A Thread/ Since Stop and Frisk is being discussed again, thanks to the prior shameful racist justifications of it by Mike Bloomberg & ongoing defense of it by right wingers, it would be helpful to review how awful and stupid the policy was...and was KNOWN to be at the time...
By 2010 in NYC after a little more than a decade of SAF, over 600,000 people were being stopped annually under the program: about 85 percent of them, black or Latino...
Defenders of the policy justified these disparities by saying that since POC commit a dispro share of violent crime in NYC the dispro stop rates made sense as crime control policy. So let’s take a look at that...
As for crime in New York, yes, rates of violent crime were and are much higher among blacks and Latinos than whites. According to data from the NYPD for 2010, one of the peak years for SAF, according to victim and witness reports...
91.5% of murder suspects were POC as were 86% of rape suspects, 94% of robbery suspects, 87.5% of aggravated assault suspects, and nearly all shooting suspects. Meanwhile, only about 5% of violent crime perps were white (as opposed to about 35% of the population of the city)...
But while these numbers might seem to justify SAF and its racial disparity, they do not. The full explainer as to why can be found in the expert report submitted in court by Jeffrey Fagan, a Professor of Law and Public Health at Columbia University...
The claim that SAF was good crime control is laughable. From 2004-2009, out of 2.8 million stops fewer than 6 % resulted in an arrest of any kind — a rate that is lower than that which has been produced in other jurisdictions using random checkpoints...
Guns were found in only 0.15% of all cases, and drugs or stolen property recovered in only 1.75% of stops. In the heavily-policed Brownsville community of Brooklyn, arrests occurred in fewer than 1% of all stops...
...out of 50,000 stops in the community from 06 to 09 only 25 guns were recovered: that’s a hit rate of about one-twentieth of a percent...
Among the reasons for such low “hit rates,” Fagan notes that a dispro share of stops are justified on police forms on the basis of vague/subjective reasons, like “furtive movements,” being in a “high crime area,” or other unspecified reasons...
In those cases, which represent roughly half of all stops, the hit rates are even worse than in the larger sample. In other words, as a crime-control tactic, stop-and-frisk is inefficient at best, irrational at worst...
In fact, hit rates were far lower for persons of color. When searched, blacks and Latinos were a third less likely than whites to be found with illegal contraband or other evidence of criminal activity...
...this fact suggests that police were quicker to suspect blacks for less legitimate reasons than they were whites, and thus, after searching them, less likely to actually find evidence of actual wrongdoing...
Furthermore, the correlation between stops in a given precinct and reports of crimes in those precincts was pathetic. For violent crime, there was no correlation between reports of crime and the number or racial distribution of stops made...
...and the racial composition of a precinct alone actually predicted stops 3x better than reported crimes. In other words, the fact that POC commit the vast majority of violent crime in NYC cannot justify racial disproportionality in SAF...
Of course, this makes sense...In violent crime cases, police have more precise info, and utilize more sophisticated methods of investigation than stopping people on the streets because of “furtive movements,” in the hopes of turning up last night’s liquor store holdup man...
This is why only about 15% of stops were written up by NYPD as being for the purpose of investigating violent crime. Rather than for violent crime, most stops were related to a search for weapons or drugs, trespassing, or for “unknown or unclassified” offenses...
As for trespassing, the correlation between stops and reports of this offense, was only one-tenth as strong as the correlation between stops and the racial composition of the community alone...
as for drugs and weapons, stop rates were significantly but negatively correlated with drug or gun possession offenses in a given precinct. Meaning such stops were more likely in places with fewer such crimes, thus, they can’t be justified by crime rates...
Although there is no clear data on drug possession or weapons possession rates for New Yorkers as a whole, there is data on Borough-level drug use and weapons possession for high school students in New York...
And that data is clear: drug/weapons possession rates are too racially similar to explain such racially disparate rates of stops..
According to data from the CDC, in Manhattan, Queens & Staten Island — the boroughs that consistently had enuf white youth to allow for statistical comparisons, there were no real diffs btw rates at which white and black youth carry weapons or possess/use drugs...
Overall, even when u control for the non-racial variables that could explain the dispro stopping of POC under SAF (crime levels, demographics of community, or level of police saturation due to higher crime), police were far more likely to stop POC people than would be expected...
Of course putting all this aside, here’s the key; disparate treatment of this kind is UNCONSTITUTIONAL and morally wrong. Even if it “worked”
Which it didn’t. You can’t violate basic liberties in name of crime control. Anyone who says otherwise is unworthy of your vote..
Which it didn’t. You can’t violate basic liberties in name of crime control. Anyone who says otherwise is unworthy of your vote..
