Readers sound off on the controversial policy:
What I would like someone to ask Bloomberg at the next press conference: “Would you support the IRS specifically targeting the tax returns of Jewish Americans for audit, if the practice proved to be more effective in catching tax fraud than random audits?” I mean, Bloomberg has said recently that he thinks the police should be targeting MORE minorities than they already are. And his sole defense of this practice is that it is effective. So let’s turn that around: would you accept the targeting of Jews if it was more effective at stopping crime than random sampling?
(I of course am not suggesting such a policy would be effective, having no earthly reason to believe that Jews cheat on their taxes more than Christians or members of any other faith or ethnicity.)
Another reader:
On the one hand, as a life-long liberal New Yorker, I am bothered by how un-bothered I am by the stop/frisk debacle. Profiling seems like a terrible consequence of certain realities. Gang violence in certain neighborhoods is a huge issue that needs solving, but I can’t really argue with the fact that the best way to find illegal guns is to stop young, black men from certain socioeconomic backgrounds.
It boils down to priorities: the mayor has decided (and rightfully so, if you ask me) that gun violence is something he and his team are committed to staunching. For example, if you wanted to crack down on cocaine and molly, stop and frisk all the wealthy club kids buying $800 bottles of vodka in the Meatpacking District on a Friday night. It would be silly to pat down all the bus riders near a project in the Bronx to look for illegal Adderall pills. But the city doesn’t really give a damn about fancy kids and their fancy drugs. It is interested in guns and related violence.
And therein lies the reason why Bloomberg, whom I generally respect a great deal, is so full of shit.
If stop/frisk was really about guns and violence alone, let them pat down each and every person they “suspect” of having guns – and then, when they find a bit of weed on an otherwise harmless teenager, LET HIM GO. You want to send a message that you are seriously trying to combat gun violence? Show how important it is by letting pot possession slide. At least then your motives will match up with your outcomes.
Furthermore – and this is what bugs me – have a little fucking compassion. I’ve seen young Arab-looking men profiled in airports often. Ironically, I’ve seen the least of this in Israel (which knows everything about you before you even step foot in Ben Gurion) and America (which just puts everyone through the ringer, like complete idiots). But in Europe I have seen some pretty targeted treatment of some Arab men. And I noticed in Denmark that the search was done apologetically, with an heir of “sorry, I need to feel your testicles for a bomb, this is ridiculous but you know how it is, right?” In Croatia, the agents acted as if they had caught a terrorist and just needed to find the damn evidence. And the response that the Croatian incident prompted from myself and others around me was irritation and shame at the treatment of this dude. The response in Denmark, however, prompted shame – at the situation in general, and annoyance at the actual terrorists out there who were, in essence, ruining this man’s reputation and morning, by tarring their ethnicity with such stigma.
Now I know the NYPD fighting gun violence is way different than the TSA fighting terrorism. But a little humility, a little apology, a touch of “Listen, it sucks we have to do this” would at least somewhat focus more of the rage on the actual scum who terrorize parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx. A stop/frisk by a cop trained to assume that this is likely just a precaution, trained to apologize for the intrusion, trained to ignore angry feedback from those being searched would be a whole different ballgame. From what I have seen, these stop/frisk situations are rather confrontational, and usually involved being bent over a car hood like a criminal. Why? What is gained from that? Why show animosity towards the young black men being stereotyped (maybe justifiably), instead of sympathy?
Another refers to the chart in this post:
Mother Jones’ overall stops-per-seizure numbers are masked by the drug seizures on whites (which was interesting to me that you find a significantly higher number of whites carrying drugs – but that’s a question for another day). But, to the point, if you run the seizure numbers just for guns, you are 2.4 times more likely to find a gun on a black than a white. That’s significant. I’m white, but if I were black and lived in some of the tougher NYC neighborhoods, I might carry a gun too. That doesn’t mean I’m a criminal, but it might mean the neighborhood is dangerous, which circles back to the underlying premise of the argument.
By the way, I am biased towards maintaining stop-and-frisk, as I was held up at 1 am as I walked into the lobby of my NYC apartment in Chelsea. Yes, he was black, but I would feel the same no matter what his skin color. I was afraid during the holdup and angry afterwards. I’m sure there are abuses by the police, as there are with all public officials, but in general I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. The police actually caught the guy within 15 minutes of the holdup and he went to jail. If they had stopped and frisked him before the holdup, it would have been better for both of us.
Another also speaks to his own experience:
The NYPD and police union are pushing back against the ruling in the stop-and-frisk case requiring officers to be equipped with cameras. I am entirely unsurprised, and that specific reaction is likely prima facie proof that the judge was right about the fact that stop-and-frisk was probably, without regard to the race component, done without a “reasonable and articulable suspicion,” as required by the Terry case. The defense by the mayor, saying the Terry case allows stop and frisk, seems to ignore the fact that Terry has constitutional requirements beyond a raw hunch by a police officer.
The reason many police are not equipped with cameras, increasingly cheaper technology, is that a tool that would in many instances conclusively show very relevant facts, paradoxically makes their job of the officer harder, not easier. Take, for example, the job of a stock broker. SEC rules require all calls with clients to be recorded so everyone has a clear record of what occurred. When something goes wrong, those calls can be really helpful, or really bad. This does not work for police. The innocent reason is that cameras will not capture everything, so what is on film can be misconstrued, and if the equipment fails for some reason, a nefarious reason would be ascribed to the police. The less innocent reason is that a clear and accurate record of what occurred is in many cases not a good thing.
The criminal justice system works in a sense with a wink and a nod – that unless the officer honestly reports a sequence of events that is constitutionally infirm, or screws up embarrassingly in lying about the sequence of events, an officer’s version as to what occurred is almost always accepted as fact in evidentiary hearings on Fourth Amendment issues no matter how much everyone in the room suspects something else happened. That is part of the unspoken societal price for safer streets. As with the national security debate, the issue is what level of invasion of privacy are we willing to accept or ignore for safety (except that in the national security context it is largely Middle Eastern; and in policing, Black or Latino).
The proliferation of cameras makes the wink and nod harder. Famously in South Florida, following a traffic accident involving an off-duty police officer, the police arrested a woman who was involved in the accident for DUI and causing the accident. However, the off-duty officer may have been inebriated and actually had caused the accident. Caught on the audio from one of the police vehicles at the scene was the supervising officer directing the other officers that they would have to do “a little Disney” on the accident report, which was then partially fabricated and used for the arrest of the woman.
As a lawyer, I have encountered, on numerous occasions, law enforcement aversion to cameras. My first was as a prosecutor years ago in NJ when the State Police first installed dashboard cameras in Trooper’s vehicles. The NJ State Police have a reputation for being extraordinarily professional, even militaristically disciplined, including testifying in courtrooms. After a particularly contentious motion to suppress evidence that focused on the videotape, the cameras disappeared from all patrol vehicles, for a time while the agency tried to assess what the agency gained and lost from the use of cameras. The issue of cameras in patrol cars remains an issue in NJ as in other states.
As a defense attorney, I have encountered other examples of police aversion to cameras, including a case where my client was arrested in an undercover drug sting and was charged as a co-conspirator; the police alleged he was a lookout. The police department had a surveillance van and about 15 officers for the takedown. The surveillance van, an expensive piece of equipment with cameras, boom microphones and recording equipment, was on the scene and monitored by two of the agents. The police had used the same location, and same cocaine, about 10 times over the course of a number of months to arrest a large number of people.
However, when the attorneys received the evidence, there was a video that ended before the transaction and arrest. At depositions it became clear that some of the officers were confusing one arrest from others that had occurred at the same location. When it came to the agents in the surveillance van, the lawyers asked if there was a surveillance van there for the purpose of the arrest and capable of recording everything, why was there no recording of the most important part. The answer was “for safety of the officers.” Asked over and over again what that actually meant, the agent finally settled on, “we had to be ready to jump out and assist other officers if something happened so there would be no one to monitor the equipment.” When then asked why they didn’t just go there in a car for all the use the surveillance van provided, the answer was, “I don’t know.”
The NYPD do not want stop-and-frisk monitored by videotape because then practice would likely not stand up to factual scrutiny.
The Dish 