Bloomberg’s Stop-and-Frisk Explosion Looks Ineffective As Well As Unconstitutional

A
new report from the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU)
suggests that the massive increase in street stops by the NYPD
during Michael Bloomberg’s administration had little, if any,
impact on violent crime. The number of stop-and-frisk encounters
septupled between 2002 and 2011, when it peaked at nearly
700,000, then fell sharply to less than 200,000 in 2013. Meanwhile,
the number of murders, which peaked at 597 in 2003, bobbed up and
down, then fell sharply after 2011, reaching a low of 335 last
year. The number of shootings followed a similar pattern. In both
cases the biggest declines coincided with the dramatic reduction in
street stops during the last two years under Bloomberg.

The NYCLU’s analysis of street stops during the 11 years for
which detailed information is available (2003 through 2013)
confirms patterns that are by now familiar: The vast majority of
the people stopped by police (86 percent) were black or Latino, the
vast majority of the stops (88 percent) ended without an arrest or
a summons, and most (52 percent) included pat-downs, only 2
percent of which discovered weapons. These numbers are striking
because the Supreme Court has said police may stop someone only if
they reasonably suspect he is involved in criminal activity and may
pat him down only if they reasonably suspect he is armed. Yet
police wrongly suspected criminal activity nine times out 10 and
were almost never right when they supposedly suspected someone was
carrying a weapon. Given this record, it is not surprising that a
federal judge
concluded the NYPD was routinely violating New Yorkers’ Fourth
Amendment rights.

In defending the stop-and-frisk program, Bloomberg did not argue
that it was constitutional. Instead he argued that it was
effective. Specifically, he maintained that
stopping and searching lots of young black and Latino men more or
less at random discouraged them from carrying guns. The beauty of
that argument was that it allowed Bloomberg to turn what looked
like failure into success. Although getting guns off the street was
one of the program’s main justifications, only 0.02 percent of
stops resulted in gun seizures. Bloomberg cited the remarkably low
gun recovery rate as evidence that the stops were having the
intended deterrent effect. But if so, and if that effect resulted
in fewer shootings and murders, it is hard to explain why the
downward trend in violent crime not only continued but accelerated
when the number of stops dropped dramatically.