Stop and Frisk, back at home in NYC.

"Unless you was me, 
how could you judge me?
I was brought up in pain, 
y'all can't touch me
Police pursued me, 
Chased, cuffed, and subdued me
Talked to me rudely; 
cause I'm young rich and I'm black" - Jay-Z (Momma Loves Me)

What's interesting about learning criminal law and procedure is the academic confirmation of things that I already knew. I know that police officers often behave in ways that they ought not to. I grew up in Southeast Queens, New York. Unquestionably there is crime in my neighborhood of Springfield Gardens. Now that I know where to look, I can see what that means. Now that i live elsewhere I can see it from an outside perspective. I always looked at my neighborhood as bad, but I knew that it wasn't even the worse neighborhood in New York. The major problem I had was the feeling that police that police were stopping the wrong people. Somehow they were taking the easy way out by stopping and frisking people like me who weren't doing anything wrong. 
Today, I found a report from the NYCLU that put stats behind that feeling. Where I lived in NY encompassed the 113th police precinct. Lets ignore the racial aspects of the report for a second. In the area that the 113th police precinct covers, there is crime undoubtedly. People carry guns, you can smell marijuana often. Needles and other remnants of recent drug use litter the floors of local parks. It also has all the signs of urban blight with graffiti on the walls, specifically gang graffiti marking territory. Knowing nothing else, you would expect that there would be lots of police stops because of all of the crime. This is a target neighborhood for stop and frisk.

However, looking at police stops, there isn't the police effectiveness you would expect. In the neighborhood, there were 12,359 stops. This amounts to about 10.3% of the population of the precinct. 6,362 stops resulted in frisks. In 2,622 cases, force would be used. Out of those stops, 11,031 resulted in no summons issued. Meaning that after an intrusive stop, and sometimes an even more intrusive frisk, 89.3% of people were innocent of any crime. This is in the "high crime area" that the stop and frisks are supposed to be the most effective in. Maybe this neighborhood is being targeted (Ranked 20th out of 76 precincts in NY) But it's also has the 29th highest rate of innocent stops and it's ranked 20th amongst total innocent stops.

It's a study that hurts. It's depressing as someone who lived there. Getting stopped is invasive. Getting stopped and frisked is even more invasive. Stopping and frisking innocent people at this number is shameful. It's especially bad, because it means that the police that are supposed to be stopping people, and that are supposed to be protecting the innocent folk from the violence that plagues the neighborhood are victimizing them, despite having done nothing wrong.

Now, lets talk about race for a second. I won't talk about my local police precinct, because the neighborhood is 92% black/Latino, so the 94.8% of stops is about what you would expect. Instead, lets look a little bit more broadly. In NY, approximately 685,000 people were stopped in 2011. Of those, about 605,000 were innocent of any crime. 350,000 were black and 223,000 were Latino. 202,000 frisks were of blacks. But a weapon was only found on 1.8% of blacks and Latinos who were frisked. Meaning that only 1 out of 50 people who received the intrusive frisk were guilty of carrying a weapon. More importantly, is the fact that 310,000 people who were stopped in 2011 were black and innocent of any crime. This is about 53% of all innocent people and this means that 88.5% of blacks stopped were innocent of any crime. If this large disproportionate percent of people are being stopped, it's troubling that this many are innocent of any crime.