Stop-and-Frisk Problem Solved? NYPD Commissioner Said It Is
Two weeks after officially taking his seat as the NYPD’s newly appointed police commissioner, Bill Bratton said the issue of stop-and-frisk is “more or less solved.”
While speaking at a community safety symposium Wednesday, Bratton added that the controversial NYPD tactic that stops a disproportionate amount of young African-American and Latino males “stopped in some neighborhoods altogether,” according to the NY Daily News.
He also reported that stop-and-frisk numbers were down from 532,911 in 2012 to 194,000 in 2013. During his campaign, Mayor Bill DeBlasio spoke on pushing for the end of the overuse and abuse of stop-and-frisk by New York City's police department.
Communities United for Police Reform spokesperson Priscilla Gonzalez said in a statement that the latest statistics are a “positive step” but that stop-and-frisk is not “simply a numbers” game. “The remnants of the Bloomberg administration's out-of-control stop-and-frisk program will not be resolved until unconstitutional stops are eliminated as policy and in practice,” Gonzalez said.
She continued, “Institutional change does not come overnight, and it remains critical that the law prohibiting all discriminatory profiling by the police be upheld and properly implemented, and the remedial process resulting from the federal court decision move forward.”
In August, a New York federal judge ruled that the practices violated the fourth and 15th Amendment rights of the plaintiffs in the case of Floyd vs. City of New York. Judge Shira Scheindlin did not order an end to the policy, but instead appointed an independent monitor to oversee changes to the practice.
Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration attempted to appeal the decision, but the request was denied in November 2013.
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(Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
