The practice of the NYPD in which police officers stop and question a person, then frisk them for weapons and other contraband is known as the policy: stop and frisk. This controversial policy has garnered much debate in recent years. With the continuation of the practice, many Americans have begun to fear going out on the streets, in risk of encountering a police officer. On many social media sites, there are public videos of these encounters where police brutality is present during frisking. Many people, including myself, that watch these videos feel angry and embarrassed that in our world this is happening. Something needs to be done to stop this. Starting with the Floyd vs. City of New York court case, the judge, Shira Scheindlin ruled …show more content…
Police officers would target communities of color, such as black and Latino communities. Criminalizing bystanders based only upon racial discrimination is a violation of their rights and our rights. The Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal.” Are our rights any different than others just because we are different races?
In 2012, several people gathered in a silent protest to protest against the NYPD’s stop and frisk policies. Throughout the march, police officers have pushed protesters to leave the intersection and at some point shoved them to the ground. The protest began when Mayor Bloomberg stated that reduced crime and got guns off the street. This argument set forward by Bloomberg is not right at all. Stop and frisk policies not only victimize certain groups of people, but humiliate them. The way the police demonstrated their authority at the protest cannot be ignored.
In 2013, Mayor Bloomberg stated that “we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.” This is clearly not the case in many stop and frisk instances where 56% of the people being stopped were black and 29% were Latino, with only 11% being white. According to NYPD reports, “nearly nine out of ten stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been completely innocent.” Mayor Bloomberg’s comments were outrageous and he didn’t deserve his position as mayor of the City of New
In the 1990s, the growth of violent crime reached its all-time high. In reply to the number of high murder rates in 1990, the New York City Police Department realized that whatever they are doing to reduce violent was not working. The local news reported that New Yorkers were afraid to wear their jewelry in public. Some New Yorkers reported that they sprint to the subway exit to avoid victimization when the door opened. The New York City Police Department decided to implement a practice of Stop, Question, and Frisk. This law became to know as the Stop -and- Frisk (Bellin, 2014). Stop-and Frisk” was a method that was implemented by the New York City Police Department in which an officer stops a pedestrian and asked them a question, and then frisks them for any weapon or contraband (Rengifo & Slocum, 2016). By the last 1990, Stop-and Frisk became a common practice implemented by New York City Police Department (Bellin, 2014).
Every day people walk down the street of New York wondering if they are going to be stopped. Paul Butler a law professor at Georgetown University and a former United States Department of Justice prosecutor says that “the problem with stop and frisk is not only that it makes the citizens of New York less free, it also makes them less safe” (Butler, 2012). This brings the feeling of the people in New York to light, as they feel like they are less than others and less free with the ability to them being stopped and searched whenever an officer has a suspicion. Not all officers have the right sense in mind when it comes to their suspicion about someone, because “according to the analysis, just 1.5% of all stop-and-frisk arrests resulted in a jail or prison sentence. Just one in 50 stop-and-frisk arrests, 0.1%, led to a conviction for a violent crime or possession of a weapon. Close to half of all stop-and-frisk arrests did not result in a conviction” (Lee, 2013). The percentages show that officers’ suspicions aren’t always correct and that they may use their own stereotype about someone when they stop and frisk. This policy is ineffective because they don’t have a 100 percent on catching people, and many times officers’ own opinions on someone gets in the way. This policy is kept around for the little percentage it has worked and to give the officers an option to do a stop and frisk if they feel necessary. If this policy
The New York Police Department's stop and frisk has been around for several years and people recently have been taking action about it but this is a very important and useful practice that officer conduct on a daily base, police officer are doing the right thing especially if neighborhoods are known for criminal or violent activities then these people should be stopped, questioned and frisked, from January to June of 2013 the NYPD's report shows that African American and Hispanics are more active to commit crimes like robbery, rape, murder and manslaughter, felonious assault, grand larceny, misdemeanor sex crime, misdemeanor assault, petit larceny, criminal mischief, shootings, procession of drugs, firearms, and other illegal substance overall blacks and latinos being targeted not only because what they are wearing or how they but also cause of what the numbers show us. The new soon to be Major of New York Bill de Blasio has said that he is against the stop and frisk but many officers say that taking away the stop and frisk will increase crime tremendously, people are going to start to walk around with weapons, the whole point about the stop and frisk and why police officers conduct it many times is because they want the public to see that anyone can be patted down meaning that if they carry weapons with them then they will get arrested. Bill de Blasio has also said
The NYPD’s stop and frisk practices raise serious concerns over racial profiling, illegal stops and privacy rights. The Departments own reports on its stop and frisk activity confirm what many people in
There has always been tension raised between maintaining a safe society and observing by the constitutional rights of its citizens. The New York City aggressive program of Stop and Frisk have been widely criticized and considered unconstitutional. However, Stop and Frisk, per se is not unconstitutional unless people are being stopped illegally. It 's a crime prevention tool that allows police officers to stop a person based on reasonable suspicion of criminal activity and to conduct a frisk based on reasonable suspicion that the person is armed. Some argue this policy was created to target minorities. Most of the people who have been stopped and frisked under this program have been African American or Hispanic. This concerns citizens and makes them oppose the policy because they believe its racial profiling and guided by color. Stop and frisk is now one of the biggest controversies in United States. It has become something that is affecting society in both a positive and negative way.
Eighty-seven percent of stops in 2012, were Black and Hispanic people. Compare that percentage to the amount of water on Earth, only seventy percent. Now, imagine eighty-seven percent water covering the Earth. That would make the world unbalanced and difficult to live in, which is how life is for the minorities impacted by Stop and Frisk. One of the most debated and controversial topics in New York City is the Stop and Frisk policy, and the impact it has on police, Latinos, and African Americans. Stop and Frisk fails to promote justice and equitable society because it creates a society where one group is lesser than another. The Stop and Frisk policy was created in Ohio, 1968, because of the a Supreme Court case, Terry v. Ohio (US Courts).
The statistics show that to be an African American or Hispanic in New York you are more than twice as likely to get stopped as a white or Asian person. Studies of reports show that 15,000 or 30% of stops are deemed unconstitutional; and those are just the ones that are reported, imagine all of those that go unreported. Imagine all of those people who were victimized just because of the color of their skin. The stop-and-frisk procedure was once a good thing that helped clean up the streets, but now it’s becoming an epidemic of racial profiling, and teaching racism and intolerance to anyone who is a victim or witness of these stops.
In New York City’s police department report in December 1999, the stop and frisk practices showed to be greatly based on race. In NYC, blacks make up 25.6% of the city’s population, Hispanics 23.7% and whites are 43.4% of NYC population. However, according to the report, 50.6% of all persons stopped were black, 33% were Hispanic, and only 12.9% were white. As you can see, more than half of the individuals who were stopped were black, 62.7% to be exact (ACLU, 2013). In Orange County, California Latinos, Asians and African Americans were more than 90% of the 20,221 men and women in the Gang Reporting Evaluation and Tracking System (ACLU, 2013). Clearly this database record shows racial profiling occurred when the total population in the database made up less than half of Orange County’s population. This is when the California Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the ACLU stepped in. One other instance of racial profiling I’d like to discuss occurred in Maricopa County, Arizona. A court ruled in May 2013 that “sheriff Joe Arpaio’s routine handling of people of Latino descent amounted to racial and ethnic profiling”; according to CNN, the sheriff’s office had a history of targeting vehicles with those having darker skin, examining them more strictly and taking them into custody more often than others (CNN, 2014). Judge Murray Snow ordered a monitor to oversee retraining in this
With blacks being stopped more than half of the time, and Latinos being stopped around 30 percent, its clear why these groups along with other minority groups feel they are being singled out and picked on; in fact, Mayor Bill de Blasio even made a public apology for the policy’s negative impact after the New York Times (2014) claimed that Judge Shira A. Scheindlin described it as “a policy of indirect racial profiling.” It’s reasons like these that encourage people to believe this tactic is inherently corrupt. If police officers are not using clear logic and reasonable suspicion when stopping individuals, it can create a major separation between our law enforcement agents and society and allow for noble cause corruption. While this policy has the ability to create major distrust and dislike for the cops, however, it can also have a very positive impact as well. For example, if officers continue to improve the accuracy of their stops and become more successful in taking weapons off the streets and deterring crime, their communities should begin to back them and also this
The NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices raise serious concerns over racial profiling, illegal stops and privacy rights. The Department’s own reports on its stop and frisk activity confirm what many people in communities of color across the city have long known: The police are stopping hundreds of thousands of law abiding New Yorkers every year, and the vast majority are black and Latino. In 2011, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 685,724 times. 605,328 were totally innocent (88 percent). 350,743 were black (53 percent). 223,740
Police are violating the 4th amendment which is protection from unreasonable searches and seizes. Police officers are stopping and frisking black and latino people just because of the color of their skin or what they are wearing. The police officers are harassing them and stopping them in public and leaving them with little to no explanation. Donnel Baird a community organizer in Brownsville, New York believes that real criminals are too advanced to be out in the public's eye and out for police officers to stop and search them to actually find something on them that could help them. When it comes to the topic of policing, most of us will readily agree that they are necessary to help keep peace in the community. Where this agreement usually
The police administration doesn’t see that they are being discriminatory because they are focusing on the areas of concentrated poverty. All the administration wants to do is prevent crime. They believe they aren’t necessarily going after people of color, they are trying to prevent crime in the best way that they know how. Police and their superiors are well aware that the areas of poverty go to illegal ways to make money. The stop and frisk method was implemented in areas of concentrated of poverty, which meant increased contact with minorities. It was seen to be a solution to get the most contact with minorities because that’s where the administration sees crime happening. The administration is telling the street cops what to do to prevent crime and the street cops are
The policy of New York Police Department‘s (NYPD) stop question and frisk for some time been a highly controversial situation of policing under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Commissioner Raymond Kelly administration. This administration praised the stop and frisk policy as a valuable resource to the City‘s successful mitigation in reducing violent crime. A resource to removing guns from the streets as well improving the quality of life for the communities that are most affected by those
“One. The police stop blacks and Latinos at rates that are much higher than whites. In New York City, where people of color make up about half of the population, 80% of the NYPD stops were of blacks and Latinos. When whites were stopped, only 8% were frisked (Quigley, 2010).” Police stops are a very common effect on society. It isn’t fair that police don’t hold everyone accountable the same way. Not every cop is that way but there are that selected few who still have that racist mindset and hold it against innocent people. It’s no secret that in New York especially, there is a lot of crime and gang activity produced by different minority groups in the city. However, The facts does not provide a good reason that in routine stops are people of color targeted and frisked down compared to
Bratton has made a name for himself within his 43 years in law enforcement, like being credited for the end of war on crime. Once appointed and in office, Bratton will have a tough job ahead of him although he is not new to any of those hurdles. In recent times, the Stop and Frisk law is a main issue that Bill Bratton will have to address, since in the summer of 2013 a federal judge ruled “that the NYPD sometimes carried out its stops unconstitutionally by unfairly targeting minorities”. Bratton has then stated that he does support the stop and frisk but only when it does appropriately. Di Blasio anticipates to use Bratton for his tough leadership skills and expertise on bringing police and community back together. The Los Angeles Times declared when Bratton left after seven years on the job. "Its work is appreciated by residents across racial lines. Its record, though not perfect, is far less inflammatory and far more