Current Events > National Review (conservative magazine): 'we were wrong about stop & frisk'

(+) Yeah! (+)

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455035/new-york-city-stop-and-frisk-crime-decline-conservatives-wrong

Like many conservatives, I had grave concerns about curtailing the New York City police departments controversial tactic of stopping and frisking potential suspects for weapons. I was inclined to defer to the police when they protested that they needed the option to stop, question, and frisk New Yorkers on a mere reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing instead of probable cause that the targeted person had committed a crime. Restricting the tactic, I thought, would cause an uptick, maybe even a spike, in crime rates. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who made ending stop-and-frisk the centerpiece of his successful 2013 campaign for mayor, struck me as a man who was cynically willing to tolerate an increase in crime if he thought it to his political advantage to amplify leftist voters core belief that policing was out of control.

Today in New York City, use of stop-and-frisk, which the department justified via the 1968 Terry v. Ohio Supreme Court ruling, has crashed. Yet the statistics are clear: Crime is lower than ever. Its possible that crime would be even lower had stop-and-frisk been retained, but thats moving the goalposts. I and others argued that crime would rise. Instead, it fell. We were wrong.

Major crime in New York City has continued to decline almost across the board in the four years of the de Blasio administration, to the lowest rates since New York City began keeping extensive records on crime in the early 1960s. Crime is literally off the charts the low end of the charts. To compare todays crime rate to even that of ten years ago is to observe a breathtaking decline.

New York City saw a record-low 333 homicides in 2014, the first year of the de Blasio administration. Though that figure was slightly higher in 2015 and 2016 (352 and 335), four of the five least-murderous years in New York City since 1960 have been in the de Blasio era. Other crime statistics have largely followed suit, with the total number of major crimes down in 2017 by about 6 percent since 2016, which was itself a record-low year.

As of December 27, New York City saw 286 homicides in 2017, down 12 percent from the previous year, itself a near-record low. That is a rate of about 3 per 100,000 population. By contrast, Chicagos homicide rate for 2017 was about 24 per 100,000. The figure for Baltimore is about 56. There were more murder victims in Baltimore than in New York City in 2017, even though New York has nearly 14 times as many residents.

Stop-and-frisk was deployed in New York City some 686,000 times at the peak in 2011, dropped sharply in 20122013, the last couple of years of the Mike Bloomberg administration, and plummeted to 12,000 incidents in 2016, according to NYPD data tracked by the New York Civil Liberties Union. Thats about a 98 percent reduction in use of the tactic.

De Blasio is not the primary reason for this reversal; the courts appeared to be on their way to killing stop-and-frisk on Fourth Amendment grounds before he even took office as civil-liberties advocates built a case that the reasonable suspicion standard seemed to have devolved into a hunch is good enough. So it seems likely that the sharp declines that began under Bloomberg would have continued if Bloomberg had remained in office. Nevertheless, de Blasio was correct in saying the city could withstand a sharp decrease in stop-and-frisk. And he was right to draw attention to the social cost of the practice; more than 80 percent of those subjected to stop-and-frisk since the start of the Bloomberg administration were, according to the NYPD, completely innocent. That means hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were unjustly subjected to embarrassment or even humiliation.

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good
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the funny thing about stop and frisk is that conservatives tend to be all for it, but if a cop actually stopped them on their way to go do something, told them to get out of the car, and patted them down against the hood of the car to look for a gun, they'd probably flip out and file a lawsuit lol
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I wonder what they'll realize is wrong next
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averagejoel posted...

I wonder what they'll realize is wrong next

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Get rekt conservatrolls
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Curious what the supporters of this policy on CE think in light of this new information.
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green butter posted...

the funny thing about stop and frisk is that conservatives tend to be all for it, but if a cop actually stopped them on their way to go do something, told them to get out of the car, and patted them down against the hood of the car to look for a gun, they'd probably flip out and file a lawsuit lol

It's easy to justify when you believe that it only happens to lower income people with baggy clothing, hoodies, and tattoos--they must be guilty of something, right?
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I think it was being used incorrectly and being abused. If I'm legitimately questioning someone about a crime, I'm frisking them. But a lot of officers were just picking people at random and using creative writing in their report to justify it.
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it's shocking that if you institutionalize police harassment, bad things will happen

who would've fucking thought
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Patchwork posted...

But a lot of officers were just picking people at random

"random"...

...riiiiight...
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Patchwork posted...

I think it was being used incorrectly and being abused.

https://youtu.be/O1PK4qYzNkI?t=11
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No shit, I argued with my friends father about this for hours one night. He would not budge on it, regularly claims to be for freedoms too. And honestly crime going up or not, it's unconstitutional and should never have existed.
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TheVipaGTS posted...

Patchwork posted...

But a lot of officers were just picking people at random

"random"...

...riiiiight...

*shrug*

My fault. Should've been more specific; they weren't using reasonable suspicion, as they should've been. Who they were targeting depends on the officer and the area.
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Wasn't there suppose to be reasonable suspicion? I mean, if the policy resulted in even a 50/50 chance at the person having a weapon, sure but it's basically just used to catch smokers.
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Good. Terry stops are a violation of the 4th amendment. And this shouldn't be a left or right thing; it's a constitutional vs. unconstitutional issue.
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The right is silent

I think the question of stop-and-frisk is a shibboleth that separates authcons from libcons.

Good move on the National Review's part, though I still can't forgive them for their joining in the collective war drum beating before the Iraq war. Also not a big fan of their purge of the "fringes" (Libertarian, Radical Anti-Communists) of the American Right in the 1960s.
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StucklnMyPants posted...

Good. Terry stops are a violation of the 4th amendment. And this shouldn't be a left or right thing; it's a constitutional vs. unconstitutional issue.

Unfortunately the courts are illegitimate and don't give a fuck.
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The people who most need to read this won't. And law enforcement policy is largely security theatre performed on a state-to-state basis to appease particular types of voters. Security theatre couldn't care less about the actual effectiveness of its policy so long as there's no scandal or challenger on the horizon drawing public attention to it.

So the National Review feels the need to assert its intellectual honesty, presumably for it's own ego/reputation. Thanks.
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All the usual deplorables arent here??? Shocked

shockthemonkey posted...

NR is at least influential, police policy is easier to change from a top down approach than some other policies.

This, it's a pretty government-created problem. Rolling back the power of police unions would go a long way, but it would be simpler (and less 'discriminatory') to roll back the power of public sector unions as a whole, which Dems would never allow.

All in all though, the National Review has historically been the gold standard with respect to American conservatism, though I'm not sure if their reputation remains strong in the wake of the past election season.
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TheMikh posted...

Rolling back the power of police unions would go a long way, but it would be simpler (and less 'discriminatory') to roll back the power of public sector unions as a whole, which Dems would never allow.

it's silly for you to say it like this, because whenever republicans have done something to curb union power they have excepted police and fire unions

so its really not "simple" to do that at all
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Stop n Frisk is dumb

But lmao at people wanting to curb police unions lolol
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Balrog0 posted...

TheMikh posted...

Rolling back the power of police unions would go a long way, but it would be simpler (and less 'discriminatory') to roll back the power of public sector unions as a whole, which Dems would never allow.

it's silly for you to say it like this, because whenever republicans have done something to curb union power they have excepted police and fire unions

so its really not "simple" to do that at all

I didn't articulate my point so well, but that's absolutely correct. Republicans defend police unions; Dems defend teacher's unions. If one party tries to take on public unions, the pet public union of the other will raise hell. It's also quite uncommon for a party to screw its pet union(s).
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Considering that NYC underreports crimes to downplay crime data, not sure any information from them can ever be considered reliable.
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