Stop-and-Frisk is, without question, one of the city's most polarizing police practices, so it comes as no surprise that the Museum of the City of New York was packed last night for a forum in which prominent New Yorkers gathered to discuss—and occasionally, bicker—about the tactic's effectiveness.
The four panelists—John Feinblatt, a chief advisor to Mayor Bloomberg; Franklin Zimring, UC Berkeley law professor and expert on New York City's crime reduction: Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College; and Councilman Jumaane Williams, who knows a thing or two about getting stopped by cops—bandied various opinions on the benefits of stop-and-frisk as an effective crime fighting tool, versus its controversial execution.
Stop-and-frisk's most vigorous defender was, of course, Feinblatt, who was quick to mimic his boss and point out New York's crime statistics compared to other "megacities" like Washington, D.C. and Chicago.
“There were 419 murders last year in NYC. If we had the crime rate of Washington D.C., today instead of having 419 murders, we’d have something like 1,196 murders," he said. "If we had the crime rate of Chicago today, instead of having 419 murders, we’d have 1,489 murders."
He went on to attribute the city's dramatic drop in crime since the '80s to a shift from "community policing" to what he called "hot spot policing," which focuses police pressure on specific locations where crime is particularly high.
"Many people say 'Well, the way you bring down crime is locking up people.' We don’t believe that’s true in New York City today," he said. "If you go to the 1980s where community policing was sort of the predominant approach, and you had 16,000, almost 17,000 murders, and your peak average daily population in Rikers was almost 19,000," he said, adding that today, it's slightly more than 12,000.
Councilman Williams, an outspoken advocate against the department's abundant use of stop-and-frisk, argued that there exists no concrete connection between increased use of the measure and cessation of crime. Moreover, he said, officials are constantly shifting the explanation for the purpose of stop-and-frisk, first claiming it was a tool for removing guns from the street, then that it was to prevent shootings and finally, that it was to lower the murder rate.
"They show the numbers, and say 'Look what we’re doing,' but they don’t tell you the cost of what we're doing," he said. "Stop-and-frisk has been an abject failure."
Williams also added that more guns are taken off the street from police sponsored buy-backs than random stops, 50 percent of which are made on the basis of "furtive movements."
"I have Tourettes—all I do is make 'furtive movements,' " he joked.
Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College, argued that the method is being overused. Many of the stops have no solid legal footing, he said, and rather than being based on "individualized reasonable suspicion," officers are simply blanketing specific areas, a practice the Supreme Court has ruled is unconstitutional.
"[The city] says 'Well, the stops mirror the race of alleged suspects in a serious crime.' But that’s not how the stops are being used. It’s not about stopping individuals who are believed to be wanted for a particular crime," he said. "It’s a broad, risk-based, place-oriented form of stopping, where officers are told, 'Go out and stop everybody in this place at this time of day who is, say, a young man. We need to have a more nuanced approach."
Williams acknowledged that he was not opposed to stop-and-frisk, as a tool, but rather, its overly aggressive implementation.
"It needs to be there so police officers can do their jobs," he said. But I’m against the current policy of stop, question and frisk that is not constitutional. It's not even a deterrent."
