Stop and Frisk – Law Street

Judging a Book by its Cover: The History of Racial Profiling in the United States

Michael Sliwinski — Fri, 18 Nov 2016 19:37:42 +0000

Image courtesy of Michael Fleshman; License: (CC BY-SA 2.0)

During the campaign, President-elect Donald Trump gave a speech in the wake of two bombings in New York and New Jersey. In response, Trump said that the police force should have the ability to profile suspects in order to be able to target individuals and subsequently catch criminals faster. While people quickly debated what exactly Trump was calling for, whether it was racial profiling versus criminal profiling, his comments immediately stirred debate over the questionable practice.

Read on to find out more about the history of racial profiling, how it is still used, its effectiveness, and the impact it has on individual freedom.

History of Racial Profiling

According to the ACLU, racial profiling is “the discriminatory practice by law enforcement officials of targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual’s race, ethnicity, religion, or national origin.” Racial profiling is closely associated with and only narrowly differentiated from criminal profiling which “is the reliance on a group of characteristics they believe to be associated with crime.”

In criminal profiling, the cumulative characteristics of people who have committed a crime are used to identify those who may be likely to commit the same crime. However, racial profiling assumes any member of a racial or ethnic group of people may commit a crime because of who they are.

In addition, part of racial profiling is willfully overlooking members of the majority when they commit crimes. The ACLU cites the following example:

An African American man in Maryland, who after moving into a white community, was attacked and subjected to property damage. Local police failed to respond to his repeated complaints until they arrested him for shooting his gun into the air, trying to disperse a hostile mob outside his home.

The accompanying video looks at the practice of racial profiling and what it means:

Racial profiling in the United States traces its roots all the way back to colonial times. One of the earliest examples was a registry in which free blacks were required to enlist. The registry kept track of a number of physical characteristics as well as how that person came to be free. The idea behind it was to limit the movement of free black people around the South. If they were unable to prove their status they could even be forced into slavery. This kind of targeting particularly reemerged during the Jim Crow era and continued on throughout the Civil Rights Movement and into the present. Often when it comes to racial profiling, the discriminatory practices are not written down in a record but implied.

The closely associated criminal profiling also has a long history, dating back to the 1880s in England when experts tried to track down the elusive Jack the Ripper. Profiling in the United States began gaining momentum in the late 1950s with profiles contributing to the arrest of suspects in high-profile crimes. In 1974 the FBI launched its Behavioral Science Unit utilizing profiling techniques to locate serial rapists and murders. Over the years psychology has taken a major role in these profiles as certain, common traits are identified in many of the cases and used to pinpoint other offenders. While this approach is used more to identify specific individuals guilty of specific crimes, it also creates a template for future investigations to use as well, which is similar to how the ACLU describes criminal profiling. Nevertheless, these same profiles cannot be overly broad generalizations, or they risk being another form of racial profiling.

The Use of Profiling

In his speech, one of the points Donald Trump alluded to was Israel’s use of racial profiling and the success it has had with it. While many other Western nations have shunned the practice, Israel has readily adopted it as a means of protection. This is especially true in airports where people with Jewish last names or links to Israel are able to quickly move through security while those from other regions, particularly from predominantly Muslim regions, are often held up for hours for intense inspections.

While the United States does not have similar programs, for the most part, there is one glaring exception that generated a lot of high profile coverage just a few years ago. That is the infamous stop-and-frisk program that was a major component of the New York Police Department’s effort to fight crime. While the city claimed this program was an effective way to reduce crime, a federal judge disagreed, claiming instead that it provided cover for officers to target non-white citizens in unnecessary and illegal ways.

While police officers are well within their right to stop someone they suspect of committing a crime or are likely to commit a crime, they must be able to demonstrate some cause. However, in the case of stop-and-frisk, people of color were being stopped at a disproportionately high rate, which led a federal judge to deem the policy unconstitutional. In fact, 83 percent of the stops conducted by the NYPD between 2004 and 2012 were of black or Hispanic people, while those groups made up slightly more than half of the city’s population. The following video gives the details behind the stop-and-frisk ruling in New York:

Although stop-and-frisk was really the only major program that led to clear racial profiling in an attempt to fight crime, as mentioned earlier, racial profiling is often done without a directive or anything on the books. The ACLU, for example, has a long list of what it claims are incidents of racial profiling against a variety of minority groups. Over the last couple of years, there have been a number of high-profile incidents involving white police officers and non-white victims, which certainly seem to indicate racial profiling does still occur even without an explicit policy.

When it comes to criminal profiling, the practice has gotten a lot of attention in popular culture but its effectiveness has also been called into question. Part of the problem is that criminal profiling is not much more reliable than racial profiling. According to a small study done in Britain, only 2.7 percent of 184 cases showed that the practice helped lead to an arrest. The main issue was there were so many different characteristics that it was hard to create a single profile that would be used to capture criminals. This sentiment was echoed by a Secret Service report on school shooters that suggested that potential shooters would have to be identified on an individual basis because they were all so different. The most common results, unfortunately, were confirmation bias at best, and at worst simply another form of prejudicial profiling.

Evaluating the Use of Profiling

Since racial profiling only targets a select group of people it is unsurprisingly not very effective. For the clearest evidence, one need only to look at New York’s stop-and-frisk program once more. Of all the people stopped, nearly 90 percent were released with no further action and were free to go. In other words, only 6 percent of stops ended with an arrest and another 6 percent resulted in court summonses. In fact, the data indicates that stop-and-frisk likely had little relation to the number of murders and other violent crimes in New York.

Other instances, such as the ones listed by the ACLU, also show how racial profiling is typically not effective. In fact, these instances of racial profiling only seem to make matters of crime worse as they encourage disaffected people to lash out in anger.

Impact

Not only is racial profiling ineffective it can also be harmful in the long run. The reason for this is because people who are unfairly targeted by police tend to feel a reduced trust in the police force as an effective means of fighting crime. When people do not trust the police, then the police are less able to do their jobs because they lack both authority and the necessary assistance from communities to help them with their work.

This feeling of being excessively targeted also seems to be supported by the numbers. The clearest example, and by now one that is well-worn, is the existence of clear racial discrepancies in prisons. Black male children born in 2001 are approximately 5.5 times more likely than white children to be incarcerated at some point in their life.

From a dollars and cents perspective, racial profiling is also costly. Retraining officers following a racial profiling incident or paying a settlement for racial profiling can cost a city or police department millions, if not tens of millions of dollars. There are countless examples of this, one of the most egregious is in Arizona–where the actions of notoriously prejudiced Sheriff Joe Arpaio just cost his county $22 million in settlements with Latino community members.

Conclusion

Like other controversial techniques for preventing crime, racial profiling does have its defenders. They argue that it has been successful in reducing crime and point to examples like stop-and-frisk in New York and to other countries that embrace the measure such as Israel. It even has a closely related cousin, criminal profiling, which relies on somewhat related methods to help in the hunt for criminals.

However, like many of those very same controversial techniques, the numbers suggest racial profiling actually does not really reduce crime at all. In fact, it may actually increase crime by lowering trust in police and diminishing officers’ effectiveness in minority communities. It also seems to fill prisons in the United States disproportionately by race while also costing police department millions in settlements and training.

Racial profiling then seems to be a practice that is more harmful than good. However, the reality of that may not outweigh some people’s perception that it is effective. In either case, the practice is unlikely to be done away with entirely, in the meantime it is likely to make the tenuous relationship between the police and many communities even worse.

Resources

CNN: Donald Trump Defends Racial Profiling in Wake of Bombings

ACLU: Racial Profiling: Definition

History News Network: The Roots of Racial Profiling

Haaretz: in Israel, Racial Profiling Doesn’t Warrant Debate or Apologies

The New York Times: Racial Discrimination in Stop-and-Frisk

American Psychological Association: Criminal Profiling: The Reality Behind the Myth

Center for Science and Law: Criminal Profiling, Present, and Future

National Institute of Justice: Race, Trust, and Police Legitimacy

Economic Policy Institute: Where Do We Go from Here? Mass Incarceration and the Struggle for Civil Rights

CNN: Racial profiling Costs Arizona County $22 million

Brennan Center for Justice: Ending New York’s Stop-and-Frisk Did Not Increase Crime

Michael Sliwinski

Michael Sliwinski (@MoneyMike4289) is a 2011 graduate of Ohio University in Athens with a Bachelor’s in History, as well as a 2014 graduate of the University of Georgia with a Master’s in International Policy. In his free time he enjoys writing, reading, and outdoor activites, particularly basketball. Contact Michael at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Judging a Book by its Cover: The History of Racial Profiling in the United States appeared first on Law Street.

Is the End of Stop-and-Frisk to Blame for the Growth in NYC Murders?

Maurin Mwombela — Thu, 04 Jun 2015 16:13:16 +0000

Featured image courtesy of [Michael Fleshman via Flickr]

New York City experienced four fatal shootings last Friday night, including the death of Jahhad Marshall, a 22-year-old chef who was killed in Queens. Stacey Calhoun, the victim’s uncle, told the media the next day, “We need stop-and-frisk.” This comes amid a significant call for the return of the controversial NYPD policy. In particular, Stop-and-Frisk supporters cite the nearly 18 percent increase in murders in New York City between January 1 and May 30, 2015 compared to the same period in 2014. Moreover, there was a 7.7 percent increase in shootings–from 403 to 434–during the same period.

In the wake of the increase in murders, particularly shooting-related murders, the heated debate over the efficacy of stop-and-frisk has returned. Supporters of the policy cite the dramatic decrease in crime in New York City since 2002, when stop-and-frisk became more frequently used. Between 2002 and 2011, there was a steady increase in stop-and-frisk related stops from 97,296 to 685,724. In this same period, there was a steady decrease in shooting deaths, as well as overall murders. Proponents argue that the threat of being searched leads to decreased gun possession and thus decreased gun violence. Therefore, many supporters of stop-and-frisk blame Mayor Bill de Blasio’s reigning in of the policy for the increased number of murders in 2015, particularly firearm murders. In a recent interview with FOX News, former NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik blamed the increase in crime in 2015 on the dismantling of stop-and-frisk, citing it as the reason for the decrease in crime in New York City.

Contrarily, a lot of evidence suggests that stop-and-frisk was not a successful policy. The policy’s opponents point to the general inefficacy of the stops, about 90 percent of which did not result in further police action. Although former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and others have defended the racial disparity of the stops by asserting that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to commit crimes, the NYCLU found that whites were twice as likely to possess a weapon when stopped. Furthermore, the dramatic increase in stops between 2004 and 2011 did not lead to a dramatic increase in the number of weapons found (176 additional guns found in 524,873 additional stops). Following the controversy over the policy in 2011, the use of stop-and-frisk was dramatically reduced, and while searches decreased by 72 percent between 2011 to 2013, murders fell by 35 percent, and shootings fell by 29 percent. This shows that the continued trend of declining crime in New York City, as well as across the country, that has occurred since 1993 continued even with a dramatic cutback in the use of stop-and-frisk. This evidence seems to suggest that increased use of stop-and-frisk does not guarantee a decrease in the number of murders or shootings.

The bottom line is that it is statistically and logically imprudent to assert that the changing of one police policy is the cause of the increase in murders in New York City so far in 2015. It is possible that stop-and-frisk does limit violent crime; however, it is too soon to tell whether the policy’s removal under Mayor de Blasio is the reason for the additional murders this year. The small sample size of five months, relative to the 24 year trend of decreasing murder, also makes such assumptions fairly weak. Furthermore, the decrease in other crimes, including robbery, felony assault, burglary, and grand larceny point to the issue being more nuanced and complicated than some will admit. Other issues such as the growing civil unrest over police brutality and the possibility of a spike in gang activity are all possible causes. Mayor de Blasio has addressed those who blame his cutbacks on stop-and-frisk for the increased violence and has cited, among other factors, the possibility of gang-on-gang violence.

Contrary to opinions on both sides of the debate, the presence of stop-and-frisk is not an “all-or-nothing” situation. It is possible that the NYPD could return to the frequency of stops that it employed in 2002 while still limiting violence. Perhaps the threat of being searched does limit the possession of guns, as proponents of stop-and-frisk assert. On the other hand, the statistics don’t show that an increase in stops will lead to significantly more weapons seizures. Furthermore, the correlation between greater searches and fewer murders is far from definitive.

It is important to separate legitimate criticism of police tactics from a lack of respect and gratitude for their work. Some sensationalist defenders of stop-and-frisk will try to spin the attacks on the policy as such, and thus delegitimize an important debate. While there is no doubt that those who serve in police forces are brave and essential to our well being, it is important to constantly question and refine police methods.

Maurin Mwombela

Maurin Mwombela is a member of the University of Pennsylvania class of 2017 and was a Law Street Media Fellow for the Summer 2015. He now blogs for Law Street, focusing on politics. Contact Maurin at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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London Moves Forward with Police Body Cams: Will the U.S. Follow?

Emily Dalgo — Wed, 03 Jun 2015 20:32:55 +0000

Image courtesy of [Elvert Barnes via Flickr]

Mayor of London Boris Johnson just announced that by the end of March 2016, the majority of Metropolitan Police officers will be supplied with 20,000 body cameras in an effort to help officers gather evidence to fight crime and boost public confidence. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe said, “For too long our equipment has lagged behind the technology almost everyone has in their pockets to capture events as they unfold.” But while this now-international trend toward implementing body cams can help to uphold the law in theory, there are still concerns about whether this technology can really do its job in practice.

Mayor Boris Johnson confirms plans to roll out 20,000 police body cameras across the Met: https://t.co/JTlW1tKUpj pic.twitter.com/2W32Hznv4K

— MOPAC (@MOPACLdn) June 3, 2015

This development will make London the most body camera heavy city in the world, further advancing Britain’s status as one of the most surveilled states. The British Security Industry Authority (BSIA) estimates that there are up to 5.9 million closed-circuit television cameras in the country, or one camera for every eleven people in the United Kingdom.

For the past year, police officers in London have undergone trials of the body cameras and have reported positive results. The trial has allowed officers to generate about 6,000 video clips per month, which are uploaded daily and referenced when the footage is considered necessary for evidence. These trials, set to end later this summer, suggest that the implementation of body cameras can increase the number of guilty pleas and reduce complaints, speeding up the justice system. London police have come under scrutiny for controversial stop-and-search laws, which disproportionately target minority groups. London officials hope that body cameras will help to improve public trust and increase officer accountability in these scenarios.

While body cameras may be useful for monitoring daily operations of police officers, some civil rights groups are concerned that the technology will prove to be an intrusive surveillance tool that can be easily exploited. There is also concern about who has access to the footage and if it will be publicly accessible. The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime has plans to lead a citywide public engagement training to explain how the cameras work and when Londoners might encounter them. The London Policing Ethics Panel intends to produce the United Kingdom’s first report regarding the ethics of officers’ use of the cameras, which will be published in the fall.

Cities across the United States are also providing their officers with cameras. The company Taser, a maker of body cams, reported a 50 percent increase in sales in the first three months of 2015. While continued proliferation of body cameras seems forthcoming, critiques of the cameras’ use are also widespread. Most footage caught on camera is not considered public record, which has proved problematic–police departments can easily erase destructive footage. In some cases, officers forget to turn on their body or dashboard cameras, since neither device is constantly recording, but needs to be manually switched on. Some police officers’ cameras have conveniently malfunctioned at the time of an encounter, leaving victims of police brutality without evidence of their claims. Had the Ferguson, Missouri police department mandated the use of police officer body cameras or used dashboard cameras in patrol cars, the mystery surrounding what truly happened leading up to and during the fatal Michael Brown shooting of 2014 would have been absolved.

Necessary changes must be made to officer accountability in the wake of years of unrest. London is taking a huge step forward in what may become a revolution in police liability and encouraging a positive shift in public discourse about law enforcement. Video clips should be accessible by the public. Police officers should be held individually accountable for the use of their cameras, by disciplining those who routinely forget to turn on their body cams. Police departments, prosecutors, and every other chain of command throughout the justice system should work toward preserving footage to protect the rights of the abused, even if—and especially when—police officers are in the wrong. While implementation of body cameras is the first move going forward–and London should be applauded for its efforts–effective, ethical execution of their use is the most important step.

Emily Dalgo

Emily Dalgo is a member of the American University Class of 2017 and a Law Street Media Fellow during the Summer of 2015. Contact Emily at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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With a New Regime, Can New York Settle on Controversial Policy?

Molly Hogan — Fri, 31 Jan 2014 14:38:01 +0000

For the past several years, the NYPD has been in trouble over a troubling “stop and frisk” policy. But with the election of Bill De Blasio, it looks like that policy may be going away.

The term “stop and frisk” stems from the practice of stopping individuals on the street, and searching them for contraband items- without probable cause. New York in particular came under fire over the past few years for taking part in the “stop and frisk” activities, and targeting minorities in the process.

Legally, there is some precedent on the issue. Terry v. Ohio was a case in 1968, which determined that officers could stop individuals without probable cause, so long as the officer had a “reasonable suspicion” to believe something was wrong. Many people claim that the NYPD took this to a new level, and used it to discriminate the people they stopped based on race, using “reasonable suspicion,” as a backdrop for that.

A lawsuit was brought against the city in 2008, and it was decided that the NYPD did indeed unfairly target minorities, specifically African American and Latino men. Rather than accept the fact the NYPD was acting in a systemically racist way, the city fought an appeals process over the ruling.

But with the newly elected mayor, Bill De Blasio, came a change in regards to the policy. This stance was one on which De Blasio campaigned last year. On Thursday, January 30, 2014 the mayor announced he would stop the appeals process of the lawsuit, agreeing to the recommendations by the judge who ruled on the case last year.

It seems as though the mayor might be looking at solutions outside of the courts, too.

This week, NYPD Chief William J. Bratton announced that rather than putting rookie police officers in high-crime neighborhoods, the NYPD would instead place more veteran officers with a better understanding of the complex dynamics in these situations.

The proposal can be seen as a step in the right direction when trying to train officers for the future. As Bratton pointed out, it would be possible for young, inexperienced, officers to take the “easy” way out, and engage in stop-and-frisk activities because it seems like the simplest way to target suspicious behavior. But starting a career with activities like this could lead to acting that way for years to come, perpetuating the kind of system for which New York is now under fire.

But are these two actions enough? Probably not, but they are two good places to start.

By changing the rhetoric and course of action Bloomberg had regarding the stop and frisk policies, De Blasio is acknowledging the systematic wrongdoings the NYPD took part in over the past years, and perhaps even decades. While the settlement itself may not change the attitudes of every NYPD officer, it is a sign of De Blasio’s willingness to move forward past these discriminatory policies.

On the same token, changing policies regarding young officers in dangerous neighborhoods may make an impact, but not until further down the road. It may not have been the lack of experience of the officers, which lead them to stop and frisk thousands of individuals without reasonable suspicion. That could have just as easily come from poor training, or a poor example set by higher-up officers in the NYPD. It could have been the result of already prejudiced individuals. And it some cases, it could have just made a mistake.

Regardless of the motivations behind the stop and frisk frenzy that took place in New York, moving forward, there isn’t going to be an easy fix to it. Though De Blasio seems to be taking the right steps in promoting change, it would be naïve to think that something as systematic and prejudiced as this policy will go away overnight. It will take major commitment on De Blasio’s part to maintain growth away from this policy.

[WSJ] [Terry v. Ohio] [NYT] [Floyd Case]

—

Molly Hogan (@molly_hogan13)

Featured image courtesy of [debra via Flickr]

Molly Hogan

Molly Hogan is a student at The George Washington University and formerly an intern at Law Street Media. Contact Molly at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Profiling

Dominic Jones — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 18:40:17 +0000

I want to begin by saying that the law is not perfect. It can’t be. It is created by human beings, written by human beings, interpreted by human beings, and ultimately enforced by human beings. It’s important to begin with this premise because, I think, it helps one understand that the law allows for mistakes. It allows police officers to get it wrong sometimes. But that is no balm to the individuals whose fundamental human dignity is diminished due to racial profiling.

This post comes on the heels of news out of Rochester, New York. Three young, African American male students were standing on the sidewalk waiting. They ended up being arrested by the police after they were “told to disperse.” The police report claimed that the boys were blocking pedestrian traffic and preventing free passage of citizens walking by and attempting to enter a nearby store. Well, loitering in many places is illegal. Could these young men have been waiting to assault someone? Were they members of some young gang of hoodlums?

Actually, they were just three young boys waiting at a designated location for a school bus to pick them up and take them to a basketball scrimmage. Their adult coach arrived just as the boys were being handcuffed, and he was also threatened with arrest. Members of the Rochester school board have spoken out and are calling for charges to be dropped immediately.

It seems we can add “standing on the sidewalk and waiting for someone or something” to the list of things young Black males just can’t do. Already on that list was walking home from a store at night wearing a hoodie, and walking either too fast or too slow through either a really nice neighborhood or a “high crime” neighborhood. What this case boils down to is racial profiling. The essence of the phenomenon is police suspecting or actually creating illegal activity based on perfectly legal actions that just-so-happened to be performed by minorities. “Driving while Black” is a familiar form.

According to the Racial Profiling Data Collection Resource Center at Northeastern University, more than twenty states have passed legislation banning or requiring the jurisdiction to collect data on law enforcement stops or searches. But racial profiling comes in many forms. It may just come in the form of an officer questioning more young Latino men on the street than young White men in Los Angeles. It might come in the form of an officer who is inclined to pull over a young, Black male driving a nice car in a not-so-nice neighborhood. If these stops never lead to formal arrest or formal prosecution, they often never get even local, let alone national, attention. But those acts are no less profiling and no less abusive to the individuals stopped.

In the experience of many minorities, it goes without saying that law enforcement respond and act differently in assessing the suspicion of a person of color. Many news stories and examples illustrate this point.

This video for example:

Or this video:

The second video is telling in just how disparate the reactions of the general population are when the same acts are committed by individuals of different races. The young White boy is questioned far less often than the Black boy. In fact, people seem to deputize themselves and feel a sense of urgency to thwart crime when they see the Black person attempting to remove the bike. Indeed, it seems that if you are a White female, most people might actually assist you in whatever activity you seem to be doing. I guess next time I need to move or paint my apartment I’ll disguise myself as a White woman.

This implicit racial bias exists in the subconscious of us all. The idea that it wouldn’t also manifest itself in the decisions of law enforcement is laughable. However, what always astonishes me is when the calm, logical, legal explanations are utterly ignored by law enforcement seemingly so bent on finding crime where none exists.This is bound to foster a feeling of inherent criminality in many poorer, minority communities that is demeaning to one’s spirit and degrading to one’s dignity.

In the future, I know not to stand on the sidewalk too long lest I be arrested.

There go my plans for a lemonade stand this summer.

—

Featured image courtesy of [longislandwins via Flickr]

Dominic Jones

Dominic Jones is originally from Atlantic City, NJ. He attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga. followed by law school at the Washington College of Law at American University in Washington, DC. In his spare time he enjoys art, photography, and documentary films. Contact Dominic at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Stop and Frisk: Did Ending it Make a Difference?

Law Street Media Staff — Mon, 18 Nov 2013 22:19:10 +0000

Image courtesy of [Thomas Good via Wikipedia]

Stop-and-frisk policies were one of the hottest topics in law enforcement in the last several years. The controversial New York policy made headlines, led to accusations of racial profiling and discrimination, and was the subject of multiple court cases. Now, the practice has basically been discontinued altogether. Read on to learn about stop-and-frisk policies, the arguments for and against them, and the progress we’ve made since.

What is Stop and Frisk?

Stop and Frisk is a situation in which a police officer detains a suspicious person and runs his hands lightly over the suspect’s outer garments in order to determine if that person is carrying a concealed weapon. If this “patting down” doesn’t alleviate the officer’s suspicion, he may also check the suspect’s pockets. Its constitutionality derives from the 1968 Supreme Court decision of Terry v. Ohio in which the Court ruled that it is constitutional under the Fourth Amendment; however, many criticize the stop-and-frisk practice for being a racial profiling tool, claiming that a disproportionate number of Blacks and Hispanics are subject to it.

On August 12, 2013, in Floyd v. City of New York, the Southern District Court of New York ruled that stop and frisk is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment as well as the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision was met with a lot of criticism and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals initially blocked and randomly reassigned the case in October 2013, stating that Judge Scheindlin, who wrote the majority opinion in August, “ran afoul” and had “compromised the appearance of impartiality surrounding this litigation.” More recently, the Court of Appeals failed to find any misconduct or ethical violation by Scheindlin and declined to reverse the decision. But it continued the stay on the ruling until the City of New York appealed it.

Why was it ruled unconstitutional in August 2013?

Activists in New York have been fighting stop and frisk for years. The August 2013 decision was based on a wealth of statistical data. Out of 4.4 million stops over the span of eight-and-a-half years, 52 percent of suspects were Black, 31 percent were Hispanic, and 10 percent were White (from a population of 23 percent Black, 29 percent Hispanic, and 33 percent White). Furthermore, in 23 to 24 percent of all stops with Black or Hispanic suspects, the police used force. Contrastingly, the police used force in 17 percent of all stops with White suspects. It was this evidence that prompted Scheindlin to write, “the policy encourages the targeting of young black and Hispanic men based on their prevalence in local crime complaints. This is a form of racial profiling.” Unlike former Mayor Bloomberg who strongly supported the practice, Mayor Bill de Blasio sharply criticized the policy during his campaign and promised to reform it. The public was outraged when the City of New York appealed the August 2013 decision.

What was the argument in favor of stop and frisk?

Supporters of stop and frisk believe in its efficacy for driving down crime. One of the most vocal supporters of the practice said that rules against stop and frisk “will make it harder for our police officers to protect New Yorkers and continue to drive down crime.” He argued that a disproportionate number of Blacks and Hispanics are stopped under this practice because a disproportionate number of them commit crimes. At least 10 out of 19 stops have been deemed justified. A report stated that gun shootings have increased by 2.3 percent between August and November 2013. The efficacy of this practice is further supported by a study that revealed that more than half of stops lead to guilty convictions, therefore keeping criminals off the street.

What’s the status of stop and frisk now?

Stop and frisk has pretty much been eliminated. According to data obtained by the New Republic, stop-and-frisk incidents have fallen by almost 80 percent during the first three quarters of 2014. More importantly, the seemingly apocalyptic scenario that many warned about if stop and frisk was discontinued didn’t happen. In August 2013, right when stop and frisk was ruled unconstitutional, New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said, “No question about it, violent crime will go up.” Bloomberg agreed: “if you try to so much as reform stop and frisk…you’re playing politics with people’s lives.”

But crime hasn’t actually gone up–in fact, just the opposite. It’s decreased, the same way that it has been steadily decreasing over the last few decades nationwide. Despite no more stop and frisk, the streets of New York City are getting safer.

Stop and frisk does still happen, though it’s gone down a lot. There’s a Twitter account dedicated to memorializing all the times that stop-and-frisk incidents happen, @stopandfrisk. It’s still active, and it still chronicles incidences of stop and frisk being used on citizens.

Stop and frisk could have made some sense, in theory, but ended up being a more problematic program than it was worth, not to mention unconstitutional. It’s heartening to see that the crime rate has continued to fall, even with stop and frisk no longer being used.