Up until very recently (“recently” as in Monday), New York City was one of several large cities with a stop-and-frisk law — a policy in which “a person [could be] temporarily detained on the street against his or her will for the purposes questioning” by police. Stop-and-Frisk has been legal in NYC for the past 11 years, but, earlier this week, a federal judge ruled it unconstitutional, saying the NYPD was using the law to resort to a “policy of indirect racial profiling.”
“Indirect” is a nice way to put it. The reality of the situation is far less accidental-sounding. 52% of the 4.43 million stops that occurred in New York between 2004-2012 were of black suspects and 31% were hispanic. Of those millions of stops, only 6% have led to arrests. A far far far larger percentage of Stop-and-Frisks is made up of people who just happened to look the wrong way and be in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is to say — in less coded language — that suspects made the mistake of being non-white while simultaneously existing on this planet. Suspicious, indeed.
Even after the court’s ruling on Monday, Stop-and-Frisk in NYC is not dead and gone. The city plans to appeal the judge’s decision, but even if they accepted the ruling as is, what the court ordered was not technically an end to the law. What was actually determined was that a federal monitor would oversee reforms on the policy.
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