The first analysis of the effectiveness of the stop-and-frisk policies of the New York City Police Department concludes the controversial practice has resulted in few arrests and rarely for violent crimes.
New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says half of stop-and-frisk arrests resulted in convictions or guilty pleas. The other half were never prosecuted or were dismissed, or charges were adjourned in contemplation of dismissal.
The Democrat tells The Associated Press that his analysis found just 3 percent of stops resulted in convictions and a tenth of 1 percent led to convictions for violent crimes.
He says his study included nearly 150,000 arrests from 2.4 million stops from 2009 to 2012.
The report is scheduled for release today.
(AP)
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The whole point of Stop and Frisk is PREVENT violent crimes. A proper study should have been how many violent crimes were prevented by taking possible future perpetrators of the streets for illegal possession of a firearm. Now, there may be problems with the way Stop and Frisk has been implemented but the basic idea is sound as long as the cop has probable cause to suspect that the individual detained is committing a crime. For instance, the cop sees what looks like the imprint of a gun in the detainee’s pocket or the detainee resembles the description of perpetrator of a previous disturbance or the detainee is a known gang member, or the detainee is a known parolee, etc. Just stopping someone because they look suspicious or because they “don’t belong” in a particular neighborhood is not enough cause to Stop and Frisk.