“I would support energy that was clean, cheap and easily available,” answered a college kid to a TV interviewer during his protest against traditional energy sources that keep our economy running. “The government needs to do something to make that happen.” Who can argue with this logic? Who can possibly be against cheap, easily available and environment-friendly energy? But where do we get that?

The Left always has one solution for all the world’s problems: if only the politicians passed a law, by some force of magic, their wish would come true. We just need to wish for the right things.

After a one-year-old baby was recently murdered, City Council candidate Chris Banks declared “I just wish it would stop.” Yes, that’s a great solution – let’s wish things away. Why didn’t I think of that one? I guess all the rest of us wished it would continue until finally we got someone who realized we should wish for crime to stop!

What we apparently need to do is to cancel the program that drastically reduces crime, while wishing for bad things to go away. In the first month following Judge Shira Scheindlin’s ruling banning stop and frisk, shootings by criminals have increased by 13%, and seizures of guns from criminals have dropped by 17%. Maybe we just didn’t wish hard enough…

Pretty much every Democratic politician in New York City has come out against stop-and-frisk, a made-up issue if there ever was one, and I’m speaking as an attorney who actually knows how it works in real life.

The issue is presented by the liberals in politics and the media as giving cops the right to stop, search and abuse anyone. But every first-year law student read the 1968 U.S. Supreme Court case Terry v. Ohio, which specified what’s legal and what’s not, and the above description was already utterly unconstitutional for the last 45 years. The Supreme Court held that police may briefly detain a person whom they reasonably suspect is involved in criminal activity. The Court also held that police may do a limited search of the suspect’s outer garments for weapons if they have a reasonable and articulable suspicion that the person detained may be “armed and dangerous.”

The inevitable response to this is that cops can violate this rule. Don’t the cops get to choose what’s “reasonable”? No, they don’t. Much of the time in law school is spent learning the definition of the word “reasonable” so that people couldn’t use it in whatever way they see fit, but rather in a fair and objective sense.

Could cops abuse stop and frisk? Yes, but anyone can abuse any right. Cops can abuse their right to arrest people, politicians can abuse how they spend the taxpayers’ money, doctors can abuse their access to drugs. That’s why we have courts, prosecutors, and in the case of the police, also the Civilian Review Board. A cop who violates the law should be held responsible for any unethical or illegal behavior, but that is no reason to throw out the baby with the bath water.

But what about “disparate impact”? Have you heard that cops arrest different groups at different rates? For instance, whites get arrested more than Asians, men more than women, and young people more than the elderly. Should we conclude that old Asian ladies have conspired against people like me – a white, relatively young man? Or is it more likely that these arrest rates reflect actual differences in crime rates?

We’ve heard a lot of rhetoric from politicians that blacks constitute 28 percent of all state and federal arrests, while making up only 13 percent of the national population. That is supposed to prove that our system is racist. Never one to be left behind when there’s a “teachable moment,” President Barack Obama concluded that this proves that police, prosecutors and judges treat blacks and whites differently “for the same crime.” Most importantly, of course, it proves that Democrats need your vote.

Why let facts interfere with racially-explosive rhetoric that helps Democrats win elections? I don’t know, but let’s try. A Department of Justice study [1] of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest cities concluded that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution for a felony than whites, and if prosecuted, were less likely to be found guilty.

Another major study conducted by the Department of Justice is the National Crime Victimization Survey. The web site for the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Statistics [2] says that the “NCVS is the Nation’s primary source of information on criminal victimization. Each year, data are obtained from a nationally representative sample of about 40,000 households comprising nearly 75,000 persons.”

The NCVS also found that blacks are significantly less likely than people of other races to be arrested when compared to how often they were identified as perpetrators by the victims.

When Mayor Mike Bloomberg mentioned that it is simply false that blacks are disproportionally arrested by the supposedly racist cops, it provoked outrage. After all, who needs facts when you can win elections by being outraged?

Surely the only reason I support stop and frisk is that I was never stopped by cops?

Wait, just a few weeks ago, on my way to Monticello, I entered a shut down strip mall at 2 o’clock in the morning and then drove back and forth for no clear reason (we were trying to find a place that sells food that was still open). The cops decided to find out what we were doing and pulled me over. This was not the first of such incidents, and probably won’t be the last. Maybe I should call Al Sharpton. Maybe not…

(David Storobin – Former State Senator and City Council Candidate)