Some must read articles…
STOP & FRISK FACTS (New York Post);
There are too many stops.
Compared to what? In 2011, the police made 685,000 stops. They also arrested or issued summonses to 900,000 individuals, under the much more demanding “probable-cause” standard. There is easily as much behavior in New York that meets the lower “reasonable suspicion” standard for a stop as there is behavior that justifies an arrest.
If the department’s roughly 25,000 patrol officers and detectives made just one stop a week, they’d tally 1.1 million stops.
COURTS V. COPS: The Legal War On The War On Crime (The City Journal);
A central claim in the anti-stop-and-frisk crusade is that NYPD officers regularly accost countless squeaky-clean New Yorkers without cause. It should be easy, then, to assemble an army of Eagle Scout–like victims of police aggression. But four of the nine named plaintiffs in Ligon had criminal histories, not even counting their juvenile records; the plaintiffs’ nonparty witnesses had similarly troubled stories. A tenth plaintiff, named in the original complaint but dropped from the preliminary-injunction motion, was well known in his precinct for gang involvement and was arrested in connection with a shooting this December.
The Ledan family is typical of the Ligon plaintiffs and witnesses. Forty-one-year-old Letitia Ledan, a named plaintiff who lived in the crime-plagued River Park Towers, has been arrested about 15 times. In the early 1990s, she pled guilty to the attempted sale of crack; in the late 1990s, she was convicted of narcotics possession. In 2000, she pled guilty to loitering for purposes of prostitution and to using an alias in connection with that arrest. In the early 2000s, she pled guilty to the criminal possession of a weapon. In December 2003, she pled guilty to the possession of burglary tools. In 2007, she was convicted of aiding in the commission of a felony. Her sometime husband, Antoine Ledan, a nonparty witness, has had between ten and 20 criminal convictions over the last 15 years. Antoine was supposed to testify about an incident in which police stopped him and Letitia at River Park Towers, but the NYCLU never called him, claiming without explanation that he was “unavailable.” Letitia’s brother—36-year-old Roshea Johnson, another plaintiff in the case—has been arrested 21 times. He served six months in prison in the early 1990s for robbery; in the mid-1990s, he was convicted of assault, robbery, and using an illegal alias and served about five years in prison. In July 2003, he was convicted of evading the cigarette tax; in 2011, of cocaine possession; and in 2012, of menacing.
HILLARY’S DEBATE LIES: With her comments about crime, policing, and race, the candidate helps push a false—and dangerous—narrative (The City Journal):
Clinton claimed that “stop-and-frisk was found to be unconstitutional.” No federal judge would have the power to declare pedestrian stops unconstitutional, because the Supreme Court put its constitutional imprimatur on the practice in 1965. Stop-and-frisk remains a lawful and essential police tactic. Criminologist David Weisburd examined the practice in New York City and found that it reduced crime in shooting hot spots. Federal district court judge Shira Scheindlin did rule that the New York Police Department’s practice of stops was racially biased, but her ruling applied only to the New York Police Department. That ruling was wholly unjustified and would likely have been reversed on appeal, had newly elected New York City mayor Bill de Blasio not dropped the appeal. Judge Scheindlin used a population benchmark for measuring the lawfulness of police actions: if police stops didn’t match population ratios, they were unconstitutional, in Scheindlin’s view. Such a methodology ignores the massive disparities in criminal offending in New York City. Blacks commit over three-quarters of all shootings, though they are 23 percent of the city’s population. Add Hispanic shootings to black shootings and you account for 98 percent of all shootings in New York City. Whites are 34 percent of the city’s population; they commit less than 2 percent of all shootings. Such disparities in gun violence mean that virtually every time the police are called out on a gun run—meaning that someone has been shot—they are called to minority neighborhoods on behalf of minority victims, and, if any witness or victim is cooperating with the police, being given a description of a minority suspect. The reality of crime, not phantom police racism, determines the incidence of police activity, including pedestrian stops.
HOW TO INCREASE THE CRIME RATE NATIONWIDE: A ruling against the NYPD’s successful ‘stop, question and frisk’ policy would be sure to inspire lawsuits in other cities (Wall Street Journal);
The irony is that Floyd itself, once it came to trial after five years of preparation, was even weaker than the illogic of its underlying argument would have predicted. The suit’s 12 named complainants, standing in for a class of potentially millions, alleged that they had been accosted simply because of their race, yet many either fit a description of a criminal suspect or were engaged in behavior—such as trying to jostle open a house door in a burglary-plagued area—that clearly should have drawn an officer’s attention.
The Obama Justice Department, which has launched multiple civil-rights actions against police departments across the country, declined a 2012 request from some New York City Council members to investigate the NYPD for its stop practices. Yet Judge Scheindlin is unlikely to be so circumspect in her ruling. It was Judge Scheindlin, after all, who invited the Center for Constitutional Rights to file Floyd in the first place, after the center missed a deadline to extend an earlier stop, question and frisk ruling of hers that required the collection of the racial stop data now fueling Floyd. If she rules against the NYPD again, the city would most likely be saddled with a costly consent decree like Oakland’s, which puts a federal judge in ultimate control of police policy.
5 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT “STOP-AND-FRISK” (The Daily Wire).
A U.S. district judge declared stop-and-frisk to be unconstitutional in 2013. The judge, Shira Scheindlin, ruled in Floyd v. City of New York and Ligon v. New York that stop-and-frisk discriminated against minorities, and was therefore unconstitutional.
But as Mac Donald explains in her book The War On Cops: How the New Attack On Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, Schendlin based her ruling off the research of Professor Jeffrey Fagan, which was flawed for the following reasons:
- Fagan did not include the race of criminal suspects in his analysis.
- His own research found that only six percent of police stops were unlawful.
- Fagan did not distinguish between gang homicides and domestic homicides, which is important because domestic homicides are not usually the cause of street stops. Most homicides committed by whites fall in the former category, so by not distinguishing between the two, Fagan’s data model creates the impression of an anti-black bias.
- Fagan also didn’t understand the purpose of Impact Zones, where the city would put in high numbers of rookie cops in high-crime neighborhoods, which typically were minority-dominated communities.
Therefore, Fagan’s data models purportedly showing discrimination against minorities as a result of stop-and-frisk can’t be taken seriously, and yet Judge Scheindlin used it to strike down stop-and-frisk.
This is a part from the Judges brief in the Floyd v. City of New York case, and you can see the flawed thinking in it… as will be expanded on as we proceed in the post:
Based on the expert testimony I find the following: (1) The NYPD carries out more stops where there are more black and Hispanic residents, even when other relevant variables are held constant. The racial composition of a precinct or census tract predicts the stop rate above and beyond the crime rate. (2) Blacks and Hispanics are more likely than whites to be stopped within precincts and census tracts, even after controlling for other relevant variables. This is so even in areas with low crime rates, racially heterogenous populations, or predominately white populations. (3) For the period 2004 through 2009, when any law enforcement action was taken following a stop, blacks were 30% more likely to be arrested (as opposed to receiving a summons) than whites, for the same suspected crime. (4) For the period 2004 through 2009, after controlling for suspected crime and precinct characteristics, blacks who were stopped were about 14% more likely — and Hispanics 9% more likely — than whites to be subjected to the use of force. (5) For the period 2004 through 2009, all else being equal, the odds of a stop resulting in any further enforcement action were 8% lower if the person stopped was black than if the person stopped was white. In addition, the greater the black population in a precinct, the less likely that a stop would result in a sanction. Together, these results show that blacks are likely targeted for stops based on a lesser degree of objectively founded suspicion than whites.
She notes elsewhere that the case she argued for — based on the 4th and 14th amendment — was this targeting minorities unlawfully: Judge Scheindlin ruled that stop and frisk, in practice, had a discriminatory effect on blacks and Hispanics, violating the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.
- “The Equal Protection Clause’s prohibition on selective enforcement means that suspicious blacks and Hispanics may not be treated differently by the police than equally suspicious whites…”.
She ruled against the city, declaring, among other things, that the idea that blacks have a higher crime rate than other groups is a “stereotype.” Please! In fact, her conduct on the bench [not just in this case] have been so egregious, that the Judge has “been repeatedly reversed—unanimously—by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on cases involving police authority, and even terrorism.” Continuing, BREITBART notes:
She has demonstrated such extraordinary bias as a judicial activist on this issue that the federal appeals court took the extremely rare action of ordering her removed from the case.
But her removal was not before she issued a decision declaring that stop-and-frisk was unconstitutional the way it was being implemented. Note that even Scheindlin would not say it was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court’s Terry case would make her a laughingstock if she took that position (which is the position that Hillary Clinton took in the debate). But Scheindlin said it was being applied in an unconstitutional manner that focused too heavily on blacks and Hispanics.
Many legal experts expected the Second Circuit to smack down Scheindlin yet again. But then de Blasio was elected, and he withdrew the appeal from the Second Circuit before they could rule on the case and announced he was ending stop-and-frisk.
THE DAILY CALLER likewise references her horrible case precedence…
…Scheindlin’s behavior was so egregious that a few months later the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals removed her from the case and ordered it to be assigned to a different judge, saying her behavior had given the appearance of impropriety to the case. Such a move is very rare, happening just one or two times per year. The Court was also poised to hear an appeal of the decision, which could have completely reversed it.
But as it happens, the Second Circuit never ruled on Scheindlin’s decision, and it remains in force. This isn’t because it was determined by any other judge to be correct. Instead, it remains in force solely because of the election of Mayor Bill de Blasio….
Here are two examples of the bad thinking the Judge used: