Essay On Stop And Frisk

Crime in the United States has been very bad in the last couple decades, though in the more recent years’ crime has been steadily decreasing. The police have been implementing a way of reducing crime by using the method of stop and frisk mostly in cities such as New York City or Chicago which are more prominently used. Stop and frisk is when a police officer has reasonable suspicion that a crime is going to happen, about to happen, or has happened before stopping a suspect. The officer then goes on to do a quick pat down to see if they have anything suspicious on them. There are different points of view of whether or not the act of stop and frisk should be legal or not. Stop and frisk should not be legal because many times these searches do …show more content…
There have been over five million street confrontations since two thousand and two, in which nine out of ten people have been found innocent (NYCLU). This means that ninety percent of people that police officers have stopped have been found innocent. This is a great amount of people considering that over five million people have been stopped by the police for appearing to be suspicious. There has been statistics that shows that there are pattern since two thousand two, that most of the people detained in New York were searched and found completely innocent (NYCLU). These statistics exemplify how this practice of Stop and Frisk really hasn’t resulted in a great amount of arrests and shouldn’t really be used as a method to reduce crime. Other than New York being a city of high activity of stop and frisk being used by the police, there is another city in which has even higher frequency of these stop and frisk situations. This city is …show more content…
Stop and Frisk has been complained numerous times as racial profiling towards minorities in these type of communities. A U.S. District Court judge of south of New York, Shira Scheindlin, said that the Fourteenth Amendment was not being enforced as there isn’t equal protection to black and latinos, as they are searched more by the police than white people (Washington Post). This very compelling because a U.S. District Court judge is saying this, yet there has not been any real changes to the Stop and Frisk system. Also, considering how high of a position this judge has, she is able to see the ins and outs of the law, and she is able to determine that there is discrimination and targeting towards minorities. Furthermore, in the Washington Post article, it has a graph in which it shows that black and hispanic people are stopped more by the police, even though there is a higher population of white people. It can be seen that black and hispanic people are the groups that are being targeted the most even though, there is a higher population of white people in the area. These statistics show that these stop and frisk searches have been directed towards black and latinos instead of it being equally distributed throughout all races. This exemplifies how stop and frisk can be considered to be racial profiling. Not to mention that, a scholarly journal from Yale