Getting it right: NYPD officers engaged in a stop-and-frisk scenario at the training facility at Rodman’s Neck in The Bronx. (Warzer Jaff)
It’s not looking good for stop-and-frisk, the NYPD’s successful tactic that has effectively disarmed countless young New York City gunmen. Even as a federal judge seems poised to kneecap the department’s use of the tactic, the City Council has passed bills that would make it near-impossible to use.
Politicians are falling all over each other to denounce as abusive, racist and unconstitutional a tactic that has helped save tens of thousands of lives, mostly minority.
Stop-and frisk has has been vital in dramatically reducing the murder rate to levels unseen in decades.
The city’s murder rate peaked in 1990 at 2,245 — having risen rapidly year after year, along with all violent crimes, since the 1960s.
By 2012, the number of murders had dropped to 419.
If we had only managed to freeze the annual murder rate at the 1990 level of 2,245, it would have been a welcome relief to terrified New Yorkers then. Yet 35,000 New Yorkers alive today would be dead.
But the opponents simply don’t care.
After a long trial, federal Judge Shira Scheindlin will soon decide the constitutional issue. Her conduct of the trial suggests she’ll sound the death knell for stop-and-frisk — for example, she has already discounted as speculative the city’s claims for the tactic’s success.
And US Attorney General Eric Holder has advised the court he supports the appointment of a monitor to enforce Scheindlin’s expected edict to effectively end use of the tactic. Meanwhile, most of the City Council has voted to make it impossible to stop and frisk without the NYPD and the city being sued for profiling.
All this will put police back in their cars, waiting for calls for help from hapless victims.
Why does stop-and-frisk work? Because if you’re going to hang out with fellow criminalsto work out today’s agenda for mayhem, stop-and-frisk greatly increases the risk that you’ll be spotted “carrying.” And with competing gang members also obliged to disarm, you won’t need your weapons for self defense. In short, it provides a strong inducement for young men not to leave home with their firearms.
Yet the program’s success makes it an easy target for critics of proactive policing: The more weapons left at home, the fewer weapons seized in stop-and-frisk searches. And 90 percent of stops result in no weapons seized and no arrests.
And yes, since the program concentrates police in high crime areas, the vast majority of those stopped and frisked are minorities. Ipso facto, the program is labeled racist. That most of the lives saved are young minority men is ignored, except by inner city parents who strongly support stop-and-frisk to protect their children.
In 1993, after three decades of out-of-control violent crime, voters chose a tough, no-nonsense former federal prosecutor, Rudy Giuliani, as mayor. He initiated proactive policing policies like CompStat (a computer-based analysis program to target crime as it begins rising in a neighborhood) and increased use of stop-and-frisk to disarm criminals.
These were revolutionary changes. All violent crime, including murders, took a nose dive.
Mayor Bloomberg kept it up, firmly supporting his police commissioner, Ray Kelly, who greatly expanded successful proactive policing strategies to force violent crime down even further — to levels no one believed possible. But now many take New York’s record-low crime rate, well below any other large city’s, for granted.
The reduction in violent crime is the single most important factor in New York’s economic turnaround. Yet most mayoral candidates are now heralding their opposition.
New Yorkers like having the safest large city in America. They need to let their leaders know they won’t accept a return to the carnage of the past. The NYPD’s success in slashing the crime rate won’t be easily or quickly replicated if we let it slip through our fingers.
Unfortunately, our present course is taking us back to those bad old days, when children slept in bathtubs and under beds to shield themselves from Wild West gunfire coming in through windows.
Gerald J. Turetsky is the chairman of the Committee on Civil & Criminal Justice Reform of the Respect For Law Alliance, Inc.