Stop-and-Frisk Protects Minorities

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New York City seems on the verge of making the same mistake that Detroit made 40 years ago. The mistake is to abolish the NYPD practice referred to as stop-and-frisk. It’s more accurately called stop, question, and frisk. People were stopped and questioned 4.4 million times between 2004 and 2012. But the large majority were not frisked.

 

The effectiveness of this police practice, initiated by Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 1994 and continued by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is not in doubt. The number of homicides — the most accurately measured crime — in New York fell from a peak of 2,605 in 1990 to 952 in 2001, Giuliani’s last year in office, to just 414 in 2012.

 

 

Nevertheless, the three leading Democratic mayoral candidates in the city’s September primary all have pledged to end stop-and-frisk. And last week, federal judge Shira Scheindlin, in a lawsuit brought by 19 men who have been stopped and frisked, found that the practice is unconstitutional and racially discriminatory.