Last August, Manhattan federal Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices are unconstitutional because they routinely violated the Fourth-Amendment protection of Blacks and Hispanics against unreasonable searches and seizures.
In fact, the sight of dark-skinned men being stopped and frisked (invariably by White cops) had become as much a feature of life in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods as liquor stores and churches.
What few people seemed to understand, however, is that the judge did not order an end to these practices; only that there should be better monitoring to ensure they do not amount to little more than racial profiling. She suggested, for example, that patrol officers could wear body cameras to document their stop-and-frisk encounters.
It speaks volumes, though, that this prevailing misunderstanding was due in no small part to the way Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg reacted to her ruling.
For instead of respecting it and seeking ways to comply, he accused her of wanting to nanny the NYPD with her schoolmarm notions of what is required to police the streets of New York City. Which, of course, is rather precious coming from a man who most New Yorkers regard as a nanny himself for his fuddy-duddy initiatives to ban things like trans fats and big, sugary drinks.
At any rate, it appears this defiant mayor and his police commissioner decided that, if the police can’t stop and frisk without federal monitoring, then they would just stop policing Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Period.
Here’s how Bloomberg betrayed their our-way-or-the-highway … we’ll-show-them decision:
These cops want to get home to their families. They want to be safe. And they are willing to put their lives on the line to protect you and me, and then they’re going to be second-guessed all the time? How can they go out and do this?
(New York Post, September 21, 2013)
Tragically, the fallout from their decision was all-too foreseeable:
Jorge Alvarez, 44, was shot in both legs when he was caught in the crossfire between two drug gangs on Aug. 13, one day after Manhattan federal Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk unconstitutional…
He was among the 164 New Yorkers struck by bullets during the 28-day period that ended Sept. 8, marking a 9-plus percent increase over the same period in 2012. Shooting incidents also spiked nearly 13 percent, to 140, with police sources noting that ‘perps are not afraid to carry a gun’ due to the reforms Scheindlin has ordered.
(New York Post, September 30, 2013)
Unsurprisingly, this spike in shooting incidents has many New Yorkers reacting just as Bloomberg probably hoped or intended. Here, for example, is what the Post quotes Tonia Garcia saying after her son was killed during a simple traffic dispute on August 18:
Stop-and-frisk is the best policy — it caught more criminals. Now, everyone is running rampant. Come live in it for a little while, move in the neighborhood for a little while.
Somebody gets killed over here once a week, twice a week. Stop-and-frisk keeps people safer.
Naturally, I sympathize with her grief. But it’s not the judge who she should be challenging to live in her neighborhood for a little while; it’s the (White) cops Bloomberg dispatches to her neighborhood like soldiers going to war in a foreign country. And they behave accordingly (a la Abu Ghraib).
More to the point, though, if you think Bloomberg feels any sympathy, the you’re-gonna-be-sorry way he telegraphed her son’s death just days earlier might suggest otherwise:
[Mayor Bloomberg] said he hoped the appeal process would allow the current stop-and-frisk practices to continue through the end of his Administration because ‘[minority communities across our city will suffer and] I wouldn’t want to be responsible for a lot of people dying.’
(New York Times, August 12, 2013)
Not to mention his rather cold but telling admission that:
[The mayor said] he might feel differently [about stop-and-frisk] if he had a [Black or Hispanic] son who was targeted by the program.
(NBC News, August 18, 2013)
No shit!
But, lest you buy into Bloomberg’s conceit that the only way to combat such spikes in shooting incidents is to let cops continue his stop-and-frisk practices, here is the more effective and constitutional alternative I proffered in my August 13 commentary:
My only contention is that the police could be equally effective by merely patrolling high-crime areas (on foot) and establishing trust and familiarity with the people who live there. For statistics also show that such neighborhood policing enables the police to better distinguish between law-abiding residents and those who prey on them (who, I submit, should be stopped and frisked, aggressively).
(“Reforming stop and frisk laws,” The iPINIONS Journal, August 13, 2013)
Even so, before condemning Bloomberg for putting New Yorkers in the perverse position of having the police violate their civil liberties in order to protect them from hoodlums, you should bear in mind that President Obama has put all Americans in the perverse position of having the NSA intrude their civil liberties in order to protect them from terrorists.
Of course, the salient difference is that Bloomberg is fully prepared to let hoodlums have their way unless his police can continue their stop-and-frisk practices without judicial oversight. By instructive contrast, Obama has not only attained judicial determination that his NSA surveillance is constitutional; he also requires his agents to get judicial warrants to limit violations of civil liberties as much as humanly possible.
Indeed, apropos of perverse positions, Bloomberg seems to be waiting for the spike in shooting incidents to become so untenable that pleas (like Tonia Garcia’s) for the return of his stop-and-frisk practices eventually force Judge Scheindlin to simply vacate her own ruling.
In the meantime:
The sad reality is that, with stop and frisk, Blacks and Hispanics are the ones whose civil liberties are most likely to be violated; without it, they are the ones whose peace and safety are most likely to be violated.
What cursed fate it is (sometimes) to be Black or Hispanic.
(“Reforming stop and frisk laws,” The iPINIONS Journal, August 13, 2013)
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