Sigh. Stop & Frisk. What a mess. I can see both sides but I also feel that it's tough being a cop nowadays. They're asking for such perfection from them. That said, has stop & frisk been proven to reduce crime?
If it has, I'm for it due to the recent spate of violent crimes. People getting beaten. People getting shot. People getting killed. Something's got to give.
“Of course any deficiency is something that we want to prevent, but let’s recognize we’re talking about human beings. Police officers make mistakes. It’s not always intuitive,” he said. “The cop on patrol who’s looking at some street encounter to determine what it is does not have time for quiet deliberation and reflection. It’s a challenging environment for them.”
https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/2/7/229...ase-crossroads
As a new monitor steps in, the judge who issued the landmark 2013 ruling says she’s surprised the saga is still dragging on, with some reforms still unrealized.
More than eight years ago, then-Manhattan U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin issued a landmark order ruling that the NYPD was routinely violating the civil rights of Black and Hispanic New Yorkers through its institutionalized overuse of stopping and frisking citizens for no apparent reason other than their race or ethnicity.
Three mayors and five police commissioners later, Scheindlin — now an attorney in private practice — is confounded that her reform order is still an ongoing affair, with a new federal monitor recently appointed to replace the one she named in 2014 and no end in sight to the rollout of reforms she’d hoped would be in place by now...
....As part of their motion to modify the order, the plaintiffs want the judge to approve hiring an “independent researcher” picked by a seven-member panel of community representatives appointed by the court to conduct annual surveys of Black and Hispanic community at the precinct level. The panel would assess “public perception” about whether police stops as currently practiced are justified and if they’re happening in a racially biased manner.
That same motion filed in July also requests testers posing as citizens who would engage in “pre-scripted non-violent ‘suspicious behavior’” to see what happens if they’re stopped and questioned.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers say they made this request to address another issue they see as crucial: whether cops are significantly underreporting stops.
A timeline analysis by the NYCLU shows that the number of reported stops peaked in 2011 under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg and then Police Commissioner Ray Kelly at 685,000 and began dropping before Scheindlin issued her August 2013 order. Since then the numbers plummeted, bottoming out in 2018 at 11,000.
They rose slightly in 2019, the last full year of data available, to 13,400, but the plaintiffs in the case do not believe those statistics tell the full story. And their doubts are partly based on the NYPD’s own data.
In tracking reported stops, the department has found multiple instances where body camera footage depicts a stop that was not reported.
City Hall Pushes Back
In court papers filed last fall, the city Department of Law labeled the requested modifications “onerous, overbroad” and require a “significant new outlay of city financial resources to implement.” They argued that numerous avenues already exist for community involvement, and that the department’s method of tracking stops is a “reliable, frequently used compliance metric.”
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