Officer Alex on the suspicions of suspecting suspects
During this wonderfully entertaining election cycle a law enforcement related question started popping up when Michael Bloomberg decided to buy the Executive Branch of the United States of America (having grown tired of his last purchase most casually known as “New York City”).
For once, it’s something I’m happy to explain over and over again because it’s one of the finest examples of how “feelings” can actually give way to “facts” in this not-brave new world of ours.
I’m speaking of course about “Stop and Frisk”. As effective as it is divisive, it’s one of the pillars of what is for once an inarguable success of Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to clean up crime in New York City in the late 90s and early 2000’s.
Because it caused police officers to detain (“stop”) and pat down the outside pockets (“search”) of largely black and brown men suspected of having committed a violent crime, this naturally makes it racist. There is a catch however, once you choose to put down your extra-fat “Progressive Sign Making” Sharpie and see what it’s about.
The original Clinton administration looked at the surface of this practice and decided to bring suit against the City of New York for “violating civil rights” via the practice due to the aforementioned focus on the more heavily pigmented citizens of said city. Upon explaining the process to them however, none other than Janet Reno and Eric Holder themselves dropped those efforts after being presented with what pre-crazy Giuliani described as “perfect statistics.”
In the words of the once Peoples Mayor himself: “We were following—not race—we were following complaints. In other words, why did we search seventy percent African American males? We did it because seventy-five percent of our complaints were of African American males who committed violent crimes. So, who are we supposed to go look for?”
As it turns out, this made a frustrating amount of sense.
Being a lawyer and foreseeing the likelihood of litigation, Giuliani had his police officers document each of these encounters for accountability and provided ninety-five percent verifiable documentation for the 100,000 occurrences during his two terms and, with all that, Reno and Holder gave the all clear.
Enter Mike Bloomberg. Upon assuming Gracie Mansion, he was so happy with this Clinton-approved method of crime reduction (actually dealing with the suspects described by the actual victims instead of letting them go because “feelings”), he expanded the program. A lot, as it turned out.
The practice went from 100,000 articulable stops in eight years, with ninety-five percent documentation under Giuliani, to 685,724 by 2011 under Bloomberg. Furthermore, with nearly no accountability for the increased stops, the ninety-five percent being justified turned to eighty-eight percent of those 685,724 parties detained and frisked being deemed “innocent”.
(If you’re wondering, that is “bad”.)
“You just can’t make a stop, which is what it kind of became,” Giuliani pointed out. “We understood the law.”
So THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is what the term means, why it was so successful and ultimately responsible for an eighty percent drop in violent crime in New York City under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and how the abandonment of any sense of accountability turned it into a civil rights wood chipper under the watch of Mike Bloomberg.
“Stop and Frisk” was the label for one of the oldest crimefighting tools in the century’s old toolbox: Criminal Profiling. No matter how much some want it to mean this, that is NOT “Racial Profiling”. Criminal profiling is the method in which police officers “look for the criminal as described by the victim.”
If the suspect happens to be described as “black” or “Hispanic” then it is no more racist than looking for a blue Cadillac involved in a hit and run when the suspect vehicle is described as (wait for it) a “blue Cadillac”.
It’s when black and brown people are stopped for no other reason than looking “suspicious” that the statistics no longer validate anything, and you have indeed just become the bad guy.
I truly hope this was informative for both my liberal-leaning readers, and questions are genuinely welcomed after class (though sadly, I have no statistics to back this up).
When officer Alexander D. Teach is not patrolling our fair city on the heels of the criminal element, he spends his spare time volunteering for the Boehm Birth Defects Center.