“ACLU Effect” — Profs find reduction in Chicago Stop and Frisk led to hundreds of additional killings
236 additional homicides and 1115 additional shootings in 2016
Stop and Frisk policies are controversial because of claims of racial bias in implementation.
In August 2015, the ACLU and the Chicago police department reached a consent agreement to scale back stop and frisk. The ACLU-Illinois website describes the accomplishment:
In August of 2015, shortly after the ACLU released a groundbreaking report, the ACLU of Illinois and the Chicago Police Department (CPD) reached a landmark agreement to reform the practice of investigatory street stops known as “stop and frisks.” The City agreed to take steps to ensure that CPD policies and practices comply with the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the Illinois Civil Rights Act, which requires that government policies do not have a racially disparate impact.
The result was a dramatic decline in stops, as this February 1, 2016 local ABC News story reported, CPD “stop and frisks” down 80 percent in 2016:
As shootings and murders spike one major component of Chicago police crime fighting is way down. The number of street stops by officers has plunged 80 percent this year.
For decades when Chicago police stopped and frisked someone on the street, they had to fill out a small card called a “Contact Card.” It required simple, basic information about who was stopped and why. Beginning January 1, 2016, a new state law regulated when cops could stop and pat down people in public and then officers had to fill out a two page “Investigatory Stop Report.”
“From May through August of 2014, there were 250,000 people who were stopped who were completely innocent; who committed no crime, who were not guilty of any offense. We know that most of those people are searched. If that number is going down, that’s really good news,” says Ed Yohnka of ACLU-Chicago.
The number of street stops by Chicago police has almost bottomed out. In police ranks, this is known as the “ACLU effect,” after American Civil Liberties Union lawyers fight for years to curtail Chicago officers from what they saw as illegal stops.
Two academics decided to study the effect on violent crime and homicides after the reduction of stop and frisk policies in Chicago. They round found that the scaling back led to hundreds of additional deaths.
The authors of the study were U. Utah law professor Paul G. Cassell and economics professor Richard Fowles. Cassell summarized the findings in a post at Volokh Conspiracy, The 2016 Chicago Homicide Spike – Explained. The sub-headline provides the topline conclusion: “After an ACLU consent decree with the Chicago Police Department dramatically reduced the number of stop and frisks, homicides significantly increased as a result.”
Here’s an excerpt:
Through multiple regression analysis and other tools, we conclude that an ACLU consent decree trigged a sharp reduction in stop and frisks by the Chicago Police Department, which in turn caused homicides to spike. Sadly, what Chicago police officers dubbed the “ACLU effect” was real—and more homicides and shootings were the consequence.
The analysis is relatively straightforward. It is well known that homicides increased dramatically in Chicago in 2016. In 2015, 480 Chicago residents were killed. The next year, 754 were killed—274 more homicide victims, tragically producing an extraordinary 58% increase in a single year….
Detailed regression analysis of the homicide (and related shooting) data strongly supports what visual observation suggests. Using monthly data from 2012 through 2016, we are able to control for such factors as temperature, homicides in other parts of Illinois, 9-1-1 calls (as a measure of police-citizen cooperation), and arrests for various types of crimes. Even controlling for these factors, our equations indicate that the steep decline in stop and frisks was strongly linked, at high levels of statistical significance, to the sharp increase in homicides (and other shooting crimes) in 2016….
We conclude that, because of fewer stop and frisks in 2016, a conservative estimate is that approximately 236 additional homicides and 1115 additional shootings occurred during that year.
The 96-page analysis is here (pdf.) and provides a wealth of information and charts, with a full explanation of methodology.
The Chicago Tribune reports on the study, and the pushback:
But the ACLU and several crime experts who reviewed the study at the Tribune’s request questioned its findings.
“They’re more or less suggesting that working in an unconstitutional police department is worth the trade-off,” said John Eterno, a criminal justice professor at Molloy College in Rockville Centre, N.Y., and a former captain with the City of New York Police Department. “If you’re going to be doing 40,000 stops a month … you have to have reasonable suspicion on every one of those 40,000 stops.”
Karen Sheley, an ACLU staff attorney who is overseeing the agreement with Chicago police, dismissed the study as “junk science.”
“This particular viewpoint is both insulting to officers who follow the law on a regular basis and ignores the harm, including the public safety, to the communities who are most impacted by police work,” she said…..
In perhaps their most controversial conclusion, Cassell and Fowles ruled out as a factor in the heightened 2016 violence the court-ordered release of dashboard camera video of a white Chicago police officer shooting Laquan McDonald, a black teen, 16 times.
The video, released in November 2015, rocked the Police Department, prompting weeks of street protests, the firing of police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, first-degree murder charges against Officer Jason Van Dyke and a yearlong U.S. Department of Justice investigation that found officers had routinely violated the rights of minorities for decades.
But Cassell and Fowles argued that the McDonald shooting had gained attention months before and wasn’t as timely a factor in the spike in violence in 2016 as the ACLU agreement going into effect at the beginning of that year.
“Awareness that Officer Van Dyke had done something terrible was widespread much earlier – such as in April 2015 when … Chicago’s City Council voted to pay $5 million to McDonald’s family,” the study said. “Nor did the video’s release constitute a unique revelation of possible racism by some Chicago police officers.”
But critics faulted the report for ignoring the broad impact of the McDonald video while singling out only the ACLU agreement.
“To minimize the impact of that video is really a mistake,” said Edwin Yohnka, the ACLU’s longtime spokesman in Chicago.
The professors analysis of the impact of the Laquan McDonald shooting starts at page 35 of the full report (linked above).
While the Laquan McDonald video was shocking—and led to significant backlash against the CPD and the mayor—we think it is an unlikely candidate to explain the Chicago homicide spike. To be sure, an argument can be made that the date of the video’s release (November 24, 2015) fits the subsequent increase in homicides and shootings that we observed. As noted earlier, there is a breakpoint in our homicide and other series around November 2015. But as the events recounted above make clear, awareness of Officer Van Dyke’s actions and rumors of a coverup was widespread much earlier—such as in April 2015 when a unanimous Chicago City Council voted to pay $5 million to McDonald’s family.
More important, a causal mechanism through which the video’s release triggered the homicide spike is not immediately obvious. The protests that surrounded release of the video concerned alleged racism by the CPD in shooting a young African-American man sixteen times. It is unclear why a result of such events would have been additional shootings of (predominantly) young African- America men by (predominantly) other young African-American men. Nor did the video’s release constitute a unique revelation of possible racism by some of Chicago’s police officers. Sadly, CPD has a long history of allegations of racism—including widely-publicized allegations preceding the 2016 spike. [footnotes omitted]
But let’s say the McDonald video did make police more hesitant to stop and frisk and police. That might let the ACLU somewhat off the hook, but it wouldn’t change the overall point, that police hesitation leads to increased crime.
Yet the clamp down on Chicago stop and frisk is being hailed as a success, as this recent Chicago Sun-Times article reports, though the focus still is on race:
The Chicago Police Department has “come a long way” to alleviate the concerns of civil rights activists about officers stopping minorities for questioning, a retired federal magistrate judge said in a report released Wednesday.
Arlander Keys is studying cops’ stops under an agreement that took effect on Jan. 1, 2016 between the department and the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU had criticized the police for disproportionately stopping minorities and failing to list lawful reasons for stops on the “contact cards” they were supposed to fill out.
In his latest report, Keys said he was unable to determine — or rule out — that the department’s stop-and-frisk policies and practices have an unlawful, disproportionate impact on racial and ethnic minorities.
But he said he was encouraged that in a sample of the 51,000 stops he examined from July to December 2016, cops “conducted an overwhelmingly large number of legitimate, lawful and justified stops.”
Officers did fewer “protective pat downs” of people they believed might be carrying weapons, Keys said. And a bigger percentage of those pat downs yielded weapons than during the first six months of 2016, which he previously studied. White people were the smallest group subjected to those pat downs, but were the most likely to have weapons on them.
Keys said the racial breakdown of the 51,000 stops in late 2016 painted a “less rosy picture.” About 70 percent of those stopped were black, 19 percent were Hispanic and 1.5 percent were white, he said.
Certainly the police should not racially discriminate. But the clamp down on stop and frisk appears to have its own racially discriminatory impact, as gun violence among gangs takes an increasing toll on the black community in Chicago.
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This is Willie Horton X 236.
In similar fashion, the Parkland school shooting is on Obama and his policies aimed at reducing the “school to prison pipeline.”
Proggie fantasies kill.
Although many of the illegal stop and frisk victims were blacks and other minorities, many of the victims of the increased shootings are also blacks and other minorities.
Excellent point, requiring liberal media to ignore it as counter-agenda.
Same effect with that moron obama’s school crime-reporting policies.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, using data from 1980-2008, the offending homicide rate for blacks was almost 8x higher than the rate for whites, and blacks were 6x more likely to be the victims of homicide than whites were (page 3).
https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf
To the extent blacks are subjected to more “stop and frisks” it’s because the data show blacks are much more likely to be both the victims of homicides and the offenders of homicides.
The other interesting data is that the black homicides are mostly related to drugs. Whites are more likely to be involved in sex related killings; workplace homicides; or homicides involving the elderly than blacks are (page 12). But those kinds of homicides pale in comparison to the number of blacks who shoot and kill other blacks related to drugs.
According to yearly “FBI National Crime Statistics”, approximately 95% of all black people killed every year are the victims of other black people, leaving the other 5% to be the victims of white people, native Americans, Latinos, Muslims, and Orientals.
The BLM Democratic organization wants to condemn white people for not agreeing with them, especially when white people claim that “All Lives Matter”, and then the BLM members call them racists for declaring that obvious truth.
But the statistics prove that the members of the BLM Democratic organization need to convince black people that “Black Lives Matter”, and if successful would save at least 15 times more black people’s lives, than they would trying to convince white people of the same.
It’s good to know the ACLU and liberal world is working hard to protect the civil rights of… well, they’re dead people now, but hey.. the thought counts. Besides, in liberal enclaves dead people vote, so there’s the political bonus too.
With a policy which shows black on black murder rates going ever upward combined with black women aborting at a rate of 5X’s greater than white’s, perhaps the ACLU’s policies having taken hold in Chicago, are now waiting for the attrition factor to play out and resolve their problems by “eliminating” the source by itself of itself.
The black population is growing faster than the general population so the death rate from various types of murder of which abortion is just one can be safely ignored by democrats. Keep moving ,nothing to see here.
No surprise here. Stop and frisks are based upon clearly articulated reasonable suspicion that a person may be involved in a criminal act. This has been run before courts since Terry v Ohio, in 1968. And, the courts have repeatedly said that the only “search” which is constitutionally allowed is a pat and frisk for weapons, for officer safety. So, in order for criminal charges to be filed and a person to be convicted for possession of contraband, is if the reasonable suspicion is found to be valid and that the contraband found can reasonably be determined from a pat and frisk. This usually only works if the contraband is a easily recognized weapon such as a firearm.
So, along comes another group of liberal do-gooder activists, the ACLU. Using activist do-gooder judges, they pressure such cities as Chicago and New York to virtually eliminate stop and frisks. What happens? Crime, particularly violent street crime goes up. Not because more people are now getting away with carrying firearms, and other weapons, but, because more people are emboldened to carry weapons illegally because there is no longer any deterrent.
What is so troubling about the ACLU’s claims of an inordinate number of black males and males of other minorities being “targeted” by these stop and frisk policies, is that everyone ignored the fact that these stop and frisks were taking place in high crime areas which are predominantly inhabited by these same minorities. I mean would anyone find it odd that polar bears would be stopped more often in polar bear habitats, which had high incidences of violent crime, while penguins, living in predominantly penguin habitats with low crime rates, would not be stopped as often?
Gotta love the mental processes of liberals. Maybe they should have polled the residents of these areas before they shut down a program which was actually safeguarding them. Nah, you have to break a few eggs in the obsessive quest to make everything equal.
How much more crime could be stopped by random frisk checkpoints, where everyone in an area is frisked? What about random home searches for evidence of weapons, contraband, etc?
Well, the random search aspect is basically what people endure at the airport now, which is hugely inefficient because to search everyone simply consumes a huge amount of resources.
You make a good point, if we accept the premise that the stop-and-frisk practices before this decree was adopted were unconstitutional. I’m not prepared to accept that without proof, and not only is disparate racial impact not enough, neither is outright racial profiling, which the courts have ruled can be a legitimate factor in forming a reasonable suspicion or probable cause.
I have a huge problem with stop and frisk, and I find it interesting that it happens and is helpful (the stats look clean for this) in very liberal cities with coercive gun restrictions. It is sad that a complete dissolution of liberties creates safety in these havens of liberal thinking. With that I am torn, stop and frisk clearly works (in these places), but it is an enormous violation of an individual’s civil liberties. Because of this I would never ever live in those places, where one government bandaid is used to fix another government bandaid … ad nauseum.
I’m not sure what your problem with it is, unless the offense, the reasonable suspicion of which gave rise to the stop in the first place, is “carrying a weapon”, which ought not to be an offense.
Notice this:
Imagine if you will that you walk to work everyday, and everyday you were stopped and frisked because you a) fit the profile or b) a cop doesn’t like you. I don’t think that you would be very happy with these circumstances. Especially if one day you were hauled off to jail because something that you carried or did everyday became law without your knowledge. Each time that you come in contact with machinery of the state you are rolling the dice. That is why it is best that that machinery is small and minimally intrusive.
We have gotten completely away from the idea of law as being punitive vs. the law as being preventative. No law can be preventative … EVER, and that is the crux of the problem with both parties (and humans in general). We suspend belief hoping that our pet problem will be corrected with a law. Watch (or read) Minority Report for a glimpse into what would be the best scenario for preventative laws, and ask yourself if that is place you want to live.
You are young Millhouse and you will come to understand why the 4th amendment is really important and it won’t just be some legal tool that you wield when appropriate.
Except that you can’t be stopped just because you “a) fit the profile or b) a cop doesn’t like you”. There must be reasonable grounds to suspect you of having committed an offense. So the only objection I can think of is that sometimes the “offense” you’re reasonably suspected of is carrying a weapon, which ought not to be an offense.
Ohh yah what law will stop that? And if you thought you had grounds for profiling or discrimination what are you going to do? File a claim? Come on Millhouse please this is the real world.
“Stop & Frisk” harms nobody but those who are found to be breaking the law. It is inconvenient and time costly, but taking a gun from a felon, arresting him for breaking the law, and getting him off the street so he can’t hurt another with the gun he is banned from possessing, might be worth it for all those potential victims that were in the area of that felon. In truth it is the only way to actually enforce our laws banning guns from felons, which according to yearly FBI statistics, felons commit 90% of all gun crimes and gun murders in the USA every year. It is also much better than taking the American people’s 2nd Amendment right away, which in most cases is their only capability to defend themselves, especially from armed felons.
Then you believe in banning guns a.k.a gun control?
Randy, I don’t think Shane actually read what you wrote….
I can imagine a lot Eskimos on unicorns, wild Nymphs running through a wooded glen, castles that move on their own.
What I can’t imagine happening in the US is what you describe. That’s not what Terry v. Ohio authorizes.
The courts have long recognized that cops can tell the difference between a dirtbag with a gun and a slovenly guy who didn’t shave going to work in the morning. Surprising I know, but apparently experience and training matter for something.
Stop and frisk saved lives. It still got used in NY during this time so some places are too important (or too close to the ACLU folks) to worry about filing bogus civil rights claims.
Who believes in unicorns? I don’t believe police are anything but fallible human beings, what do you believe? I don’t believe that more police can prevent crime, and I have reality to back me up. Once again police can’t prevent … NO HUMAN BEING CAN. And please don’t read this is that I am anti police because I am not. I want police to do what they are intended for to keep order and civility and their side job to clean up and document the mess of human interaction. I DON’T want them to enforce their or someone else’s view of things on me.
To note the PERCENTAGE of bad cops is low, but raising the numbers of police because we have more laws or because we have more fear only raises the absolute number of bad cops out there not the percentage. I don’t think that is good or helpful.
What do I know? I know more police do reduce crime. I know getting out of your car and walking your beat reduces crime. I know stopping and frisking guys who meet the criteria under Terry v Ohio is very, very effective at reducing crime.
Of course, some of those frisked are not armed. It would be a miracle if they were not. The court recognizes and realizes that.
Well said, Shane.
Kind of interesting/ironic that the ACLU defends the 4th amendment and it leads to more deaths in Chicago. The NRA defends the 2nd amendment and it (arguably) leads to more deaths. Why are the NRA called murderers and not the ACLU? Is the 4th amendment more important than the 2nd?
I guess freedom has its costs, beyond the obvious sacrifice of soldiers. It probably works best with more civil societies.
This is exactly it. Pretty much all our liberties come at a price. We could save lives by giving them up, but we don’t, because consider them more important than lives. The second amendment is merely one of these expensive liberties, and far from the most expensive. Anyone prepared to give it up in order to save lives ought a fortiori to be prepared to give up the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th as well.
Arresting criminals seems to have a racial bias, too. Probably should stop doing that.
LOL. Orwell must spinning in his grave.
The Left got what it wanted. The consequences involves more deaths. They seem to have no problem with that. On them be it.
Um, what? How is it even possible to have a government under such a stricture. Every city and state program to help those in need will necessarily have a racially disparate impact, because need is not distributed equally across the races. Every homeless shelter in Chicago where non-Hispanic white people do not make up 1/3 of the residents (i.e. all of them) must be in violation; so what are they to do? Seize white people off the street and force them into the shelter to make up the numbers?
If disparate impact law/policy isn’t in 1984, it should have been. It has just the right proportions of moronic ill-logic and pc social justice.
Because the government is full of humans not robots.
The ACLU has never concerned itself with unintended consequences. In their world, everything is black or white. Gray is not a color they recognize nor consider. We have all heard of cases that they have brought against the state based on a sliver of law that allows the perp to walk when everyone involved knew they were guilty. Their constant harassment of locales over religious monuments on public property is one of their most egregious. If it were up to them they would only allow any religion indoors in private.
It was just stop and frisk ending … The liberals have declared it open season on cops in Chicago … I read a cop blog out of Chicago called Second City Cop … It details the liberal insanity that’s affecting policing in the city
“Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”
ANOTHER FINE MESS (1930)
There are several issues going on here.
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The first is the research that shows the reduction in stop and frisks being related to an an increased crime rate. While any decent researcher can manipulate data to have it “show” anything he wants, this relationship appears to be valid. What is fascinating is that the Left claims to be the party of science and conservatives and others are anti-science and yet whenever they see a study that goes against what they want, they immediately blame the study as bogus.Clearly further work on this issue is needed while the Left needs to work on its acceptance of science that goes against their dogma.
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A second issue is trying to demand frisking rates to be equal to that of the total population. Because there is few to no gun homicides on the streets of Chicago suburbs and other locations that are largely white, there is no need of r it to be conducted there. In those neighborhoods where gun shooting and homicides are common, the makeup of these neighborhoods are overwhelmingly black. So what would the proper rate of frisking according to race be in these locations – in proportion to the local population or of the entire country?
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A third issue is how the Left that is running Chicago has no problem with restrictive gun laws promoting sanctuary cities, and other legal issues that push their ideological agenda while being on questionable legal grounds while clearly being shown to be ineffective or counter productive over the long term and yet when they see a program that works, that goes against their political agenda, and is on shaky legal ground, they are immediately against it. They are willing to trade people’s lives for their politics.
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Lastly, stop and frisk clearly works. There should be some work around where a Constitutional mechanism that would accomplish the same result could be found and implemented. However, the liberal machine that runs Chicago wants none of this. In their minds gun control in the only solution. By demanding more gun control that clearly is not working while rejecting other potential solutions because it is ideologically counter to their position, Chicago leadership is making the statement that the lives of its citizens are of a far lower importance than is their political ideology. Is it any wonder why Chicago and other Democrat led cities are failing?
Feelings are more important to the ACLU than lives.
Liberty is more important to me than lives.
Find another way to stop the bad guys that doesn’t violate the rights of the good guys. Total gun confiscation would save how many lives? Mandatory strip searches would save how many lives?
And this assumes competent LEOs. I thought the responses with Brown, Gray, Scott etc were justified, but I’ve encountered some real asshole bullies in blue.
“Stop and Frisk policies are controversial because of claims of racial bias in implementation.“
No, the racial aspect is just noise. They are controversial because ‘stop and frisk’ defines authoritarianism. If I am simply a mere subject of the king, then stop and frisk is appropriate. As a ‘free citizen’ however, it is not.
We chide the left for wanting to trade liberty for safety. How is this different?
I suggest that you actually find out how a legal stop ad frisk [aka a Terry Stop] works.
First of all, in order for the stop itself to be legal, there has to be a reasonable suspicion that a criminal act may be occurring. Factors involved are the activity itself, the location, the time of day, attendant actions of the person stopped and the type of criminal activities common to the area. Race may be one of the factors used, but it has to be an unusual occurrence for the area and it can not be the only factor used to justify the stop.
Second, the person stopped can not be searched without probable cause to believe that he is in possession of contraband, including a weapon. However, for the safety of the officer and any innocent people in the area, the person may be subjected to a pat-down for weapons.
Third, the contraband is not admissible in court, unless the first two conditions are met.
Pretty simple. The courts have been dealing with this subject for the last 50 years. Terry stops are not some new fangled policing experiment.
Let me give you two instances where a Terry Stop is appropriate.
In the first, a man is observed walking down the sidewalk of a working class neighborhood, at 10 am, carrying an unboxed large screen tv. This area has been experiencing a wave of day-time burglaries. The man is stopped. Because there is a reasonable suspicion that he may be a burglar, and burglars are known to carry tools which may be used as weapons and that burglars may use violence in an attempt to escape, the LEO pats the man down and feels a bulge which corresponds to the size and shape of a firearm. He retrieves the object and it turns out to be a firearm. This is a good Terry stop, even if the man in not, in fact, a burglar. And, if his possession of the firearm violates the law he can be arrested, charged and tried for the offense. He could even be convicted. No sane person would argue with the propriety of such a stop based upon the circumstances and the need to stop a particular criminal activity in that area.
In the second, a man is walking down the street in an minority urban area. He is not displaying any over suspicious behavior. He is of the same ethnicity as the vast
majority of the inhabitants, dressed in a similar manner. He is young. Upon seeing the LEO approach, he turns away and exhibits a furtive demeanor. The LEO stops him and because the are a is known for violent street level criminal activity, frisks the man. He encounters what resembles a firearm [a pistol] and retrieves the item for officer safety reasons. It is a pistol. Subsequent investigation reveals that the man is not in legal possession of the firearm and is arrested. This is a much more problematic situation. Was the fact that the LEO interpreted the man’s actions to be furtive enough to justify the stop and frisk? Not in and of itself. Would an arrest be actionable, by the person stopped? He could sue for a violation of his Constitutional rights, false arrest. On the other hand, if the pistol created a visible bulge which strongly resembled a pistol, then the validity of the stop becomes greater.
Terry stops are simply a very well defined and regulated criminal investigation tool. The criminal act is already being committed, it is not generated by the stop. A man carrying contraband is carrying contraband whether he is stopped or not. No innocent person can be prosecuted simply by being stopped.
What concerns me is that since Terry was decided cops started abusing it by making the search the purpose of the stop, rather than incidental to it. That is, rather than stopping a person because they reasonably suspect him of an offense, and frisking him just for safety’s sake before asking him about the offense he’s suspected of, the police look for excuses to stop people in order to create a pretext for frisking them. The true purpose of the search is not officer safety, but crime detection, and that is not what the court authorized in Terry.
Wrong. Terry was all about stopping Terry and his friends because the detective said he thought they were going to commit an ARMED ROBBERY. To do that, he expected them to have illegal weapons in their possession. And, guess what? That is just what they had and what they were charged with.
In truth, Terry was one of the worst decisions in US history. In the first place, the detective based his “firmly held belief” that Terry, et al, were engaged in “casing” a business with the intent of robbing it, because Terry was walking back and forth in front of the store looking in the front door, but not entering. There myriad innocent reasons why Terry might be doing that, including that he was waiting for someone whom he knew to come out. The court then decided that the fact that the detective did not clearly hear and was unable to understand one of Terry’s answers to a question was sufficient to show deception. Even though the detective did not ask him to repeat the answer or ask for any clarification of the answer, the court decided that this was sufficient to justify the frisk, which turned up a pistol. What happened was that the detective guessed that Terry and his friends might be contemplating a criminal act and, because he was correct and the court did not want to throw out the stop and frisk, ruled that it was valid. It would be nearly i9mpossible to use the same facts as justification for a stop and frisk, today.
See, even if Terry and company were preparnig to rob the store, there was virtually no way that the detective would ever have gotten them to confess that fact. And, if they wer plannnig a strong arme robbery, there would have been n o weapon to arrest them for possing and they would have walked and came back the next day, or next week, and robbed the store. Or hit somebody over the head down the street. The detective suspected that these men were armed, illegally, and was looking for an excuse to search them. And, the court allowed his actions. Bad decision, which the courts have been tightening up for 50 years.
Remember when they told us that to prevent terrorism we were going to have to retreat behind the static defenses of a surveillance state?
And how that tech would never be used against American citizens? Much less to spy on and sabotage a political campaign for President of the United States?
Good times.
Red Guard: Ma’amm, I need you to step out your car please.
Leslie: Did I do something wrong officer?
Red Guard: Is this your car? Is that an NRA sticker?
Leslie: uh yes…
Red Guard: Lift up your bra, now place your hands on the hood, spread your feet apart. Are there any firearms in the car?
Leslie: No officer.
Red Guard: Okay. You can go on your way ma’am. Thank you for your cooperation. Have a nice day.
The people of Chicago get what they voted for. We live in a representative democracy, so what’s the problem here. If Chicagoan’s don’t care why should I?
I haven’t had time to read the study yet, but I’m curious how they accounted for “lives saved” because someone was carrying a firearm legally/illegally and warded off thugs by employing the weapon for self-defense purposes only.
“We live in a representative democracy, so what’s the problem here. If Chicagoan’s don’t care why should I?”
You should care because we don’t live in a representative democracy, we live in a constitutional republic.
It’s what prevents California Texas and Florida from deciding that you’re on the menu for dinner
All of the gun debate seems to ignore the fact that gun ownership requires a culture of personal responsibility.
why would anyone want to be a LEO in these bastions of LibRuleism ?
I grew up in Brooklyn, NY prior to the Crown Heights riots.
Except for the Chabad group, the white flight was an outcome of the ‘block buster’ movement. it has taken half a century to recover from this catastrophe.
LibRulism in action.
That Chi, NYC and other bastions of this sort of thinking do not require the perpetrators of these laws to live with the consequences is telling.
The same is true for the importation of Muslims who will not and cannot integrate but ‘lay low’ waiting for sufficient numbers to take over (see Minnesota Somalis).
How long must we play Charlie Brown and the football ?
What does “Stop & Frisk” do? It enforces our law that criminals are banned from owning and possessing guns. Why is this important? It’s very important because yearly FBI statistics have shown every year that 90% of all gun crimes and gun murders are committed by felons who are banned by our laws from owning or possessing guns.
It seems that Liberals, Progressives, and Democrats want law abiding citizens to give up their right to protect themselves and their loved ones by taking away their guns, but don’t want the rights of criminals to be infringed on by simply searching them for guns that it is against our laws for them to have, in order to save lives and stop crimes.
So the Liberals, Progressives, and Democrats choice to law abiding US citizens is to give up our constitutional right and our ability to defend ourselves, but don’t infringe on the rights of criminals, which would be much more effective in stopping gun crimes and gun murders, than destroying our 2nd Amendment right.
The problem with your understanding of criminal is that it is ex post facto. You know how you will see stories of a man being shot. The MSM will ALWAYS say that the man (or woman) was unarmed. Do you find this a little unsettling? I did because I felt like I was being manipulated (I was) but clearly the person shot was unarmed, so that was bad because of a disparity of force from the officer.
Here is what I learned. The discovery of a person happens AFTER the situation. This is a common human heuristic called historical bias. At the time of the encounter we do not know if someone is armed or not.
TL;DR How do you know someone is a criminal when you see them other than if they are blatantly committing the crime in front of you, or you were lucky enough to see them commit it. In the article 250,000 people in a 8 month period were NOT criminals and were stopped. That puts police accuracy pretty much in the toilet. Do you want to be on the other side of that? Do you trust the police that produced those results?
I Don’t.
The discussion here is supposed to be about “Stop & Frisk”, and when stopping someone and frisking them, their ID is obtained and called in on the officer’s shoulder radio, which they are then sent back the record of who was stopped, and if they are a criminal, then if they also have a gun, they just committed another felony and will be arrested and taken to jail, preventing the possibility of another gun crime or gun murder.
As far shooting an unarmed person, mostly by mistake, when an officer points his weapon at a suspect and orders him to do something, and instead of that suspect obeying the person who has a bead on him with a gun, he does something else that may be construed as going for a weapon of his own, and the scared officer, wondering why he’s not being obeyed when pointing a gun at the suspect, also thinks that this person may be going for a gun to shoot the officer before the officer can shoot him, so the officer makes sure he shoots first.
Just an example of what law enforcement officers must go through and must make deadly decisions of who to protect first, the suspect or themselves. Not saying this happens all the time, but I’m willing to bet it occurs most of the time.
I wouldn’t act that way in the same situation, but I’m a little stupid when trying to make sure I’m always safe, but I can’t blame officers for acting like this, for it is a deadly situation when someone who has a gun pointed at them refuses to obey orders, and does something that could put the officers life at risk, and that officer wants to go home to his family after his shift, and not in a body bag.
Wow just wow do you not see the underlying idea I am trying present to you. I will make it easy … You can not know before hand what you know after the fact. Hence the saying “Hindsight is 20/20”
You only want to see the part after the person is stopped, and then you only want to see the situation where the officer discovers an actual crime. You are willfully missing everything else because you want there to be only this way despite everything that is wrong with it. As Fen said why not search people’s homes or cars for evidence of criminality. Why not do it constantly every hour of every day. Why stop at just Stop & Frisk. I am sure this will root out all criminality.
250,000 people in a 8 months
Read this several times, a quarter million people that were not committing any crimes yet they were stopped. What happens if this was you and it happened over and over again every day, because you committed the heinous crime of being poor.
Something else, do you think criminals aren’t going to get wise to this stupid shit? If you don’t then you are either young or naive. There are still guns in England despite the ban, how is that?
You miss the point!
If the politicians are going to choose to take away our 2nd Amendment right to provide more gun safety for our populace, and “Stop & Frisk” has proven to be an excellent method for gun safety, by arresting the criminals who are committing 90% of all gun crimes and gun murders in the USA, by infringing on people’s rights by law enforcement stopping and frisking those they suspect of being criminals for possession of guns, whether rich or poor, then I want them to choose to infringe on those suspected of being criminals, rather than taking the 2nd Amendment right away from law abiding people who need their guns for defense against those same criminals that are committing 90% of all gun crimes and gun murders in the USA.
You’re essentially saying there’s no such thing as reasonable suspicion. Every experienced policeman will tell you there is, and the courts have accepted that as fact.
But I’d ask every honest cop to ask himself before stopping someone, “would you have stopped this person even if Terry had gone the other way, and stopping him would not give you an excuse to frisk him?” If you would not, then you’re not really stopping him because of your reasonable suspicion at all, which means the suspicion isn’t that strong, so stopping him just to take advantage of Terry is abuse.
And THAT is the crux of the problem. This is why free markets can never really be achieved.
A great movie/book that explores this topic is Minority Report.
Go read it/watch it. And yah Tom Cruise is useless, but the idea comes through despite him.
“Minority Report” is fiction and has nothing to do with the reality going on in the USA today.
“Sop & Frisk” has already been proven to cut down on gun crimes and gun murders tremendously in both NYC and Chicago, but it infringes on people’s rights to a certain extent, but harms nobody but criminals caught possessing guns, which has been against our laws all across the USA since as far back as the 1950s, maybe a tad longer.
The only people that “Stop & Frisk” really affect are the criminals who are caught possessing guns, a felony which gets them arrested and off the streets to prevent a lot of crimes, proven by the statistics in NYC and Chicago, since the “FBI National Crime Statistics” show that criminals commit 90% of all gun crimes and gun murders in the USA every year.
You are why we have statism. Stop & Frisk is proven under a specific set of circumstance and only if the police are trustworthy. You can not conceptualize, but unfortunately you can vote and this is why we slide into statism. It isn’t just the liberals that are calling for authoritarianism. Concepts matter and maybe someday you will understand that.
Milhouse: “Except that you can’t be stopped just because you “a) fit the profile or b) a cop doesn’t like you”. There must be reasonable grounds to suspect you of having committed an offense.”
That’s so cute. And the FISA court would never be used against innocent citizens, and Senior Staff at the FBI are Boy Scouts.
Tell me, if you have this much faith in the State, why bother with Separation of Powers, checks and balances, limited government etc? Because I thought one of the pillars of conservatism was the acknowledgement that all men are corruptible, even police officers?
And didn’t our host here advise during the all legal analysis of the Brown, Grey and Scott shootings that the time to defend your rights is in an courtroom and NOT on the side of the road with an armed ignorant police officer? So what good does it do me tell the judge I have been violated AFTER I have been violated?
No, stop and frisk is too subjective and police too incompetent for this to be be tolerated. I don’t care how many lives it saves. You might as well argue for mandatory internment of all black males aged 14-40.
Fen: I’m afraid the only way we can save the Republic now is to go outside the Rule of Law.
LI: Bad Fen! Bad! We will stand by our principles – a legal insurrection bound by the Constitution, even if that mean another 100 million more lives sacrificed to Marxism…
Fen: Fine. We’ll try it your way.
LI: …well, except for the 4th Amendment.
Fen: ???
Trust the police? This is a small percentage of police but a percentage that can not be ignored. The funny thing is that I give more credence to officer’s stories when I see that they are from southern states than I do when I see that they are from liberal shitholes.
From the article:
” In 2013 when (officer) Sung took him aside one day and allegedly shared a plan with him to ‘get rid of’ Thomas Conforti by framing him for a rape with the help of one of the prostitutes working at Li’s karaoke clubs.
It was believed that Conforti, who was a family man and a by-the-book commanding officer, was not going to put up with the bribery scheme.
Lee decided to turn on Sung by going to NYPD’s Internal Affairs and eventually agreed to wear a wire.
But according to Lee, he soon discovered that Internal Affairs was not interested in exposing suspected widespread corruption for fear of causing embarrassment to the NYPD.”
So we allegedly have 100 offers taking bribes and an Internal Affairs reluctant to investigate and hurt the Department’s reputation.
Didn’t we just see this with the FBI refusing to release information that would reflect poorly on their institution?
If the whistleblower is telling the truth, we are looking at systemic corruption within a Police Department. Not only the 10% bad apples, but the almost 90% who look the other way.
Do we really want to trust them to determine what is “reasonable suspicion” for a stop and frisk?
Perhapd a Stop & Fist policy would be even more effective.
At least someone is actually calculating the effects of a policy. Very often policies are implemented and there is no follow up to learn about the effects. Roe vs Wade for example is a textbook study of The judicial branch of government dabbling in social engineering.
I wish the ACLU would defend the 1st and 2nd Amendments to the degree they are defending the 4th. The ACLU has lost its Due North.
The ACLU was a communist organization, started by the “American Communist Party” back in the early 1900s. Google their history and discover for yourself. They have not strayed far from their beginnings, which was to use our rights and freedoms against us for the benefit of the “American Communist Party”, and they are still doing it today for the new communist and socialist political party, the “Democrat Party”. If it doesn’t benefit the socialists, communists, and/or Democrats, they usually won’t get involved in any violation of American citizens rights and freedoms. But if it goes against conservatives, Christians, and/or Republicans, you’ll find them right at the front of the opposition, fighting harder than anyone else.