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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.
Because focusing your suspicions on someone based on their socio-economic conditions (wealth, race, family, friends, etc.) as they relate to a specific crime is a very, very different matter from *detaining* someone based on those criteria.
Self-fulfilling prophecy for one thing. If cops believe the majority of crimes are committed by cubans, and spend 90% of their time in cuban neighborhoods frisking cuban immigrants then 90% of their arrests will be cubans. This will serve as a confirmation bias to further harass cubans, because 90% of criminals are cubans.
The vast majority of prostitutes are female. Please submit to your doctor for intro-vaginal camera implantation, female scum.
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.
Not to mention the negative effects that such behaviour would have on the cuban areas and on the mentality of the people living in them, which then makes it more likely that they will live up to the stereotype that has been formed of them.
Think about it... black people are -no- different to us in any way except their appearance. The number of people that escape that trap and become highly successful proves it. So what's different? The people that are like that are like that for no reason other than they have grown up believing that is the slot in which they are placed.
Plus there are plenty of equivalents in every other population group... but the ones that look like you blend into the crowd while those that look different stand out. Therefore you ignore the first and focus on the latter, falsely believing only the latter exist.
I've always wondered how something can be racist if it is true.
Because complaints of "racism" is now how you stop people from telling the truth.
13% of the U.S. population is black but they commit 50% of all murders and 55% of all robberies. But that's just the national average. In some areas it's much worse. In Chicago for example, blacks and hispanics combined are responsible for 96% of all murders. In St. Paul, Minnesota the population is 13% black but they are responsible for 70% of all crimes.
And so on, and so on . . . . . . .
When minorities stop committing a disproportionate amount of crime the police will leave them alone.
That doesn't really work with murder and gang violence. You can't hide gunshots and dead bodies from society. You can massage arrest stats and crime stats for drugs, gambling, prostitution, and even burglaries and auto-theft. Let a few prostitutes go because it's not worth the hassle. Knock down some felony thefts into petty larceny.
Ever seen an arrest sheet for a kid who fires at police with a gun? Kids in gangs have huge arrest sheets. Dozens of violent arrests but all knocked down to minor crimes. It hides the stats and makes NYC look safer. Then these kids get out into the streets and eventually are killed by police after a few robberies, murders, and rapes. All the gang violence by kids like Shaaliver Douse and Kimani Gray are hidden from society until it is too late.
But you can't realistically turn a murder into something else unless you really stretch the truth. You can't say that a dead body filled with bullets was a suicide or a hunting accident in NYC. So these magic fake stats that the police use rarely apply to murder. A body is a body. We are seeing this with the Ft. Hood mass shooting. Obama refuses to call it terrorism because it counts negatively towards his anti-terror stats. So he classifies that as 'workplace violence' when an admitted terrorist is firing into crowds of people screaming 'Allah Akbar'.
The reason why police profile certain races, certain age groups, certain dress types, and other attributes and behaviors, is that those help them narrow down the likely perpetrator of a gang crime. Gang violence in NYC, LA, Detroit, Chicago, is what causes the majority of street murders. Stop and Frisk was meant to profile gang members and then allow police to search them for weapons. It's solved a considerable number of murders. And prevented a considerable number of murders.
The majority of murders solved and prevented by Stop and Frisk have been of black victims. Because black on black crime is almost an epidemic in large urban areas in the United States.
Sorry for replying to my own post...
>> In my view, police-eye view cameras should be completely mandatory.
For clarification, the footage should be available to everyone as part of their own defense. If you are accused of a crime, the police must give you the footage in exactly the same way other evidence must be made available. It doesn't matter the crime, even failing to signal for a lane change, or whatever else. Along the lines of "pics or it didn't happen".
This should also include the entire transaction inside police 'interview' rooms. If they invite you inside for a little chat the entire video should be available to you and your lawyer. Many times police will coerce a 'confession' out of somebody through dubious means, the mandatory video would prevent false claims and help eliminate bad cops. Everybody wins.
Cameras are so cheap that police policy should be that all police interactions are recorded. If the cop claims he saw you do something then it should be on the glasses camera. If the video is missing from the record, the police shouldn't prosecute and juries should have a serious question of "Why did the cop not generate a recording of this? What is the cop trying to hide?"
This is different from a surveillance state. It is not "big brother watching you." It is watching big brother. As the NYT article linked to describes, when people fraudulently claim police abuse they give up after seeing the tape. On the other side, after police see their mistakes they will drop the cases because they know they'll lose in court, and become better and more honest cops.
Everybody wins.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
You can't say that a dead body filled with bullets was a suicide or a hunting accident in NYC.
Sure you can:
Dick Cheney was visiting the city.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
We have so many laws I wouldn't be surprised if most crime was actually *accidental*.
"I'm sorry, your honor, I had no idea that was illegal." should be a valid defense against some laws these days.
1. Blacks commit violent crimes four to eight times the white rate. Hispanic commit violent crimes at approximately three times the white rate, and Asians at one half to three quarters the white rate.
2. Blacks are as much more violent than whites (four to eight times) as men are more violent than women.
3. Of the approximately 1,700,000 interracial crimes of violence involving blacks and whites, 90 percent are committed by blacks against whites. Blacks are 50 times more likely than whites to commit individual acts of interracial violence. They are up to 250 times more likely than whites to engage in multiple-offender or group interracial violence.
4. There is more black-on-white than black-on-black violent crime. Fifty-six percent of violent crimes committed by blacks have white victims. Only two to three percent of violent crimes committed by whites have black victims.
5. Blacks are twice as likely to commit hate crimes.
*Sources
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States
Bureau of Justice Statistics, Criminal Victimization
Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hate Crime Statistics
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An "inconvenient truth"?
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
So I wondered what the actual statistics where the other day and here's the lose results of what I found, it took all of like 5 minutes of googling to find it, so basically anyone with a strong opinion on the subject against it is being intellectually dishonest.
BUT!
Firstly, the density and locations of stop and frisk (properly termed terry frisks after ohio v terry, a SCOTUS case that made this legal) fairly accurately map NYCs violent crime locations, particularly their homicides. The same places you're most likely to be terry frisked are also the places where you're most likely to be shot (as guns account for the majority of homicides there). Moreover, statistically speaking, sans grand larceny where the victim is most likely to be white, if you're a victim of basically any crime in NYC, you're probably black, or potentially hispanic. This holds especially true with homicide et cetera, with greater than 50% of the victims being black IIRC. Furthermore, if you're the victim of such a crime, your attacker is generally black.. or hispanic. With blacks making up 61% of the perpetrators of homicides from 2003 to 2011.
So, stop and frisk occurs largely where the crimes, particularly homicides occur. The target and the perpetrator are statistically black or hispanic. So yes, if you don't consider what legitimate purposes the police might have, it could seem racist. However, once you look at the data, you're pretty much forced to recognize why they seem 'targeted'
Left is crime rates, darker is more crime. Right is stop and frisk data, notice the correlation:
http://i.imgur.com/Dztosey.jpg
The same thing, but looking up towards harlem and the upper east side and such, where we see again the pattern of violent crime and incidence of stop and frisk occurs:
http://i.imgur.com/nJ6K7z9.png
Here we have murders plotted out 2003-2011 in NYC by race, blue dots are black perpetrators and gold are hispanic. Again cross-reference this with the stop and frisk data and you'll find the pattern again holds:
http://i.imgur.com/lpaYmPU.png
That isnt to say that NYPD isn't biased however, its just not against blacks and hispanics, its against gays. We find that the terry stop data when cross-referenced shows pretty clearly that the places with high volumes of violent crimes, particularly homicides, have high terry stop counts as well, UNLESS you're in an area that also shares a high volume of homosexuality, then the volume of stop and frisks drops:
http://i.imgur.com/gqmDI3m.png
So yeah, reality shows a pretty objective picture, its just that people dont want the truth, they want to show that cops and the government are racist institutions as justifications for doing whatever it is people want to do.
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!
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.
What happen to those statistics when you change black and white to poor and well off? How about the density of poor black people near wealthy white people? Also, how about listing links to the statistics you offer? I did a cursory search for the stats that you claim, and basically you are completely full of it:
You: "Blacks are twice as likely to commit hate crimes"
Fact: "Whites are more than twice as likely to commit hate crimes"
See link:
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2011/narratives/offenders
"In 2011, the races of the 5,731 known hate crime offenders were as follows:
59.0 percent were white.
20.9 percent were black."
You: "Blacks commit violent crimes four to eight times the white rate."
Fact: "White individuals were arrested more often for violent crimes than individuals of any other race, accounting for 59.4 percent of those arrests."
See link:
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/table-43
Basically you are a racist who is making up statistics. If you are racist, well there's nothing I can do about it, but don't spread lies to try to make others racist.
So yeah, reality shows a pretty objective picture, its just that people dont want the truth, they want to show that cops and the government are racist institutions as justifications for doing whatever it is people want to do.
Either you haven't looked very hard for data, or you've done an interesting job cherry picking information to reflect the reality you want to portray.
Here's the results of what I found, it took all of like 5 minutes of googling to find it, so basically anyone with a strong opinion on the subject supporting the NY Police is being intellectually dishonest.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/05/22/2046451/white-people-stopped-by-new-york-police-are-more-likely-to-have-guns-or-drugs-than-minorities/
It's unlikely that the appropriate lesson to take from these findings is that stops of white people should increase because they are more likely to carry weapons and drugs. Rather, they suggest that police are excessively targeting minorities. Officers may be netting more successful stops of white New Yorkers because they are only likely to stop a white person when they actually suspect that person of committing a crime
89% of stops result in no action.
That's hundreds of thousands of people who are harassed by the NYPD for no reason other than being young and not-white.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Thank the move away from requiring mens rea and toward strict liability in recent laws for this. Because, you know, it's easier to prosecute if the perp had no knowledge of, or intention of, committing a crime. We need to fill up those for-profit prisons, and disenfranchise as many voters as possible, and there are only so many actual criminals out there.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
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.
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.