New York’s stop-and-frisk
There’s been a new ruling curtailing New York’s controversial police practice of stop-and-frisk:
In a blistering decision issued on Monday, the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, found that on hundreds of thousands of occasions since 2004, the police have systematically stopped innocent people in the street without any objective reason to suspect them of wrongdoing. She further found that the Police Department had “adopted a policy of indirect racial profiling” that targeted young minority men for stops.
Judge Scheindlin has “called for a federal monitor to oversee broad reforms” of the practice.
If there really were a huge number of instances in which the NYPD stopped people merely because they were black or Hispanic and in the wrong place at the wrong time, rather than actually being prompted by the proper standard of “reasonable suspicion,” it seems clear that the practice would need stricter guidelines. But were there?
Here’s an example of the sort of statistical wrangling on which the charges of racial bias are based:
…[N]umbers [released by the mayor’s office] showed that 87% of the people stopped under stop-and-frisk in 2012 were black or Latino, and that 9% were white. That same year, more than 90% of those identified as murder suspects were blacks or Latino; just 7% were white.
Critics of stop-and-frisk charge that such numbers are irrelevant. They charge that cops indiscriminately go after young black and Hispanic men on bogus grounds, and that nearly nine out of ten people who are stopped are innocent.
That last fact—that most people stopped are innocent—was also cited by the judge in her ruling. But law by statistics is a dangerous game. Of course most people stopped are innocent, but this does not tell us why they were stopped and whether those reasons constituted “reasonable suspicion” or not, which are the important issues. It merely tells us that stop-and-frisk is a highly imperfect instrument for locating criminals.
Nor does it tell us what the relationship of New York’s stop-and-frisk has been to the decline in crime experienced by that city. Is it causative, or is the drop merely another instance of a more general drop in crime during the same period that has occurred even in jurisdictions that don’t practice the sort of tactics employed by the NYPD?
It will be “interesting” to see what happens to the crime rate in the city if New York’s stop-and-frisk is dramatically cut back as a result of this ruling. Because make no mistake about it—there is a good chance of some very serious negative consequences if stop-and-frisk is watered down:
Even compared with other cities where crime has also declined, New York has experienced dramatic changes. Since 2002, major crimes across the country have declined fourteen per cent; in New York, they have declined thirty-four per cent. The contrast is even more striking between New York and other big cities. If New York had Detroit’s murder rate last year, there would have been forty-five hundred murders in the city–more than ten times the actual number.
One thing is pretty certain: just as this ruling affects mostly black and Hispanic male residents of New York, who are mostly the ones being stopped and frisked, so the crime rate mostly affects the black and Hispanic population of New York, because those groups are enormously over-represented not only as perpetrators but as victims of crime.
To get more details about the legal reasoning behind the Judge Scheindlin’s decision, read the 165-page text. But this article on Scheindlin and New York’s stop-and-frisk, which appeared in The New Yorker last May, contains some troubling information. The following is only a small sample:
“What I really like to do is write opinions,” the Judge [Scheindlin] said. “There you get to do what you think is right, what you believe in. You’re pushing the margins of the envelope, being willing to be creative.”…
As one of her former law clerks put it, “What you have to remember about the Judge is that she thinks cops lie.”
According to a study prepared by the Mayor’s office, Scheindlin suppresses evidence on the basis of illegal police searches far more than any of her colleagues–twice as often as the second-place judge. This may mean that Scheindlin is uniquely courageous–or that she is uniquely biased against cops…
Whether Scheindlin herself is biased or neutral on this subject, the proper legal question is whether the NYPD actually is just stopping and frisking willy nilly (or based merely on race and nothing else) in high-crime areas without “reasonable suspicion.” If so, the practice needs to be stopped and/or revamped. But let’s hope that doesn’t lead to New York coming more and more to resemble Detroit.
They’ll probably just do what the British police have been caught doing more than once – going to some disgustingly low-crime white area of their district and nominally “searching” as many people they can find there just to get their Caucasian numbers up, so they can actually perform the frisking they want to do.
I take it this judge doesn’t live in the South Bronx.
I recognized the name instantly — Scheindlin — and googled to see if she’s related to the more well-known Judge Sheindlin. That would be tee vee’s Judge Judy.
No, they’re not related, and Judy Sheindlin, unlike Judge Shira Scheindlin, spells her name sans “c”.
Just in case anyone (else) wondered . . .
Seth Mandel over at Commentary has a good piece on this; he basically makes the case that “she has no idea what she’s talking about.”
He offers us this from the introduction in her decision as a peek into her mindset:
Back to Mandel:
The black violent crime rate is about seven times the white rate. About 30% of black males have been involved with the criminal justice system as compared to 5% of white males. Those numbers are from memory, but they should be close.
If you are going to question somebody on the street in hopes of deterring crime, it’s clear where you should focus.
When witnesses claim that they’ve been rolled by a Black gang member with prison tats … just what are the cops supposed to do?
Go Norman Mineta on the Swedish tourists?
( Old Norm is behind the anti-profiling of the TSA that has grandma being groped right along with the crippled veteran from Iraq.)
“What I really like to do is write opinions,” the Judge [Scheindlin] said. “There you get to do what you think is right, what you believe in. You’re pushing the margins of the envelope, being willing to be creative.”…
No mention of the law. Were she honest, she would have said, “What I really like to do is base my rulings on my personal opinion of right and wrong. What I believe in supersedes the law and I creatively push the margins of the envelope to work around the law.”
Judge Scheindlin is an activist, liberal judge who rules out of ideology. She views victims as simply collateral damage, the price our society pays for, in her opinion, its inherent racism.
The simple truth of the matter is that the police cannot reduce crime without adopting a policy of targeting young minority men. Not only is the black violent crime rate about seven times the white rate and about 30% of black males been involved with the criminal justice system but in the high crime rate areas the numbers are much higher. So when cops stop-&-frisk, they have a better than even chance that they are stopping and frisking a criminal. New York’s much lower crime rate reflects that reality.
But when was the last time that liberals allowed mere reality to supersede ideology?
The first sacrifice upon ideology’s altar is truth.
Wait! I have it! Let’s stop & frisk everybody like the airports do. The road to the stasi-state is paved with good PC intentions.
Wait, I thought one of the big discoveries from the MSM about the Zimmerman case was that Hispanics are in fact white. So they’re not frisking Hispanics, they’re frisking white people. (I mean hell, their cuisine features tomatoes, cheese, and pork. They’re catholic and they like soccer. Not only are they white they’re basically Italians. Damn NY, they’re bothering us Italians again.)
The whole Hispanic thing is a brilliant strategy of the Democrats. They have created a “racial” minority out of thin air. Just because someone has a Z at the end of their name does not make them a race or minority. Present day Hispanics are no more a race than Italians and Greeks were in 1900. The all see themselves as “white.” Democrats push the minority scam to get votes by giving goodies like affirmative action. Because Zimmerman had the wrong name he was a white Hispanic for the MSM. Most Hispanics are indeed white.
“… a good chance of some very serious negative consequences if stop-and-frisk is watered down…”
Serious consequences are a price we have to pay in a society that believes the following: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
There has to be probable cause that can be justified in a court of law before a jury. Individual liberty is sometimes a dangerous affair. When weighing safety and security against liberty I press down with my thumb on the liberty side of the scale.
parker,
I sympathize and in principle agree. However… press down with your thumb on the liberty side of the scale, while the left denies your right to self-defense and you end up with the UK. Where defending yourself gets you jailed, where you’re literally helpless before criminal aggression. The devil is still in the details.
notsoheavyd,
Sloppy terminology. Hispanics are ancestrally, Native American and Iberian Peninsula European, i.e. Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan. Since Zimmerman is the offspring of a white and Hispanic he’s a “white Hispanic”. His whiteness is, ‘dominant’. Technically, he may be genetically more white than Hispanic but we all know it’s a tactic by the left to justify accusing Zimmerman’s motives to have been racial.
Mr Frank,
Yes to the brilliant strategy. Hispanics are indeed not a race but an ethnicity. No to Hispanics being white, they are what in our old West were pejoratively known as ‘half-breeds’.
Former law clerk reveals a confidence that the federal judge believes cops lie.
Yeow!
And others don’t?
GB says: “I sympathize and in principle agree. However…”
IMO ‘however’ is the problem. No, I don’t want to go down the road of the UK. That road is paved with ‘however’ and ‘but’ and all sorts of excuses for promoting hoped for safety and security over liberty. These are IMO excuses for handing over authority to the state and taking away individual control over our lives. Individual liberty does pose dangers to society conversely the absence of individual liberty results in tyranny.
There is no compromise. Either we are free and suffer the consequences of our actions or we are worker bees in the hive. We are free and assume responsibility for our personal self-defense or we are victims waiting for the state to come 20 minutes late and draw the chalk lines.
“You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once.” — Heinlein
I have seen a lot of conservatives defending this practice. It’s not defensible. We cannot be stopped in public by armed agents of the law on a whim, even if they are “dangerous neighborhoods.” This is all to cover for NY’s rampant income disparity (wonder why they are obsessed with it? Physician heal thyself!) and the lack of concealed carry which would significantly curtail crimes against persons and property. So instead of doing what a free people should do, they instead up the individual monitoring and intrusion. It’s an egregious wrong, I don’t care what Terry. v Ohio said.
Cornhead:
The point is not that the average person believes cops lie. The point is not even that cops do sometimes lie; of course they do.
The point is that a law clerk is saying this about the judge, which indicates Scheindlin is coming to her decisions with a built-in bias against police. This is not at all okay for a judge.
Neo,
You’re ceding ground by repeating the phrase “stop-and-frisk.” A more accurate name is “stop-question-and-frisk.” The police claim (and I believe them) that beat cops are not allowed to frisk unless they can justify it on the basis of the answers to their questions.
“… that beat cops are not allowed to frisk unless they can justify it on the basis of the answers to their questions.”
Questions? I don’t have to answer no stinking questions when I’m walking down the street, in the library, in my favorite restaurant, or in my home. Show me probable cause or back off and leave me alone. I am the master and you, Mr. of Ms. police or federal goon squad, are the servant. Don’t tread on me. Got the message NSA? I will not give a tiny faction of an inch so you can gobble up a mile. FOOD!
Neo:
Not only a bias but that clerk should never have said a word.
Major mistake; almost like a breach of attorney-client privilege.
One of the reasons I decided I could not be a cop-after completing a law enforcement academy, was “Terry Stop and Frisk” plus the myriad of unconstitutional gun laws. It was clear to me at the academy, that “case law” was nothing more than the gradual erosion of our Constitutional rights. How conservatives can support warantless searches-whether electronic or physical- is beyond me. No wonder this country is sunk. There is no true opposition, just degrees of compromise.
Stop, question, and frisk does bring results. And can help educate the local public. Just read this latest news from the AP wire about a bust made from a stop, question, and frisk done in Camden, NJ:
New Jersey State Police have announced the discovery of an arms cache of 200 semi-automatic rifles with 250,000 rounds of ammunition, 10 anti-tank missiles, 4 grenade launchers, 2 tons of heroin, $25 million in forged bills, and a ring of 25 prostitutes all in a housing project behind the Camden Public Library.
Camden residents were stunned. A community spokesman said: “We’re shocked. We never knew we had a library!!”
See stop, question, and frisk does work!
jon baker says, “It was clear to me at the academy, that “case law” was nothing more than the gradual erosion of our Constitutional rights. How conservatives can support warantless searches-whether electronic or physical- is beyond me. No wonder this country is sunk. There is no true opposition, just degrees of compromise.
Yes. Degrees of compromise only pave the road to hell. When it comes to my natural rights by virtue that I breathe the atmosphere and piss water, I can not acknowledge any compromise. I am free. They can only kill me once.
“New Jersey State Police have announced the discovery of an arms cache of 200 semi-automatic rifles with 250,000 rounds of ammunition…”
So DHS finally found terrorists on our soil? What took them so long? This smells of made up bogey men. BTW, 250K per 200 firearms is less than 1,500 per firearm. I have more than 100,000 rounds of ammo for the 8 guns in my collection. Pretty lame on the part of 25 prostitutes.
“What I really like to do is write opinions,” the Judge [Scheindlin] said. “There you get to do what you think is right, what you believe in. You’re pushing the margins of the envelope, being willing to be creative.”…
The Judge fails Judging 101.
A moron would do better in the long run.
Judges never get to “do” what they think is right. They interpret the intent of Legislatures by first looking at the plain language of the statute. Then they apply that intepretation to the facts of the individual lawsuit before them. If the language of the statute is unclear, ambiguous or capable of more than one reasonable interpretation, the judge consults the case law, then perhaps administrative law if it is informative and cohesive. Then, they apply their interpretation to the facts as determined by the trier of fact.
In this case, the Judge was also the jury, that is, she was the trier of fact. (See pg 30 of Opinion and Order stating “a non-jury trial was held on liabilities and remedies”
This is certainly allowed. Trials can be jury trials or bench (judge) trials. However, in this case, due to the extraordinary bias of the judge, her fact finding can hardly be trusted. I can’t for the life of me understand why the defense, in this case the City of New York, allowed a bench trial. Knowing the judge they were assigned, what the fuck were they thinking?
The opinions which Judge Idiot Asshole Schinelikeshit so likes to write are worthless. Since she is doing what she thinks is right instead of interpreting statutory provisions and researching and applying relevant case law, why would her anyone consider her opinion authoritive and persuasive. The next person considering the issue just merely does what they “think is right.”
Fuck.
Her approach is a complete and total nullification of law. What she does may be something, but that something is so vastly outside judicial law, rules and ethics that it can only be described, at this point in my white hot contempt, as “something.”
(I can provide, later, so many statutory and persuasive case law (all state or U.S. Supreme Court) that judicial interpretation is limited and cannot include “creative” or “what the fucked up in the head judge thinks is “right”) that it will fill up a years worth of posts. I can, but why should I? If that basic tenet has not destroyed this piece of shit Judge (and I don’t see anyone mentioning it) then the submission of the text would be like delivering all the building materials of the Empire State building to the construction site. Very nice, but the building does not stand.
parker,
We are already going down the road of the UK. We are NOT “handing over” authority to the state, it is being seized by the state through ever greater regulation. The left, with the collusion of the Republican leadership is and has been incrementally taking away individual control over our lives for decades. You stand athwart that path, a Don Quixote and futilely yell stop! Bluster will accomplish nothing and physical resistance will result in that train running over you.
Of course, individual liberty poses dangers to society and conversely the absence of individual liberty results in tyranny. That is a given, the point however is that the left has developed a highly successful strategy and tactics to take away individual liberty, so the question is how best to fight it. Might I suggest that subtlety is more effective, when outright defiance has proven ineffective? A bit of Sun Tzu…
Compromise or die. OR…outsmart the bastards because if we don’t outsmart them, they will kill us. Either literally or metaphorically by forcing us to live as bees in a hive.
Heinlein’s Lazarus Long didn’t directly fight the leviathan, he outsmarted them.
“If that basic tenet has not destroyed this piece of shit Judge (and I don’t see anyone mentioning it)”
That is the deeper issue. She’ll retain her position in spite of gross incompetence. Which tells us just how deep and widespread the rot is in the system.
I wish it wer gross incompetence. But it is not. Judge S knows judicial interpretation. She cannot, by virtue of her position and experience as a federal district court judge, claim incompetence.
No. This is a full throated frog gulp where pure ideology (appetite) is not only doing, but telegraphing (willing to be creative) its doing.
And it really shouldn’t be a “deeper” issue. Just like in the early 1900’s nearly 100 percent of Americans knew how to read and today the percentage (much less the comprehension capacity) is so retarded, so today the comprehension of easily understood subjects such as the role and limits of judges, is described in one fat, fucking word: failure.
Hello common core education.
sharpie:
A couple of things—
Because plaintiffs sought an injunction and requested a judge rather than a jury, in this case the defendent (the city of NY) had no right to request a jury.
See this.
In addition, this case was not about the interpretation of a statute. It was about the way the practice was carried out and whether the application was in violation of the Constitution (Fourth Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment). That involves quite a bit of judgement: is this an UNREASONABLE search and seizure? Are the NYPD actually stopping and searching people for no reason, or merely because of race? Because the stature itself requires them to have a different and better reason.
Sounds about right.
In other words, the plaintiffs didn’t seek damages but an order from a judge, thus negating the right to a jury trial. Bitches. I bet they were bribed by the plaintiff’s attorneys and their backers. Sounds like Tennessee to me.
Why would the plaintiffs consent to an action without damages? In any action brought, doesn’t the plaintiff have to have an interest? What interest do the class action plaintiffs have in this action? Justice? That is an attorney general responsibility.
No. This was a set up class action lawsuit. The plaintiffs named in the summons were paid off. It stinks. Like a crucible full of shit.
The Constitution is a statute in the real meaning of the word. (As was the Magna Carta.) The Constitution was passed by a Legislature that wrote the Constitution, and that Constitution was passed by nine of the thirteen States.
So there is no difference in the treatment (and could you actually be advocating differently) between statutes and the Constitution because the Constitution, rightly understood, is the first statute. Or are you actually suggesting that statutory intepretation and case law do not apply to the Constitution?
I actually agree with the finding. There is a violation of due process and the only way around that is a susupension of the due process because of war.
Which is basically what we are in–war against most citizens justified by a bogus critical race theory (CRT).
War changes rules. Like it did in the Civil War and like it is doing now. It is a shame but either you accept the shame or accept the evil.
sharpie:
No, I’m not “suggesting” anything. I’m clarifying a point for you. You wrote that judges[emphasis mine]:
I was merely pointing out that this was a little different than your definition, because it wasn’t the interpretation of a statute exactly but rather the Bill of Rights, and in particular it involved not so much an interpretation of the language of the Bill of Rights as an evaluation of how the rules for police action were actually carried out by the police.
Ahh, the power of suggestion.
I love that phrase “blah blah blah suggests blah blah blah.
You are right. It is such a lazy man utilization.
Which affords well my couch potatoe pompous pillorization, ie, the power of suggestion.
I’m, tautologically, doing well.
But my main point does survive as well, in that, there is scum, much scum, in Judge S’s (say it like the hissing of snake) Opinion and Order. And that scum is because it violates law and the Judge cannot say why that violation is good and protective.She is an enemy. And I don’t trust my law to a fucking enemy.
You know what’s tragic? Any Jew, including secular Jews, which are 75% of American Jewry, agrees, without knowing it, with my arguments, because they understand law. They are raised with law by their tradition of Passover and Kosher and other things. Even though most Jews do not live their law, they know it.
So Jews know what law is, including the very brilliant Supreme Court Justice Kagan who already has distinguished herself.
I’m predicting that in the same way Justice Kennedy did not fulfill the hopes of his sponsor, that Justice Kagan will not fulfill the hopes of her sponsor.
That hope is not without precendent. What happens if the secular Jews connect the dots and accept the inescapable conclusion that the tradition of Torah and Talmud is more than a match for Obama and Jarrett?
What then?
What will the results be?
Well, here’s an anecdote for you. A friend of mine, a slender blonde in her early 40s (nice looking) had the scare of her life this week: at 3:00 am, a black man reached his hand into her apartment window from the fire escape. Luckily, she had a window guard gate, and the bars kept him out. She texted the woman next door, and just two minutes later that woman called her in a panic, because the same guy was tapping on HER window.
They called the cops (3X), the cops showed up but didn’t fill out a report, because the creep hadn’t succeeded in breaking in. The landlord resisted strongly their attempts to get the security video, but they finally did.
In an attempt to get the cops to fill out an incident report, my friend and her neighbor went to the police precinct (in Manhattan). The cops there, she said, were VERY bitter about the stop and frisk tactic, and they flatly told her that since the guy was black, it was going to be too much trouble to try to follow up and arrest him. No one wants to deal with the Scheindlins on the bench.
“They want us to stop doing this police work? FINE. We’ll stop doing the police work. Let them see how That goes.”
They are angry and disgusted and bitter, and we law-abiding citizens will be the ones who suffer. BTW, the discrepancy in crime rates is huge: in Fla., for instance, if you look at the prison inmate stats, you’ll see that the average black male is 9 times as likely to commit murder as the average white male; over 30 times as likely to commit armed robbery; and a similar huge difference in domestic violence, etc., etc.
Bloomberg was right: the cops are actually stopping FEWER blacks than they should be, going strictly by the crime rates. Also, they stop only the people who look like they’re up to something suspicious. I know, I know: this gives too much power to the cops, potentially. But it has been used responsibly so far.
Also, the S&F has been HUGELY popular among the law-abiding poor, of all colors. They benefit the most, by far.
Scheindlin is a very hardcore Leftwing Asshat, as you may suspect. She fancies herself a romantic heroine, who does battle with all the ‘evil whites.”
As a LEO I say, “Ditto” to Parker.
This was the right decision for all the reasons he stated.
Got a metaphor.
Public swimming pool. Kids drowning. Close the pool to kids. No kids drown. But you don’t know that none of the local kids can swim.
I think it works.
Stop the Stop and Frisk. Violence, particularly against minorities goes way up. Had been reducing the effects of the propensity. Now, not reducing the effects, we’ll see the results of the unrestricted propensity.
As if you re-opened the public pool without teaching the kids to swim.
Scheindlin is coming to her decisions with a built-in bias against police. This is not at all okay for a judge.
It is however a refreshing change from the notion that everything told by the police in a court is the unvarnished truth because the speaker has a badge.
I R A Darth Aggie:
Well, it’s a change, but hardly a refreshing one.
Actually it’s not even really a novel change, it’s merely a swing back to the liberal side of the pendulum.
In NYC blacks are 25 percent of the population, and commit 55.5 percent of homicides, 45.5 percent of rapes, 63.5 percent of robberies, and 52.8 percent of aggravated assaults.
Hispanics are 28 percent of the population, and account for 33.8 percent of homicides, 43.1 percent of rapes, 29.1 percent of robberies, 33.8 percent of aggravated assaults.
It is of course blatant racism to notice or mention these staatistics.
Source: Crime and Enforcement Activity in New York City, 2011
In NYC blacks are 25 percent of the population, and commit 55.5 percent of homicides, 45.5 percent of rapes, 63.5 percent of robberies, and 52.8 percent of aggravated assaults.
Hispanics are 28 percent of the population, and account for 33.8 percent of homicides, 43.1 percent of rapes, 29.1 percent of robberies, 33.8 percent of aggravated assaults.
It is of course blatant racism to notice or mention these statistics.
Source: Crime and Enforcement Activity in New York City, 2011 (NYPD)
I tried to link to this in my reference and it didn’t work.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/analysis_and_planning/crime_and_enforcement_activity.shtml
The Japanese do these things as well. They profile based upon attitude, behavior, as well as whether you look like you are a foreigner or immigrant (Korea/China/SouthEast Asia).
The Japanese have police boxes that police live in, presumably for 24/7, every mile or so. Thus reducing the centralized reaction time of American police/SWAT teams from 30-60 minutes to 3-10 minutes.
flat out unconstitutional