Stop and Frisk Rises in Brooklyn
The use of controversial police tactic stop and frisk has decreased in the City after coming under increased scrutiny and a lawsuit, but spiked in select areas of Brooklyn, The New York Daily News reported. Specifically, stop and frisk was up 66 percent in Brownsville and 45 percent in East New York from 2011 to…
The use of controversial police tactic stop and frisk has decreased in the City after coming under increased scrutiny and a lawsuit, but spiked in select areas of Brooklyn, The New York Daily News reported. Specifically, stop and frisk was up 66 percent in Brownsville and 45 percent in East New York from 2011 to 2012. Its use in Bed Stuy increased 6 percent, 3 percent in Greenpoint and 2 percent in Bensonhurst, while it dropped precipitously in Williamsburg — by 44 percent. As has been the case for years, very few of those stops found actual law breaking: 89 percent of stops did not result in an arrest or summons, the Daily News reported. Those that did were mostly for marijuana; 12.6 percent of those stopped were carrying a gun or other weapon. Interpretations of the change in policing varied widely. “We are seeing the next chapter,” said John Jay College professor and former officer Eugene O’Donnell. “Good stop-and-frisk should be targeted. They’ve identified a pattern, a spike in crime, and they are throwing resources at it.” And, on the other side: “The Police Department continues, against any possible rational analysis of the data, to insist that the stop and frisk program is both necessary and effective, and to target young black and Latino New Yorkers, who are so innocent of any wrongdoing that they walk away without a summons,” said NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman. What do you think? Is stop and frisk effective and constitutional, or are the police just harassing law abiding citizens who happen to live in the poorest parts of Brooklyn?
Stop and Frisk Is up in Brooklyn [NY Daily News]
Photo by jag9889
Is anyone else worried about initiatives that will intimidate our police force into NOT stopping a suspect based on either an eyewitness description or suspicious behavior? That is exactly what Brooklyn councilman Brad Lander intends to have happen by allowing racial profiling lawsuits against individual officers, in state courts. In theory that may sound fair, but in practice it will tie the NYPD in knots and scare individual cops into a state of inaction.
A place no less expert on gun violence than Chicago has their own city Treasurer, Stephanie Neely, recently calling for their own version of a ‘stop and frisk’ law. In a March 2013 article in the Chicago Tribune, Ms. Neely said the following needed to be done to get the gun violence down in her South Side neighborhood: the Chicago Police Department need to adopt a “proactive and courageous strategy known as ‘stop-and-frisk’.”
Speaking of women, a lovely young woman came to my Park Slope stoop last week, and I will call her Melinda because I actually can’t remember her name. She lives in Bed-Stuy and was giving out pamphlets for Charles “Joe’ Hynes, who is running to be re-elected as Brooklyn’s DA. Her single most important issue was ensuring safety in her neighborhood, where gun seizures are a critical component. She spoke glowingly of Mr. Hynes for making this happen, and the occasional heightened police presence when there is crime committed in her neighborhood. At no point did she speak of racial profiling as a concern. I think if the police do abandon her neighborhood either in fact or in kind, she will feel very put upon.
Let’s address racial profiling and ‘stop and frisk’ for a moment. The statistic that is meant to prove racial profile is the following: blacks make up 55% of all ‘stop and frisks’ and comprise 24% of the population. And whites make up 10% of all ‘stop and frisks’ and comprise 35% of the population. But doing the math this way is incorrect, and recasting the scenario will help explain why.
Suppose happiness suddenly became contagious and were spread by NYC animals, but mostly by squirrels, and we wanted to do a testing program in order to find and breed the animals most likely to spread happiness. If 55% of the squirrels were tested but only comprised 24% of the animal population would we think we were over-testing the squirrels? We can’t tell because we are’t asking the right question. The right question is: what is the proportion of squirrels to animals being tested compared to the proportion of squirrels that have this happiness virus?
To carry the analogy forward, we might find that 9.7% of all tests for the happiness virus are on cats but only 6.9% of cats carry this bug. That is to be compared to squirrels where 54.1% of the squirrels are tested, though a much higher proportion have it – at 66.4%. And we would then realize that we should actually be testing the squirrels more.
Back to our real scenario, these are the statistics in NYC: 9.7% of all stop and frisks are on whites who make up 6.9% of violent crime suspects where the ratio for blacks is 54.1% to 66.4%. Even if the numbers are not exactly correct, this is the correct math, and they would not be orders of magnitude away from reality. In sum, the statistical outcomes of ‘stop and frisk’ laws don’t involve racial profiling. And please know I know there are individuals who feel their personal space has been intruded on, and are even worried about the practice for fear of having a minor offense surface and be used against them as a result, so no doubt there is room for improvement in the law. But what Brad Lander has put together is quite dangerous.
I am going to appeal to the pecuniary portion of your brain for a moment. Do not forget that house values depend on NYC in general being safe, not just this or that neighborhood. So if you care about your personal safety, the safety of Melinda in Bed-Stuy, or more superficially your home value, you should think about sending an email to Brad Lander letting him know that hand cuffing the NYPD by allowing untold frivolous lawsuits against individual cops, especially based on incorrect statistics, is not acceptable. This is his email: lander@council.nyc.gov. And please do so urgently before Aug 22, the deadline by which one councilman has to change his/her mind on this.