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Arguments for Most Police Street Stops, and the Math, Don’t Hold UpBy MICHAEL POWELLPublished: May 28, 2012 I grew up in the New York City so often invoked as the horror to which we might return if the police stopped illegally frisking hundreds of thousands of black and Latino men. There were many things that I loved about life on the Upper West Side in the 1970s, but crime was not among them. As a kid I had the requisite five bikes stolen, one at knife point. My friends and I held tight to stacks of books as we sprinted to the public library on the risky territory of 81st Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Roaming gangs periodically disrupted our baseball games in Riverside Park, causing us to scamper up the hill. Many neighborhoods had it worse. As a tenant organizer in 1981, I stood in a living room on Rockaway Parkway in Brooklyn and watching as arsonists made a bonfire of a tenement in Brownsville. Tenant leaders had guns stuck under their noses, sons and daughters killed. Many police officers lost their lives. That city of darkness slowly disappeared. Neighborhood leaders from East New York to Fordham to Jamaica fought to reclaim the streets, working with the police at great risk to themselves. Mayors allocated billions to rebuild on the rubble of lost neighborhoods. And smart police commissioners from Raymond W. Kelly to William J. Bratton refused to treat crime as an urban immutable. Today we justifiably celebrate a New York largely drained of menace. Yet we lack the confidence that should accompany our accomplishment. To listen to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly — and their hallelujah chorus on the editorial boards of The Daily News and The New York Post — is to hear the same sad argument: Our victory over crime is so tenuous that only the mass stopping and frisking of black and Latino men keeps a sea-tide of violence at bay. Two weeks ago, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin of United States District Court declared this argument flatly unconstitutional. She found “overwhelming evidence” that top brass had put in place “a centralized stop-and-frisk program that has led to thousands of unlawful stops.” The department’s lawyers argued that stopping and frisking was a time-honored “social institution.” The judge batted down that argument, too. “Defendants’ cavalier attitude towards the prospect of a ‘widespread practice of suspicionless stops,’ ” she wrote, “displays a deeply troubling apathy towards New Yorkers’ most fundamental constitutional goals.” Stopping and frisking, done properly, is useful and legal. Officers can stop someone when they have reason to suspect that a crime has taken place or is about to take place. But that police favorite, “furtive movement”? No such legal animal exists. This is not just a fine point harped upon by federal judges. In the last few weeks I interviewed two officers in Bushwick who insisted that current policy required them to trespass across clear constitutional lines. “You can’t catch innocent young men in your nets and just say, ‘Oh, that’s all right, I’m fighting crime,’ ” a veteran officer said. “You have to follow the law.” Judge Scheindlin was withering on this question. She noted that many stops were illegal on their face and that even “according to their own records and judgment, officers’ ‘suspicion’ was wrong nearly 9 times out of 10.” This said, let’s dispense with race arguments. Neither Mr. Bloomberg nor Mr. Kelly is a racist. From juvenile justice to probation reforms to an ambitious initiative aimed at black men, Mr. Bloomberg has tried to short-circuit the depressing number of those whose lives are lost to the criminal justice system. Spurious race argumentation cuts both ways, however. The mayor and his supporters suggest that the New York Civil Liberties Union shies from uncomfortable truths: that a decided majority of those who commit street crimes in this city are black and Latino, as are a majority of their victims. The columnist Richard Cohen, a former colleague whose talents I respect, gave voice to this argument in The Washington Post. He applauded the mayor for inventing “a new statistic”: 5,600 “fewer murders in the past decade” because of stop-and-frisk. The mayor’s math is certainly inventive, as well as deeply ahistoric. He takes the high point for homicides, which hovered around 2,200 in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Then he points to the number of homicides each year since he took office in 2002, which has hovered near 500, and claims 5,600 lives saved. Where to begin? The early 1990s represented a high-water mark for urban bloodshed. Boston, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, Richmond, Washington: all became caldrons of violence. The wave of homicides subsided most substantially in New York, but violence slid in most cities. Smart policing helped a lot. So did the waning of the crack epidemic, the decline of drug turf wars, and tens of thousands of citizens who refused to stay locked in their homes. New York experienced its sharpest drop before 2002, the year Mr. Bloomberg took office. Since then, homicides have fallen about 11 percent, while stop-and-frisks increased sevenfold. Commissioner Kelly has announced a few grudging changes. He will re-emphasize a ban on racial profiling and scrutinize stop-and-frisk forms. “It may translate into fewer stops,” he said. Yes, well, maybe. Last week, two police officers told me several colleagues were in heavily attended remedial classes for those who fail to record enough stops and arrests. “They want five arrests a month for marijuana for some units,” he said. “If you can do that, you either have X-ray vision or you are breaking the law.” The Daily News editorial page warns that minor tinkering will cause crime to rise, and points a prospective finger of blame at the New York Civil Liberties Union. John Podhoretz, who came of age on the Upper West Side and edits Commentary magazine, warned that the bad old days lurk down the interstate. Residents in Washington, he wrote in The New York Post, are experiencing the worst crime wave in a generation, and it could happen here. I worked in D.C. in the mid-1990s, as neighborhoods became death zones. There’s little evidence of darkness returned. Washington recorded 108 homicides last year, down from 262 in 2002. Homicides are down 19.5 percent so far this year. Fear is corrosive as acid, not the least when it blinds us to our greatest achievements. E-mail: powellm@ ................
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