Excerpts from Mayor Bloomberg’s remarks yesterday.
Our crime strategies and tools — including Stop-Question-Frisk — have made New York City the safest big city in America. We are on pace for another record low number of shootings and homicides this year because our police officers follow the law and follow the crime.
They fight crime wherever crime is occurring, and they don’t worry if their work doesn’t match up to a Census chart. As a result, today we have fewer guns, fewer shootings and fewer homicides.
Stop-Question-Frisk — which the Supreme Court of the United States has found to be constitutional — is an important part of that success. It has taken some 8,000 guns off the street over the past decade — and some 80,000 other weapons.
There is just no question that Stop-Question-Frisk has saved countless lives. And we know that most of the lives saved, based on the statistics, have been black and Hispanic young men.
As recently as 1990, New York City averaged more than six murders a day. Today, we’ve driven that down to less than one murder a day. If murder rates over the last 11 years had been the same as the previous 11 years, more than 7,300 people who today are alive would be dead.
Stop-Question-Frisk has helped us prevent those and other crimes from occurring — which has not only saved lives, it has helped us to reduce incarceration rates by 30 percent, even as incarceration rates in the rest of the nation have gone up.
Throughout the trial that just concluded, the judge made it clear she wasn’t at all interested in the crime reductions here or how we achieved them. In fact, nowhere in her 195-page decision does she mention the historic cuts in crime or the number of lives that have been saved.
She ignored the real-world realities of crime, the fact that stops match up with crime statistics, and the fact that our police officers on patrol — the majority of whom are black, Hispanic, or members of other ethnic or racial minorities — make an average about less than one stop a week.
And even though the plaintiff’s own expert found that about 90 percent of stops have been conducted appropriately and lawfully, and another 5 percent may well have been conducted appropriately and lawfully, the judge still wants to put the NYPD into receivership based on the flimsiest of evidence in a handful of cases.
No federal judge has ever imposed a monitor over a city’s police department following a civil trial. The Justice Department — under Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama — never, not once, found reason to investigate the NYPD.
But one small group of advocates — and one judge — conducted their own investigation. And it was pretty clear from the start which way it would turn out.
Given the judge’s public comments and media interviews throughout the case, this decision was certainly not a surprise. From even before the start of the case, when she offered some strategic advice to the plaintiffs that would allow her to hear the case, the judge clearly telegraphed her intentions.
And she conveyed a disturbing disregard for the good intentions of our police officers, who form the most diverse police department in the country, and who put their lives on the line for us every single day.
Throughout the case, we didn’t believe that we were getting a fair trial. This decision confirms that suspicion, and we will be presenting evidence of that unfairness to the appeals court.
We will also be pointing out to the appeals court that Supreme Court precedents were largely ignored in this decision. The NYPD’s ability to stop and question suspects that officers have reason to believe have committed crimes, or are about to commit crimes, is the kind of policing that courts across the nation have found, for decades, to be constitutionally valid.
If this decision were to stand, it would turn those precedents on their head — and make our city, and in fact the whole country, a more dangerous place.
Let’s be clear: People have a right to walk down the street without being targeted by the police — and we have a duty to uphold that right, which is why I’ve signed a law banning racial profiling, and it’s why the NYPD has intensified its training around Stop-Question-Frisk.
But people also have a right to walk down the street without being killed or mugged. And for those rights to be protected, we have to give the members of our Police Department the tools they need to do their jobs without being micro-managed and second-guessed every day by a judge or a monitor.