Federal Judge Rules NYC "Stop and Frisk" Violated Rights 308
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.
Bloomberg, I have a great PR idea for you! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bloomberg, I have a great PR idea for you! (Score:5, Funny)
We have a saying in the SF Bay Area:
Two wrongs don't make a right...
but three rights make a left
Re:Bloomberg, I have a great PR idea for you! (Score:5, Insightful)
So now the cops will just do 'fake' s&s's on a whole bunch of white people to make the overall percentages more reasonable.
By 'fake', I mean the cop will stop a random white person, say they want to do a s&s, maybe touch the person on the shoulder, maybe ask to look in their purse, and they are on their way [unlike the regular full ball-sack fondling search].
This will have to dual effect of technically meeting the requirement of not solely targeting minorities, and making white go "why are they complaining about these searches? I/someone I know went through one of these searches and it was trivial."
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You made a good joke and all but in all seriousness. No man is above the law?
I'm a New Yorker and live in Manhattan for many many years. I'm white some what preppy, and a pot head.
I've accidentally blown pot in a cops face before walking around a corner on the way home! They've seen me buy it on the streets when I was a kid and you name the kind of trouble it would look like you were in I've been seen standing next to! (I've changed ;) ).
All I've ever been given is a stern stare.
I know many black people
Re:Bloomberg, I have a great PR idea for you! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if the idea is that you should stop and frisk the people who are most likely to be committing crimes, then at least in Chicago, you would absolutely justified in stopping and frisking every city official.
I seem to recall that a Chicago city official is something like 17 times more likely to be convicted of a felony than the average Chicagoan. That exceeds any racial or ethnic basis for crime statistics by a wide margin. That's even greater than the likelihood that the perpetrator of a violent crime will be a man instead of a woman.
Yes, that's a very good idea to start profiling city officials.
What's really sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's really sad (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What's really sad (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What's really sad (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
What's DOUBLY sad about this is that a court found it unconstitutional and LET IT CONTINUE!
The Supreme Court has said that unconstitutional laws are void from the start and do not authorize anything. Government functionaries claiming to operate under such laws and interpretations have no special standing - they'reperforming the act as a private citizen.
If *I* stopped and frisked somebody it would be several felonies - which means it is if the cops do it, too.
You need to interpret figures based on context (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:You need to interpret figures based on context (Score:5, Informative)
Read the memorandum in the case.
Many of those stops were on Broadway. I've walked down those very same streets many times. I'm white and I've never been stopped, even when I was walking home late at night. Black guys get stopped.
The thing that impressed me about their testimony is that they sound like really cool guys. They're black law students, medical students, teachers, social workers, etc. They're getting hassled by cops all the time, they're tired of it, and they're responding in reasonable ways. The cops are unreasonably arbitrary and rude, and according to the judge's decision, the cops repeatedly broke the law. These guys filed protests with the police department, complained to the ACLU, and finally took the cops to court. They've got balls. They're complaining that they're being singled out all the time because they're black, and if you read the court documents, they made a pretty good argument.
DAVID FLOYD, et al. vs. THE CITY OF NEW YORK,
David Floyd, et al. vs. The City of New York.
OPINION AND ORDER
08 Civ. 1034 (SAS)
Case 1:08-cv-01034-SAS-HBP Document 373
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/08/12/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-decision.html [nytimes.com]
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/750446/stop-and-frisk-memoranda.pdf [documentcloud.org]
Re: (Score:3)
Also worth noting here is that these guys were not convicted and trying to suppress evidence leading to their conviction. These are completely innocent people, treated like criminals by police solely because they were not white.
Re:You need to interpret figures based on context (Score:5, Informative)
This is from the memorandum in the case. There are many other accounts like this.
DAVID FLOYD, et al. vs. THE CITY OF NEW YORK,
David Floyd, et al. vs. The City of New York.
OPINION AND ORDER
08 Civ. 1034 (SAS)
Case 1:08-cv-01034-SAS-HBP Document 373
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/08/12/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-decision.html [nytimes.com]
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/750446/stop-and-frisk-memoranda.pdf [documentcloud.org]
1. Unconstitutional Stop and Frisk
a. Leroy Downs
i. Findings of Fact
Leroy Downs is a black male resident of Staten Island in his mid-thirties. On the evening of August 20, 2008, Downs arrived home from work and, before entering his house, called a friend on his cell phone while standing in front of a chain link fence in front of his house. Downs used an earpiece connected to the phone by a cord, and held the cell phone in one hand and the black mouthpiece on the cord in the other.
Downs saw a black Crown Victoria drive past and recognized it as an unmarked police car. The car stopped, reversed, and double-parked in front of Downs’s house, at which point Downs told his friend he would call back. Two white plainclothes officers, later identified as Officers Scott Giacona and James Mahoney, left the car and approached Downs.
One officer said in an aggressive tone that it looked like Downs was smoking weed. They told him to “get the [fuck] against the fence,” then pushed him backwards until his back was against the fence. Downs did not feel free to leave.
Downs explained that he was talking on his cell phone, not smoking marijuana, that he is a drug counselor, and that he knows the captain of the 120th Precinct. Without asking permission, the officers patted down the outside of his clothing around his legs and torso, reached into his front and back pants pockets and removed their contents: a wallet, keys, and a bag of cookies from a vending machine. The officers also searched his wallet.
After the officers failed to find any contraband, they started walking back to the car. Downs asked for their badge numbers. The officers “laughed [him] off” and said he was lucky they did not lock him up. Downs said he was going to file a complaint, and one of them responded by saying, “I’m just doing my [fucking] job.” Charles Joseph, a friend of Downs who lives on the same block, witnessed the end of the stop. After the officers drove away, Downs walked to the 120th Precinct to file a complaint.
Downs told Officer Anthony Moon at the front desk that he wanted to make a complaint and described what had happened. Officer Moon said that he could not take the complaint because Downs did not have the officers’ badge numbers, and that Downs should file a complaint with the CCRB. As Downs left the station he saw the two officers who stopped him driving out of the precinct in their Crown Victoria, and he wrote down its license plate number on his hand.
Downs then returned to the station. He tried to give Officer Moon the license plate information, but Officer Moon said that he should give the information to the CCRB instead. Downs waited at the station until he saw the two officers come through the back door with two young black male suspects.
Downs pointed out the two officers to Officer Moon and asked him, “Can you get their badge numbers?” Officer Moon talked to the officers and then told Downs “maybe you can ask them.” At that point, Downs went outside again and took a picture of the license plate on the Crown Victoria, which was the same number he had written on his hand.
Eventually, Downs spoke with a supervisor, who said he would try to get the officers’ badge numbers and then call Downs. The call never came. Having spent a few hours at the station, Downs went home.
I don't understand (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re: I don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: I don't understand (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re: I don't understand (Score:4, Funny)
There must be some mistake. When you make guns illegal, there shouldn't be any gun violence at all. I'm sure the criminals were first in line to turn in their guns when NYC made them illegal.
Re: I don't understand (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [thinkprogress.org]
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.
Re: I don't understand (Score:4, Insightful)
Correlation isnt causation, and even if your incidences stack up perfectly that still does not translate into the color of your skin amounting to individual probable cause to search you, and in America we do not permit searches without such individual cause for suspicion.
Furthermore, the 'crimes' they are catching here are simple possession of controlled substances or second amendment implements. So the poor black/hispanic guy that is stuck living here and has to walk on these streets where his chances of getting shot are relatively high to begin with, and he either arms himself or gets high, depending on which type he is. And now he gets randomly stopped and caught and boom! another poor person converted into a criminal.
Much easier and more lucrative for the imprisonment-industrial complex to deal with than trying to figure out who is actually committing murders and arrest THEM and convict them. Those cases might get complicated, and require police work.
Judge says your argument is a logical fallacy (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
The City and its highest officials believe that blacks and Hispanics should be stopped at the same rate as their proportion of the local criminal suspect population. But this reasoning is flawed because the stopped population is overwhelmingly innocent — not criminal. There is no basis for assuming that an innocent population shares the same characteristics as the criminal suspect population in the same area.
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.
Or to put it another way, just because a black neighborhood has a high rate of crime, you still can't suspend the Fourth Amendment to fight crime in that neighborhood.
Re: (Score:3)
With blacks making up 61% of the convictions of homicides from 2003 to 2011.
FTFY. I hope you understand how the number of "perpetrators" and "convictions" are only related by the amount of money the defendant has to spend on lawyers.
Re:I don't understand (Score:4, Insightful)
The vast majority of violent crimes are males. Please submit for your daily frisking, male scum.
Re: (Score:3)
I think vast majority of people questioned or stopped for violent crimes are also male. Are you insinuating that that shouldn't be the case?
Re: (Score:3)
No. But where they stopped because they are actually suspected of a crime? Or were they stopped because they are male and obviously are guilty of SOME crime, they just aren't sure what yet.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:I don't understand (Score:5, Funny)
The vast majority of prostitutes are female. Please submit to your doctor for intro-vaginal camera implantation, female scum.
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I think we should start frisking police officers and politicians.
Re:I don't understand (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I don't understand (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:I don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I don't understand (Score:5, Funny)
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.
-
Re:I don't understand (Score:4, Insightful)
Citation?
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The majority of murders solved and prevented by Stop and Frisk have been of black victims.
Is there any evidence that Stop and Frisk actually prevented or solved any crimes? I understand that 92% of searches were total misses, which means 8% have hit "something". But somehow I doubt a lot of them were fleeing murderers and not people with unregistered guns or with pot.
Re: (Score:3)
We can look at how many bombs the TSA has found vs. the number they let through. We know of 2 actual bombs and several dummy test bombs they have let through. We know of a few incidents where they stopped something innocent believing it to be a bomb. I am not aware of any case where they have actually found a bomb or anything else that was newsworthy.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
All of which is rooted in rampant poverty. But, by all means, let's continue playing cowboys and indians because it's a hell of a lot more fun than actually fixing the underlying problem.
Re: (Score:3)
In other words, non-Cubans get a pass and their crimes remain invisible, right?
That might work for some crimes, but not for those with obvious victims and villains. Murders, for example, c
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Because it's attacking a stereotype and completely disregards the civil rights of the people you search. The police can't possibly have reasonable suspicion that every black person in NYC is a potential criminal. It's the same bullshit that the TSA uses to search/scan everyone who comes through, and it's broken there as well.
Re: (Score:2)
I presume you are not in a race where you are suspected and targeted for increased frisking not because you actually look suspicious, or because you fit the description of someone who was at the scene of a crime, but just because the color of your skin.
Re:I don't understand (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice example, but it seems the answer is still the black guy [wikipedia.org].
Nice example, but your single data point proves nothing. Somebody saw a guy busting into a house and called police, and she even said it could be the guy who lives there---she wasn't sure. An officer showed up and explained that he was looking into a report of a break-in. Gates became belligerent and abusive, so he got arrested.
You're a lawyer? I looked up the Massachusetts disorderly conduct statute that Gates was charged with (and there were a few articles by lawyers about this issue). Disorderly conduct required making a public disturbance. Gates was not in public. He was on his own porch, in the middle of his own fenced-in plot. There was nobody from the public around for him to disturb. He had a right to be disorderly on his own private property where he was bothering no one else. They had to throw the charge out, because it was invalid on its face. They couldn't have prevailed.
Gates became belligerent and abusive, so he got arrested.
If Gates had behaved perfectly, he wouldn't have been belligerent and abusive. But people in that situation often do get angry and offended.
Gates had no legal obligation to behave perfectly. He only had a legal obligation to follow the law, and it's not against the law to become "belligerent and abusive" in his own home under those circumstances.
On the other hand, Crowley had no right to arrest Gates. "Disrespecting a cop" is not a crime.
Gates also asked Crowley repeatedly for his name and badge number, and Crowley repeatedly refused. In New York City, that would be grounds for discipline, as you can read in the Scheindlin memorandum. In Gates' account, his being "belligerent and abusive" consisted of repeatedly demanding Crowley's name and badge number -- which was Gates' legal right.
It was a false arrest, and I wish Gates had settled the debate by suing Cambridge for false arrest.
Then the racial-industrial complex jumped in to milk it for maximum gain.
I'm glad they did. Do you want to live in a world where somebody can get arrested for repeatedly asking a cop for his badge number? I don't. They're protecting me. They're protecting the rest of us. They're protecting you.
Then the Agitator-in-Chief weighed in with his blanket statement that Gates was right and Crowley was wrong.
You're a lawyer? What was Obama's "blanket statement"? Citation needed. I thought Obama stuck up for Crowley when he shouldn't have, out of inappropriate even-handedness.
I somehow suspect you're not a defense lawyer. Or a constitutional lawyer.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
From the article:
"During police stops, she found, blacks and Hispanics "were more likely to be subjected to the use of force than whites, despite the fact that whites are more likely to be found with weapons or contraband."
So is it racist? Blacks and Hispanics are subject to more force, despite being less likely to carry arms/contraband. So shouldn't white people be the ones being stopped an frisked more than anyone else?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
The thing you have to remember is how crime statistics are compiled. If 70% of drug offenders are black, for instance, that does not mean that 70% of all people who use drugs are black. It means 70% of those who are arrested are black. If you focus the bulk of your efforts on black people because 70% of drug offenders are black, then you'll just continue to incarcerate black people while white investment bankers continue doing blow. This is what's racist about it: you're now at risk of targeting one p
Re:I don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I don't understand (Score:5, Informative)
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
----
An "inconvenient truth"?
Strat
Re:I don't understand (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Guess who's disproportionately victims of crime? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Economically speaking, you are right of course. Target the mitigation-measures where they have most impact. The problem is that you cause people fitting the pattern without actually doing something wrong to be targeted as well. Think of it as discrimination against minorities. For example, think of it as discrimination against non-criminals in a certain race group. That is the real problem, discrimination against certain groups because of characteristics that are not their fault. The results will be that th
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The problem is that you cause people fitting the pattern without actually doing something wrong to be targeted as well. Think of it as discrimination against minorities. For example, think of it as discrimination against non-criminals in a certain race group. That is the real problem, discrimination against certain groups because of characteristics that are not their fault. The results will be that these people are intimidated, have their personal integrity and privacy violated, while doing nothing wrong whatsoever.
only needs to be dropped to include all of us. Believe it or not, white people DO get abused by the police as well. When a white person complains about this, they generally get the equivalent of "shut up whitey, you are the oppressor." This doesn't make things better for minorities, it shuns potential allies. Possibly more allies than in the group who is shunning them. And why do they shun these potential all
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Mathematically, it does make sense. But the American system is not designed to be the optimum system for incarcerating the guilty, it is designed to provide a maximum protection of rights to all citizens while making the minimum concessions necessary to keep law and order. One feature of the system is "innocent until proven guilty." And this applies to collection of evidence as well, i.e., a warrant based on some substantive reasons is required before searching my property; it can not be done as a matter
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Because some people decided that it wasn't a good idea to judge a person based on his or her skin colour, sex, etc. No matter who you are, I can come up with some demographic you belong to that is more likely to do something undesirable, so that sort of profiling can be used to justify anything.
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Like the summary said, "the New York police were too quick to deem as suspicious behavior that was perfectly innocent". So they focused their suspicions on race, and didn't focus on real suspicious behavior.
It's true the cops focused on one race.
It's true the cops didn't focus on people of other races who had indicators that tie much more strongly to crime (Or did you think the white and hispanic gangs of New York don't wear their own gang symbols or colors. The cops damned well know what these are, and act
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70% of the crimes might well be committed by one race according to the FBI statistics, but the majority of the members of that race aren't criminals. Even if it WAS true that 70% of black people, it would be unethical and immoral to treat the entire race any differently, since it subjects that other 30% to punishment for sins they haven't committed.
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Interestingly, when you look at the stop-and-frisk statistics, it turned out that white people were the ones most likely to be committing a crime. Clearly they need to be stopping more white people.
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It isn't racist to observe that black males are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime. It is racist when you start treating black males as criminals with no other evidence other than the fact they are black.
no, for three reasons (Score:2)
Secondly, there are behaviors that are suspicious and other evidence. In my city, for exam
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The reason is there is not a whole lot of evidence out there to suggest that race is a driving factor, as appose to other factors like education levels, environmental health, and economic opportunities that for historical reasons may also correlate with certain racial groups.
Consider: You have 1000 identical little plastic boxes. You open 200 of them and insert a little slip of paper with the word "crook" written on it. You open the others and insert a little slip of paper that says "good citizen" on it.
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It doesn't matter if it's true that black and Hispanic people commit more crimes in NYC. People still have rights. Rights are absolute and aren't supposed to be chucked aside to make it easier for police.
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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.
Seriously, what part of that is hard to grasp? If there is so much crime in an area, why not hire police and ask the neighborhood to help resolve issues without grabbing people and violating a basic human right?
Let me ask a pointed question to drive that thought home. What prevents more traffic violations? An Officer in the open visible for everyone to see, or an officer hiding in the bushes with a radar gun?
The obvious answer is that the visible officer will prevent violations. If you see the cop and d
Because it doesn't work and is malicious (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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I've always wondered how something can be racist if it is true.
There are a variety of old sayings I've heard about this, along these lines... "The best place to hide a lie is inside the truth". "Heed not the word of a demon even though it speak the truth".
You asked how can something be racist if it's true. The main answer I think is selective reporting. Imagine a hypothetical town in which black and white people live 50/50, and imagine that mugged are committed 50/50 by the two groups, but the town newspaper always says "The perpetrator was a white male in his 30s" for
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Percentages aren't people. If someone commits a crime and then says that to say they did it is racist - that's ridiculous.
Ridiculous, but happens all the time, with the full vociferous support of their community and leaders, both locally and nationally.
If however someone assumes that a person is probably a criminal because of the color of their skin, that's racism.
Sorry, but no it isn't.
Do you not see the difference? Imagine spending your entire life being hassled by cops because people who look like you are statistically more likely to commit crimes.
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Actually, that's kind of the definition of racism. You can argue about whether it's justifiable racism, but it is, by definition, racism.
Re:I don't understand (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it isn't. Racism is the belief that one race is superior to another. Racism isn't the belief that a large number of members of a particular racial group in one country in the world has an over-proportionate chance of being a criminal.
Hint, even black girls get nervous when black men follow them at night. That isn't racism.
I'm not saying it is fair, or right, or reasonable. But I am saying it isn't racism.
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Even Jesse Jackson admitted to getting nervous when meeting young black men alone on city streets.
It might be racism, but given the demographics of crime in the USA, it is rational.
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Not quite. You've committed one of the classic blunders - believing people have a clue what the hell they're talking about.
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/racism [oxforddictionaries.com]:
The belief that a man is dangerous (or not dangerous, or good in bed, or a good clarinet player) because he is black (or white, or yell
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If you censor bad speech you only drive it underground where it goes unchallenged.
If we let racists have their say then that gives the rest of us an opportunity to rebut their fallacious arguments. Letting them speak does not mean endorsing their speech.
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when the Obama administration correctly noted that the biggest terrorism threat in the US is from *extreme* rightwing militias, that created an uproar.
Rightwing militias are the biggest threat against the direction our government is going, that is certainly a true statement. But for this reason, I think it is a horrible idea to disarm them.
Staistics (Score:2)
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.
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Let look at two e
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FYI the real danger period for young drivers is the first 1000 hours of operation. Almost the same as for new pilots (who are almost all older).
The real reason we don't put reasonable restrictions on older drivers. AARP and political expedience/cowardice. At that any cop can and will send an old driver back to DMV to retest based on something the cop sees happen.
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Seems to me the numbers I saw were about 4.4 million "stop & frisk" since Bloomberg got to be mayor (no, it didn't start with him, but the numbers I saw referred to his reign), of which 89% were "people of color".
Since New York City has more than 11% whites, it looks pretty clearly like the people being stopped were "wal
Ridiculous (Score:2)
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).
It is about maintaining fear (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Stop and frisk indeed has one aim: to reduce crime in areas historically high in violent crime. Unlike your innuendo and speculation, I come with facts.
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 maj
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You have this one very, very wrong. The problems caused are far, far worse than the high murder rate was. Sure, you can suppress crime with enough repression. Totalitarian regimes always sell that as an advantage of living there, and indeed it is. It is about the only advantage though, and the disadvantages are monstrous.
The problem here is mission-creep. As soon as stop-and-frisk (without anything even resembling due cause or due process) is established, you can escalate. At the end, you have the road-bloc
It is not innuendo and not speculation (Score:3)
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.
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Oops! We Violated Your Rights! (Score:2)
There are some stats that shouldn't be overlooked. (Score:2)
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You are correct, it is either constitutional or not, you can have no other options. In this case it is unconstitutional, however done in another way it can be constitutional. In other words racial profiling is unconstitutional, hence why this one is unconstitutional, however *random stop and frisks are not unconstitutional,
Well, there's the rub. The fourth amendment seems very clear that
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, ... against unreasonable searches and seizures....
The only debatable term there is "unreasonable". Unfortunately, the powers that be have decided that in New York City, 'stop and frisk' is reasonable. I've mentioned before on other boards that the amendment doesn't protect you against random searches, as long as the courts don't find it to be 'unreasonable'.
If this makes it to the Supreme Court, and they decide it is unreasonable on its face, then it will be over. But only then.
Founders not the problem (Score:2)
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
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owever *random stop and frisks are not unconstitutional
ummm... yes, they are.
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Either it's constitutional or it's not. And the way I read the fourth amendment there isn't much question it's not.
I'm pretty sure that's why the judge ordered the cameras.
Several precincts around the country started wearing cameras.
When police wear cameras, complaints about civil violations go down by about 88%, overall use of force drops by about 60% [nytimes.com]
Simply knowing that their actions are being recorded is enough to make cops think twice.
Locally our police departments have cameras on them, as do various cities in Arizon, Connecticut and Texas. They were introduced in response to claims of police abuses. Cameras are
Re:Because of race? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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In general I agree with you. But there are some privacy concerns that should be addressed. The video wouldn't be able to view anything the officer couldn't have seen, but perfect permanent storage compared with imperfect memory and the ability to automate searching through footage could be troublesome. Perhaps if you needed a warrant. It should be easy to say you saw a crime at 12:43 and then get a warrant saying you can look at the footage from around 12:43.
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RANDAAAAAAAALL!
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RANDAAAAAAAALL!
What do you want?
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oh, hi
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If Bloomberg is for it you should pretty much just assume it's a bad idea until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt.
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They do because they can. There is no IQ test or basic knowledge test or conflict of interest screening as a prerequisite for the right to vote. (Hell, parenthetically, you don't even have to be a citizen!). Are you really surprised that this pandering, megalomaniac creature is able to hood winkstupid people, ignorant people, and people dependent on government largesse?
Re:The remedy is wholly inadequate. (Score:4, Interesting)
they didn't limit it those conditions that the fourth amendment permits
They did in the original Terry v. Ohio case. The cop spent a fair amount of time watching 3 guys casing a store for a robbery, and when he stopped them he had reason to fear for his safety. He also limited the search to checking their coats for weapons (which he found). If you believe such situations happen over 1/2 million times a year in NYC though, I've got a bridge to sell you. "Reasonable suspicion" has been watered down to the cop felt like it, or he had to meet his quota (you know, the kind that doesn't exist). If Terry stops (the other name for stop-and-frisk) were limited to situations anything like the original case I, and I think most other people, wouldn't have a problem with it.