Please don't stop and frisk me

Although it may not be a direct form, New York’s stop-and-frisk law is a form of racial profiling by unfairly targeting the city’s men of color.

In New York City, the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policies allow for officers to stop thousands of law-abiding citizens every year under the pretense of reasonable suspicion, with the majority of these residents being either black or Latino.

According to 2012 NYPD reports, New York residents were stopped by the police 532,911 times. In those cases, 473,644 were completely innocent. Fifty-five percent of the innocent residents were black and 32 percent were Latino.

The data also showed that nine out of 10 New Yorkers who were stopped were completely innocent.

Although the reasoning for the stop-and-frisk policy is being attributed to crime being committed in low-income areas, there is no doubt that stopping thousands of law-abiding citizens is not a reasonable policy for lowering crime rates.

The stop-and-frisk law was challenged in a federal class action lawsuit, Floyd et al. v. City of New York et al. In it, a number of plaintiffs claimed that the city, along with numerous defendants, was unconstitutionally stopping and frisking people of color.

Last week, federal judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that the NYPD was liable for a pattern of racial profiling and that the stop-and-frisks were unconstitutional.

However, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has publicly indicated that the city would possibly appeal the ruling.

The law is completely unjust. Regardless of low income, high crime or any reasoning that is cited, it is a violation of the 14th Amendment to single out particular groups of people on the basis of race.

The stop-and-frisk policy in New York does just that.

A policy like this makes the assumption that those that live in low-income areas are more likely to commit crimes.

The controversy in New York is in many ways similar to a local lawsuit in North Carolina. In Alamance County, the U.S. Justice Department ruled that Latinos were unfairly targeted as a part of the sheriff’s office’s search for illegal immigrants.

As much progress as we have made as a nation in the past 151 years, it is evident that we do not live in a post-racial society. I would love to think that policies like the stop-and-frisk law have nothing to do with race, but the statistics alone show otherwise. When or if the day comes that race is not a factor, a law like this could be justifiably upheld.

In the meantime, this should not happen and citizens should continue to question the law enforcement and government on how and why these policies are effective.

Hopefully Mayor Bloomberg and the city of New York soon recognize that these discriminatory tactics violate one’s civil rights.