The
Case Against STOP AND FRISK
We have heard it all before. “This
will handcuff the police… Crime will explode…The public safety will be at risk!”
These were just a few of the law
enforcement pronouncements that emerged more than four decades ago after the
Supreme Court of the United States leveled the, now famous, Miranda
decision. It was widely regarded that
allowing law enforcement to violate a basic right of persons only suspected of
a crime or misdemeanor was the best way for police officers to properly do
their job. Now, more than forty years
later, we are faced with the same excuses as police forces are allowed to run
roughshod over the Fourth Amendment under the auspices of public safety using
the policy called STOP AND FRISK.
Having executed more than half a
million Stop and Frisks annually, the New York Police Department has discovered
only a negligible number of guns. New
York Mayor Michael Bloomberg contends that even finding one gun, which might
save one life, is worth the 600,000 or more invasions into the lives and
liberty of, mostly black and Latino men.
If this wholly corrupt policy of Stop and Frisk is supposed to be about
guns and gun violence, why are hundreds and thousands of non-gun carrying men
of color being subjected to the criminal justice system for drug possession?
Award winning syndicated radio host
and television personality, Don Imus, has raised millions of dollars for
charity throughout his career. His wife
is a best-selling author who specializes in diet and environmental issues. They run a non-profit cattle ranch in New
Mexico hosting teenagers afflicted with cancer, sickle cell anemia and those
siblings of victims of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In the past, Mr. Imus has related a story
wherein a couple of homicide detectives, on a routine canvass, entered his home
to question if he had seen anything relating to a recent murder in his
neighborhood. According to Imus, a bunch
of cocaine was out in full view at the time. Imagine the difference in all of the
aforementioned lives and their families had those homicide detectives informed
the Narcotics Division to get a search warrant for Mr. Imus’ premises. Now realize all of the damage done,
educational and job opportunities lost, and the untold grief experienced by the
multitude of individuals and their families, almost exclusively black and
Latino, who have been charged with drug possession under the guise of gun
violence prevention.
Police Departments have been using Stop
and Frisk to bolster their arrest records and federal funding as part of the
decades of failure of the War on Drugs.
A more honest approach would have been for the courts to allow the
confiscation of illegal drugs but the release of all suspects who were not in
possession of a firearm. In August of
2012, the NYPD discovered a massive weapons cache at a home in Astoria. And in December of that same year, another
major weapons arsenal was found in Greenwich Village. Another cache was discovered in Staten
Island. Yet tens of thousands of Stop
and Frisks did not, and do not, occur in those neighborhoods.
President Obama was targeted and
Attorney General Eric Holder was called on the carpet before Congress when it
was discovered that, under an ill-advised sting operation dubbed FAST AND
FURIOUS, started during the GW Bush administration, weapons were lost and a
federal agent was killed. However,
persons of color are dying on the streets of major American cities by the
hundreds, from illegal guns, and the US Congress is silent.
It is well known that many of those
guns are purchased out of state and subsequently sold on the streets of New
York, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere.
Yet the Congress has had no public hearings and called no ATF agents,
supervisors or directors to testify as to their lack of effectiveness into the
interstate transportation of guns, nor have they subpoenaed any Governors to
testify as to how a gun purchased in their state(s) wound up killing an
innocent person a thousand miles away.
The death of one ATF agent as a result of a botched government program
and the deaths of four diplomats at the hands of a zealous mob in Benghazi,
Libya ignited the 24 hour news media as Congress allegedly vowed to get to the
bottom of these tragedies. However, in
neighborhoods of people of color where five deaths might be considered a calm
month, the US Congress sees no such national crisis.
This targeting of minorities, under
force of law, is not a new phenomenon.
The inferior status of Jews was established in September 1935 by the
Nuremberg Laws. According to the
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE HOLOCAUST, these laws “officially
revoked the civil equality won by Jews in the period of the Emancipation and
gave legal force to racist principles… to separate the Jews as individuals and
as a group from the rest of the population.” The Nazi policies were “calculated to eliminate the Jews from public and social life, take away
their civil rights, and crush them economically.” Edward B. Westermann confirms these policies
in HITLER’S POLICE BATTALIONS. He
writes, “The regular police also played
an important role in enforcing discriminatory ordinances and statutes…
including the enforcement of the provisions of the “Nuremberg Laws” of 1935.”
The use of Stop and Frisk as a
rationale for curbing gun violence should not be heralded as legitimate. There are several methods of policing that
can also be used to stem the waves of gun violence. The police can use excessive force, coerced
confessions, quarter officers in suspected homes, conduct warrantless searches
and refuse to honor the Miranda decision.
However, there exists well-documented, historical reasons among the
American legal landscape as to why these methods will not be employed. And they are the very same historical reasons
why the policy of Stop and Frisk should be halted.
It
has not been outlawed because incarcerating and marginalizing persons of color
for dubious reasons is also something we have heard before. It was infamously noted by Chief Justice
Roger Taney in his Dred Scott v. Sanford majority opinion. Blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound
to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery
for his benefit.”
