Stop And Frisk

Stop and Frisk

The term “stop and frisk” is shorthand for a strategy that police officers use to reduce crime in an area by stopping and searching people they consider suspicious. The approach led to close to 700,000 stops in 2012 alone.

The tactic has come under fire from civil rights groups, as well as some city council members and minority community leaders, who point out that the overwhelming majority of the stop do not result in the discovery of any wrongdoing on the part of the person stopped.

Critics say that the police unfairly target black and Hispanic young men, who have made the 85% of those stop. The police department has strongly defended the tactic as helping to bring down crime, saying it is an effective way of getting illegal guns off streets.

Legal experts say the police require reasonable suspicion that a person is about to or has just committed a penal violation before stopping that person.

In 2013 a Federal judge ruled that the New York Police Department practice of stopping people suspected of trespassing outside private buildings in the Bronx was unconstitutional.

Often overlooked in stop and frisk encounters in how frequently police officers use some level of physical force. People who have been stopped say that if they show the slightest bit of resistance, even verbally, they can find themselves slammed against walls, forced to the ground and, in occasions with officers’ guns pointed at their heads.

Over all 64% of population, specially New Yorkers, said the police favored one race over the other, a steep rise from the early years of the past quarter, when less than a half of the population agreed with that sentiment.

These views in many cases appeared to have been influenced by personal experience. Surveys include 37% of black people; said police officers had used insulting language toward them. A fifth of the respondents said they had been stopped by a police officer because of their race or ethnicity and almost all were black or Hispanic, and more likely to be young male.

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