NEW YORK -- A teenager trying to get into his apartment after school
is confronted by police. A man leaving his workplace chooses a
different route back home to avoid officers who roam a particular
street.
These and hundreds of thousands of other Americans in big cities
have been stopped on the street by police using a law-enforcement
practice called stop-and-frisk that alarms civil libertarians but is
credited by authorities with helping reduce crime.
Police in major U.S. cities stop and question more than a million
people each year -- a sharply higher number than just a few years ago.
Most are black and Hispanic men. Many are frisked, and nearly all are
innocent of any crime, according to figures gathered by The Associated
Press.
And the numbers are rising at the same time crime rates are dropping.
Ronnie Carr's experience was typical: He was fumbling with his
apartment door after school in Brooklyn when plainclothes officers
flashed their badges.
"What are you doing here?" one asked, as they rifled through his
backpack and then his pockets. The black teenager stood there, quiet
and nervous, and waited.
The Carr youth said the officers told him they stopped him because
he looked suspicious peeking in the windows. He explained that he had
lost his keys. Twenty minutes later, the officers left. The youth was
not arrested or cited with any offense.
"I felt bad, like I did something wrong," he said.
Civil liberties groups say the practice is racist and fails to deter
crime. Police departments maintain it is a necessary tool that turns up
illegal weapons and drugs and prevents more serious crime.
Police records indicate that officers are drawn to suspicious
behavior: furtive movements, actions that indicate someone may be
serving as a lookout, anything that suggests a drug deal, or a person
carrying burglary tools such as a slim jim or pry bar.
The New York Police Department is among the most vocal defenders of
the practice. Commissioner Raymond Kelly said recently that officers
may stop as many as 600,000 people this year. About 10 percent are
arrested.
The practice is perfectly legal. A 1968 Supreme Court decision
established the benchmark of "reasonable suspicion" -- a standard that
is lower than the "probable cause" needed to justify an arrest.
But in the mid-1990s, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani and NYPD Commissioner
William Bratton made stop-and-frisk an integral part of the city's law
enforcement, relying on the "broken windows" theory that targeting
low-level offenses helps prevent bigger ones.
Street stops started to go up, and overall crime dropped dramatically.
Last year, New York police stopped 531,159 people, more than five
times the number in 2002. Fifty-one percent of those stopped were
black, 32 percent Hispanic and 11 percent white.
Not all stops are the same. Some people are just stopped and
questioned. Others have their bag or backpack searched. And sometimes
police conduct a full pat-down.
David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and an
expert on street stops, said few searches yield weapons or drugs. And
the more people are searched, the more innocent people are hassled.
When officers make a stop, they are required to fill out a form,
including the time and location of the stop and why police were
suspicious. Age, race and whether the person was frisked are also
recorded.
In Philadelphia, stops nearly doubled to more than 200,000 from 2007
to 2008. Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter deployed an "aggressive"
stop-and-frisk policy in the year since his election in November 2007
and overall crime has dropped.
In Los Angeles, where Mr. Bratton recently stepped down as police
commissioner, pedestrian stops have doubled in the past six years to
244,038 in 2008. The number of people stopped in cars is higher.
About 15 percent of the stops resulted in arrests in 2002, compared
with about 30 percent in 2008, according to an analysis of the data by
Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
RAND, an independent research agency hired by the New York Police
Department to analyze street-stop data in 2007 after public outcry,
found little racial profiling. It said the raw statistics "distorted
the magnitude and, at times, the existence of racially biased policing."
The NYPD continues to monitor the issue, but after the RAND
analysis, officials agreed that large-scale restructuring was
unnecessary.
Civil liberties groups also complain because New York police keep a
database of everyone stopped -- innocent or not. That makes them
targets for future investigations, said Christopher Dunn, associate
legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Los Angeles was forced by federal mandate to release data on street
stops -- including the race of those stopped -- starting in 2000 after
a series of scandals.