Stop & Frisk: The Truth
Ex-Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s abrupt and unconvincing flip-flop on stop-andfrisk doesn’t change the facts: This tactic is an essential of good policing, and the NYPD’s use of it under Bloomberg was not remotely racist.
Bloomberg plainly figures he has no shot at the 2020 Democratic nomination without this reversal. Even so, he limited his mea culpa: “I didn’t understand back then the full impact that stops were having on the black and Latino communities. I was totally focused on saving lives, but as we know: Good intentions aren’t good enough.”
Notice: He’s apologizing for saving lives, simply because opponents of effective policing managed to sell a narrative about one tactic’s supposed impact. In other words, he’s confessing his failure as a politician to counter a political attack.
Critics argue that crime was going down before the NYPD went big on stop-andfrisk, and kept on going down after it massively cut back. But that skips a lot of relevant info.
For starters, we don’t have hard data on stops before at least 2006, because the police only started recording stops obsessively once the City Council passed laws requiring it. And virtually every figure that denounced stop-and-frisk as racist had been making the same charge against all New York crime-control strategies from the day that Bill Bratton started cracking down on subway fare-beaters. (Heck, most of them still haven’t changed their tune.)
Yes, it’s clear that NYPD brass started pushing street cops to do more stops after Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Ray Kelly, took over on Jan. 1, 2002 — because they needed each beat cop to become more effective.
Why? This was right after 9/11, which forced the department to divert a huge share of resources to counter-terrorism. And Bloomberg was nonetheless shrinking the size of the force — because 9/11 also slammed the city economy, and thus the city budget, and he was drastically boosting spending on the public schools.
Today’s NYPD makes very few stops — but it also has a lot more cops on the beat than Ray Kelly ever did. And those cops are also far better supported. Bank settlements out after the 2008 mortgage meltdown have handed billions of dollars to Manhattan DA Cy Vance, who has passed much of it on to the NYPD to allow for much smarter, more precise policing.
Every officer today has far more data on who the bad guys are, and exactly what they look like. Other technology helps cops keep guns off the street without having to frisk anyone merely on suspicion — and, even so, the NYPD is struggling to keep shootings down citywide.
As for “racist”: Yes, police stopped far more black and Hispanic civilians than white or Asians ones — relative to their share of the overall city population. But not relative to their share of criminal suspects, as reported by crime victims (who are also disproportionately black and Latino).
Above all else, stop-and-frisk was about getting guns off the street. Shootings by blacks and Hispanics account for 98 percent of all city shootings.
Critics love to note that a federal judge ruled stop-and-frisk racist. They never mention that she literally refused to let the NYPD bring evidence about the racial breakdown of criminal suspects, or call experts to testify about those hard realities.
That egregious bias is why an appeals court tossed that judge off the case. But the factual record was never corrected because that’s when Bill de Blasio took over as mayor — having won by exploiting the “stop-andfrisk is racist” narrative to win — and settled the case.
Politics and propaganda trumped policy then. And, with Bloomberg’s craven flip, they’ve won yet again.