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Federal Judge Rules NYC "Stop and Frisk" Violated Rights
In a mixed ruling for Fourth Amendment rights, a federal judge today ruled that NYC's Stop-and-Frisk program violated constitutional rights due to disproportionately targeting minorities. However, despite the program being unconstitutional in its current form, it will not stop. From the New York Times: " Judge Scheindlin also ordered a number of other remedies, including a pilot program in which officers in at least five precincts across the city will wear body-worn cameras in an effort to record street encounters. She also ordered a 'joint remedial process' — in essence, a series of community meetings — to solicit public input on how to reform stop-and-frisk. ... The Supreme Court had long ago ruled that stop-and-frisks were constitutionally permissible under certain conditions, and Judge Scheindlin stressed that she was 'not ordering an end to the practice.' But she said that changes were needed to ensure that the street stops were carried out in a manner that “protects the rights and liberties of all New Yorkers, while still providing much needed police protection.' ... The judge found that the New York police were too quick to deem as suspicious behavior that was perfectly innocent, in effect watering down the legal standard required for a stop. "
The ruling itself (PDF). Bloomberg is furious about the decision, and the city, naturally, intends to appeal.
Just have a directive that all city officials will be frisked at least once randomly each day. I'm sure once people see their public officials undergoing the same unwarranted searches they will be perfectly fine with it... assuming the public official don't quit first.
I've always wondered how something can be racist if it is true. I don't know what the percentages in NYC are of people who commit crimes in certain areas and what races those folks tend to be, but if 70% of the crimes in an area are committed by folks of a certain race, whatever that race may be, why does it not make sense to focus your suspicions while policing on people of that race?
I remember reading an article showing that based on the descriptions of those actually committing crimes, visible minorities were significantly under-represented in the people frisked. If this "Stop and Frisk" this is supposed to be random or something, it sounds like there's a bias, but based on trying to stop crime, apparently not.
So if they frisk white people with the same frequency it become constitutional?
Ridiculous.
Either it's constitutional or it's not. And the way I read the fourth amendment there isn't much question it's not.
So...it has come to this...
At this point, I don't even know why we where clothes while we're out in public. Just think about how many lives could be saved if nobody could hide weapons or anything else illegal under their clothes!
I mean, I hear a lot of counters to slippery-slope being a fallacy. While that might be true, in theory, it sure seems like in practice, it is all around us, especially when it comes to rights that the culture of the day don't find as important (right to privacy and right to bear arms are the big two in NYC).
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Stop-and-frisk has one aim: Keep certain groups in fear and make sure they do not organize or start defending themselves by strongly implying that they have no rights and that their privacy can be invaded at any time and without any reason. It is a tried and true tactics, optimized by the Nazis and in Stalinism, but created much earlier.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Bloomberg and some here have justified the 4th amendment destroying policy as necessary to prevent crime, even though most of the people stopped have committed no crime and don't have a gun or drugs on them.
But since crime prevention is what he and others care most about and since the greatest concentration of wealth in the world has been lost due to Wall Street criminality will Bloomberg order his cops to visit the offices of investment bankers and wall street traders in Manhattan to stop and frisk them and search their computers to make sure they're not currently committing any crimes?
Yeah I didn't think so.
Stop and frisk only applies to minorities who don't have thousand dollar an hour attorney's on standby
Why did idiots keep electing him?
Sorry about that. Our bad. We now return you to your regularly scheduled frisking.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"In 98.5% of the 2.3 million frisks, no weapon was found,"
Wow... Who'd have thunk the US constitution mattered anymore in Obama's America.
First, you're looking at the wrong number mathematically. The proper statistic would be "X% of black people are criminals". Remember you're trying to estimate whether or not a particular person is a criminal, not who a particular crime was committed by. because a very small number of black people or white people are criminals race is not a good indicator that a particular person is engaging in criminal behavior.
Secondly, there are behaviors that are suspicious and other evidence. In my city, for example crack dealers circle the block on bicycles in the middle of the night. If X% of crack dealers are black, approximately X% of the people circling the block in the middle of the night will be black. If you focus on the specific suspicious behavior, you'll get more accurate results AND whatever racial proportion is correct will be looked at as a side effect, without ever considering race. So mathematically, it's best to ignore race when stronger indicators are available.
Lastly, other commentors have discussed the EFFECTS of racial profiling. Harassing people on racial grounds also has negative effects.
Interestingly, your concept of "true probabilities" DOES work for solving a specific crime. If, in a certain city, the italian mob does professional hits, then when investigating a professional hit it's mathematically correct to have a look at Italian mobsters. I'll say it - if young middle eastern men are normally the ones who hijack planes, it makes sense mathematically to check which young middle eastern men are booked on the flight, AFTER you have evidence that flight is involved in a hijacking attempt
It would be nice to believe our problem is lack of prescience on the part of the founders, leading to a failure of the system to forestall evil, illiterate, stupid supreme court justices.
But it isn't. The problem is supreme court justices (and politicians) who see the constitution as simply a bothersome obstacle, consider that they know better what the best governing principles are for the country than a bunch of long dead white guys of European heritage. There is also an extremely large contribution to decay of rights due to corruption.
Having said that, my impulse is also to impugn the ability of the founders to foresee the mechanisms of decay, but on reflection that is not fair. No one of that era could have foreseen the astonishing loss by the people of resolution and interest in their own rights.
“A lady asked Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin 'Well Doctor what have we got; a republic or a monarchy?'. 'A republic', replied the Doctor, 'if you can keep it.'”
-- notes of Dr. James McHenry, one of Maryland’s delegates to the constitutional convention.
Where is our Patrick Henry now?
What's really sad about this is that the act of frisking anyone without any fact-based suspicion is not considered a violation of the constitution. It's only the racial bias in the ways the stops were performed that makes it illegal.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Jesse Jackson, as quoted in the NY Times on12/12/93, by Times columnist Bob Herbert ( who is also black):
“Jesse Jackson is traveling the country with a tough anti-crime message that he is delivering to inner city youngsters. In Chicago, he said:
‘There is nothing more painful to me at this stage of my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
Anyone who has a shred of common sense can see that Bloomberg
likes to stick his nose it doesn't belong.
The good news is that Bloomberg has cancer and will be dead within
a year from today.
Seriously. Could we please stop cherry-picking which rights the Honorable King Bloomberg is allowed to violate? He goes after the 2nd Amendment and /. cheers. He goes after our soda and /. is mixed. When will people realize that Bloomberg is at the top of the 1%ers and is not out to help the "common man." That perspective should inform the sensible reader about everyone of his policies.
Happened to me last month or two ago. I just wrote an article for Slashdot about my experience, but after trying to submit it now, I think I'm gonna publish it on Reddit. No offense, it's just Really Long & has a Great Deal of Unicode, which is necessary when you get surrounded by 12 cops on Nicollet Mall & are approached by the Forensics Lady putting on some Rubber Gloves for the next part of attempting to hassle me for not being a criminal but still having the nerve to have long hair & Bluetooth.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
Very few crimes are being caught or prevented. Gun seizures are low. Weed busts have nothing to do with public safety.
NYC police chief Ray Kelly admitted to state senator Eric Adams in 2010 "[Kelly] stated that he targeted and focused on that group because he wanted to instil fear in them that every time that they left their homes they could be targeted by police". It is, in other words, deliberately intended as racist.
The Supreme Court had long ago ruled that stop-and-frisks were constitutionally permissible under certain conditions,
The court fucked up on this, because they didn't limit it those conditions that the fourth amendment permits.
When an organization commits millions of counts of civil rights violations, being told to stop is NOT enough. At the very least, the mayor, the police chief, and the top three or four layers of NYPD management should be behind bars for this. Any patrolman who took part should be dismissed and banned from any position of public trust in the future.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Not to mention, that any statute that purports to ban firearms is unconstitutional, and is therefore not a law at all.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If you're interested in crime prevention and care equally about all citizens, you'll have to insist that police should spend more effort protecting blacks. That requires good relations with the community, to get tips about who's running the crack house and whose kid is at a turning point. The police won't get those good relations by stopping people at random and treating them like convicts or airline passengers.
As I mentioned in another comment here, Ray Kelly himself said outright that the purpose was to make Those People afraid to leave their homes.
Nor is it legal under Terry vs. Ohio, which requires articulable facts to justify a stop. Instead, the NYC police have been using "walking furtively" as an excuse.
Funny how "racial profiling" is OK in the minds of liberal politicians for their cities but bad when done in a place like Arizona. I guess it's racism in Arizona and "just stopping the most likely offenders" in NYC.
Emperor Bloomberg will declare Judge Scheindlin an 'Enemy Of The City' then order the killing of Judge Scheindlin for the "Safety Of The City."
Is it really any wonder, that the two good-looking, but otherwise horrible Presidents have hailed from the city?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
When these searches return results of 10% carrying either/or illegal weapons or drugs that may in itself justify probable cause as the motive.
It turns out that these searches are a very efficient way to catch criminals and with arrest rates as high as they are it would seem like the cops are doing exactly the right thing.
Really it does not boil down to race at all. It does boil down to poor people committing exactly the types of crimes that are easily caught whereas more fortunate people commit crimes that are much harder to observe or detect. Meanwhile the tax payer is getting efficient use of police funding. For NYC the drop in crime has been spectacular. To me it seems that any tool or method the police use will be attacked if it is effective. Hate cams, hate drones, hate stun guns, hate computerized surveillance and then scream your head off when you are a victim of crime. Seriously, who is for crime and who hates crime?
If 96% of all murders in Chicago are committed against blacks, then aren't these frisk and stops disproportionally helping blacks? That's racism. They should stop that, and devote more time to other crimes like burglary that affect an equal amount of victims by race.
It brings me great joy to see such injustice by your government to your people as well now, I used to think your government only used its thugs to harass us and rape our resources..
you can have a taste of what your marshal law is like as so many of us have overseas
Laws have to be applied equally to every group. When 87% of the people stopped and frisked are young Black or Hispanic males would suggest that these two groups were singled out and that may be illegal.
Relying on raw numbers like that to draw assumptions is dangerous and may mistake the cause for the effect. You can get the same numbers from completely innnocent events- one example I can think of is if there was a crime wave in a particular area which the police are focusing on quelling. The police may, acting in good faith treat everyone in that area the same regardless of race but that area just so happens to be predominantly populated by Blacks and Hispanics. In those circumstances it would not be surprising if a larger number of the arrestees slant towards Blacks and Hispanics.
What I'm saying is that looking at pure percentages is deceptive if we don't take into account the context in which that figure was calculated or arrived at.
no weapon was found
We can stop passing useless gun laws then.
And I think the Judge was right. If you read the Judgment, your argument is the same one the NYC police made.
Right at the start, the Judge said that even if racial profiling is effective at combating crime, being unconstitutional it cannot be used :-
The Judge also found as a fact that the stops were not effective. The uncontested facts are :-
The key point to note is that although whites were stopped with much less frequency than blacks or Hispanics, the percentage of them found to be carrying weapons or contraband were higher compared to blacks or Hispanics. So you can't even make the argument that black or Hispanics ought to be stopped more than whites because they were more likely to carry weapons or contraband, because this is untrue.
The Judge also disagreed that it was fair to look at crime rates :-
To put it in simple terms, if you happen to be black or Hispanic and have been clean all your life, you wouldn't like it if you were stopped simply because you are black or Hispanic.
My gut reaction was originally the same as you, but having read the judgment in more detail I cannot say that the decision was wrong or unjust. I hope Bloomberg will at least read the same judgment.
Bloom tends to want to run New York as he does one of his households. I don't think he really understands that Americans have rights. Or he just does not respect the rights of others. I like how he flipped the script and said that the very people who the law target are the ones being protected by this practice (guess he didn't want to say the upper class). I was like, really !
Lets not talk about how _you_ define racism and look at how it is defined in dictionaries.
Like in the Oxford Disctionary.
Or Dictionary.com
Racism is fundamentally a belief. As in you believe that (insert race of choice) is fundamentally superior to (lesser race). It is therefore racism to suggest that members of a particular race are more likely to be criminals purely on the basis of their race.
If you feel so strongly about it, I think it is even more important for you to stay and make yourself heard. Fight their impassioned hyperbole with calm logic. Confront their FUD with links, facts and figures. Skewer their fallacies with reasoned arguments.
I have no illusions that you will ever win over these trolls to your point of view. However, there is a chance that the silent majority who read but do not post might be swayed enough not to fall for their false teachings.
Therefore the word 'disproportionate' is incorrect. It is entirely proportionate.
There is a SIMPLE solution: SEPARATION.
In a mixed ruling for Fourth Amendment rights, a federal judge today ruled that NYC's Stop-and-Frisk program violated constitutional rights due to disproportionately targeting minorities.
This is a real stretch.
So they are making a statistical argument (using a fast and loose statistical technique of highly dubious value); that if someone measures more people who are minorities to be affected by something, then it must mean that the thing is discriminatory.
Whereas, in reality: obviously the so called disparate impact would more likely be a coincidence with no discrimination involved.
The ruling against it on this basis sucks; because that means they can still have a stop and frisk policy.
They just have to make it intentionally discriminatory by specifically targetting non-minorities; to overcome the false perception of disparate effects.
To pay off all the people who had their rights violated. Walking is probable cause, When your a Nazi.
Police that have been at their job for years know damn well who commits crimes and who is carrying weapons. Before, their hands were tied to do anything about it. They might get it wrong a small percentage of the time but the reason this program hasn't been instantly crushed is because it works. If you're some sort of outwardly seemingly high-risk anything (age, race, socioeconomic level, clothing style, sleep pattern, etc) then stop living in a high crime area where people specifically just like you are committing crimes. That will stop drawing suspicion to yourself, obviously.
That could also be, because people knew they ran a risk of being frisked, and thus didn't carry a weapon on them. Which may or may not have prevented crime.
Bottom line is: as in IT-security, preventative measures prevent intrinsically. The only way to tell how much they prevent, is to run an experiment double-blind on other, similar, unprotected environments.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Cries like a little baby whenever he can't dictate how everyone should run their lives.
No respect for anyone living in NYC anymore. Obviously it's a city full of idiots, if there were any brains there at all they wouldn't keep electing that clown.
Bloomberg is a damn globalist traitor. If the police would respect the law and stay within the boundries instead of skirting their responsibility, then issues like this would not come up.
Frankly, the courts are responsible for being so stupid and being lead like puppets by the police so the police could get away with whatever they want.
They better stay clear of me or I will keep them in court for the next 20 years just to make a point.
...but won't stop?
So the constitution is more of a handy reference guide than a directive. Eventually it should become like the Yellow Pages - we can use it to prop up broken furniture.
Your argument is that the NYC stops were unlawful, and you provided the background/context. In that case, I agree with you! You seem to have misunderstood the point I was making, however.
I was responding to parent post, who said :-
Unlike you, the parent post provided no links, no references, no attributions, no context. He was simply quoting the raw numbers, and relying on the raw numbers to draw assumptions. That was my 'beef', if you will. To repeat, my response to the parent post was that "What I'm saying is that looking at pure percentages is deceptive if we don't take into account the context in which that figure was calculated or arrived at. "