.
> 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.
This is very dangerous thinking. It shows a mentality that views "Will it catch criminals?" as the watermark for whether to give the state more power. That should not be the only consideration. State power tends to expand itself, and needs to be watched constantly. At some point, it is better to let guilty men go free than to open the Pandora's Box of giving the state enough power to catch them.
I just typed out a big post, hit add comment - "link has expired", highlighted the text, forgot to copy, refreshed and lost it. Fix this already, HN!
Similar laws also exist in the UK. Unfortunately both our politicians and activist organisations such as 38 Degrees completely ignore the effects of them. I've tried taking political action against this and have been met with canned responses and ignored outright.
> Analysis by the London School of Economics (LSE) and the Open Society Justice Initiative shows during the past 12 months a black person was 29.7 times more likely to be stopped and searched than a white person. That figure was 26.6 the previous year.
We also have a "stop and account" law, where a police officer may ask you what you are doing and why you are where you are. Recently, the obligation for police to record these encounters has been removed.
> From 7 March 2011 we have removed the national requirement to record stop and account, in order to reduce police bureaucracy. Instead we have allowed police forces to make a local decision on whether they feel that recording stop and account is necessary. Those forces with little evidence of disproportionate use and little community concern should no longer need to spend valuable police hours completing forms, monitoring records and collating statistics.
> Five out of the 10 forces most likely to use stop-and-account powers disproportionately against black people – West Midlands, Avon and Somerset, Thames Valley, Sussex and Hertfordshire – have halted recording the race of people they have stopped.
> One experienced officer said colleagues could use the power, which does not require reasonable suspicion of criminality, to justify searching someone, which does: "It could lead to a suspicion to arise. Why are you not talking to me? Why aren't you answering questions?"
So you're not officially obliged but in practical terms, you are.
The worst thing is the heavy duty denial by the authorities that there is anything wrong with this.
For those who have never lived what I'm talking about you might doubt it exists, but it's real and it's in your backyard.
I'm glad that activists are taking up the cause. It's long overdue.