New York Finally Reforms its Stop-and-Frisk Policy

New York City will no longer keep tabs on millions of innocent people just because they were randomly stopped and searched by the police on the street.

On Friday, Gov. David Patterson signed a law prohibiting the NYPD from collecting and storing the personal information of the half million people stopped and frisked by police each year. The NYPD says it needs this information to solve crimes, but the department's thin evidence didn't hold a candle to the policy's massive, racially biased invasions of privacy.

Wisely listening to a the voices of civil libertarians and criminal justice reformers, Patterson finally decided to end the practice, saying it was "not a policy for a democracy." He's not the most beloved governor in the nation, but he won plaudits with this move on Friday, ending an invasive and unnecessary policy — which was unique to the NYPD alone.

As Te-Ping wrote recently, the NYPD stopped half a million people on the street in 2009 — and 84% of them were black of Latino. Only 6% of the stops resulted in arrests. In Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood, officers make an estimated 93 stops a year for each 100 residents. Men between 15 and 34 in the area were stopped an average of five times — most of them completely innocent. In other words, black and Latino men in New York City were the most likely to get frisked by the police, with their information entered into a database — starting an unnecessary cycle of contact with the system.

The NYPD pulled together some last-minute stats in a failed attempt to save the policy, while police commission Raymond Kelly tried to sound the alarm: ""Without it, there will be, inevitably, killers and other criminals who won't be captured as quickly, or perhaps ever."

Asking Patterson to veto the legislation, the department presented him with a list of 170 crimes in which it said stop-and-frisk data played a key role in solving the crime. The New York Times pointed out that some of those suspects had criminal records anyway and could have been identified through other means.  Rather than convincing him, Patterson said the NYPD report did the opposite: it showed that thorough investigations could have solved many of these 170 cases and that the troubling invasion of privacy wasn't necessary.

I can't deny the fact that New York's database would likely prevent a few crimes and help solve several others. By collecting identifying information about suspected gang members and violent individuals who might later be involved in a crime, the department is more likely to catch a fugitive or two and connect a couple of street names to real names and addresses. But think about how slippery that slope is. We could also prevent crimes by locking up every teenager in the city on a Saturday night, but we aren't about to do that, right?

Solving 170 cases is simply not enough cause for the police to collect and store personal information about millions of people — most of them minorities, and most of them innocent. Kudos to Patterson and the New York legislature for putting a halt to this practice.

Photo Credit: FutureAtlas