Giving Compass’ Take:
• Rose Lenehan explains that that stop-and-frisk policies expose the biases of police officers that operate under them. The data shows that black and Hispanic individuals were stopped more often than white individuals.
• What policies have been more effective at reducing crime without targetting minorities? How can future policies be shaped to prevent racial bias in practice?
• Learn about the state of mass incarceration in the U.S.
President Donald Trump has expressed support for stop-and-frisk repeatedly, even before he endorsed the practice as a presidential candidate. But he’s wrong: stop and frisk does not work.
The question of whether a policy like stop-and-frisk is effective is moot if it systematically violates citizens’ rights. A federal judge found that stop-and-frisk in New York City had been racially discriminatory, violating both the Fourth Amendment and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
To see how stop-and-frisk was implemented, we looked at the raw NYPD data on stop-and-frisk in 2011. That was the peak year for stop-and-frisk in New York City, when police made 685,724 stops—almost 2,000 stops every single day. Our analysis shows that the police used physical force in almost a quarter of stops—and that their use of force is also racially discriminatory.
In 2011, the police stopped Black and Latino people 574,483 times and used physical force against them almost 130,000 times.
The police reported using force in 23% of stops of Blacks and Latinos, but in only 16% of stops of Whites. And for what? The police found weapons—mostly knives—in about 1% of stops of Blacks and Latinos. They found weapons on Whites they stopped nearly twice as often.
Read the full article on stop and frisk by Rose Lenehan at Prison Policy Initiative.
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