Sunday, December 1, 2013

Stop and Frisk Profile- Darker skin required

Just a month ago in a court ruling the NYPD Stop and Frisk program that had been going on for 10 years was officially unconstitutional and violated the 4th amendment. That amendment states:

This clearly states that the police can only search with a probable cause, which means the NYPD must have a reason or grounds to justify the search because they suspect they will find something. 
Apparently the legal system did not find that being a race of black or hispanic proved probable cause enough to justify the stopping of a pedestrian to search for weapons or other contraband. 

There has been a lot of controversy over the profile of a person who is stopped for these random searches. I would put money on the fact that you won't see a 5 year old girl with a lollipop the size of her head being stopped and searched for weapons. An astounding 87% of those stopped were black or hispanic, where only 10% of these stops result in an arrest and it is extremely rare that they will find a weapon. 

This means that 90% of the time these searches are simply for no reason, and we can never be sure if the police officer did suspect something because we don't know what he is thinking but I would hope that his gut isn't that bad at guessing. US district judge Shira Sheindlin said on this subject, "The city and its highest officials believe that blacks and Hispanics should be stopped at the same rate as their proportion of the local criminal suspect population," however then she commented, "But this reasoning is flawed because the stopped population is overwhelmingly innocent - not criminal." 

Sheindlin is saying that the these New York officials justify their support of the the stop and frisk of blacks and hispanics over other races is because in those areas the crime rates of those races are higher. This means that these officials are just acting on stereotypes. It is not fair to more heavily police one area just because some of those people happen to get into some trouble. We cannot just assume that all the people in that area are therefore going to be criminals then. Also, obviously if you stop and frisk 10 hispanics for every white person you stop and frisk, the odds say that you will find more weapons and such with the hispanic, simply because you have rolled the dice 10 more times. This could lead the public to believe that hispanics are more criminal because they were caught with more weapons when in reality they were just singled out on a stereotype. 

I'm grateful that this unconstitutional practice has ended for the time being, and hopefully it will stay that way. Do you the practice of "stop and frisk"generally kept the public safer or just discriminated against minorities? 



No comments:

Post a Comment