Increased Use of Stop and Frisk Leads to Increased Constitutional Abuses, Legitimizes Racial Profiling
By: Houston Criminal Defense Lawyer John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair
Law enforcement officials claim “stop and frisk” is one of their most effective crime prevention practices. Civil libertarians, however, claim that “stop and frisk” is being used as another racial profiling tool against hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens each day across the country. The Associated Press recently released statistics showing that law enforcement stop and question more than one million people each year in the nation’s largest cities—a figure that reflects a sharp increase in the use of “stop and frisk” over the past few years. The AP figures revealed that most of the individuals stopped and frisked were black and Hispanic men, most of whom were innocent of any criminal wrongdoing.
The fact that the “stop and frisk” practice often targets racial minorities who have not violated any law does not deter New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly from being an ardent and vocal supporter of the practice. The Commissioner informed AP that his officers will stop as many as 600,000 individuals this year alone but will arrest only 10 percent of them.
“This is a proven law enforcement tactic to fight and deter crime, one that is authorized by criminal procedure,” he told AP.
But the New York figures are indeed troubling. AP reported that of the 531,159 people stopped by the city’s police department in 2008, 51 percent were black, 32 percent were Hispanic, and 11 percent were white. Even more troubling is the fact that New York City police stopped five times as many people in 2008 than they did in 2002.
David Harris is a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. As an expert on stop and frisk, Harris has become increasingly troubled by the practice because it yields very few weapons, drugs or evidence of any crime. (more…)
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