by Kyle Smith
Like many conservatives, I had grave concerns about curtailing the
New York City police department’s controversial tactic of stopping and
frisking potential suspects for weapons. I was inclined to defer to the
police when they protested that they needed the option to stop,
question, and frisk New Yorkers on a mere reasonable suspicion of
wrongdoing instead of probable cause that the targeted person had
committed a crime. Restricting the tactic, I thought, would cause an
uptick, maybe even a spike, in crime rates. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who
made ending stop-and-frisk the centerpiece of his successful 2013
campaign for mayor, struck me as a man who was cynically willing to
tolerate an increase in crime if he thought it to his political
advantage to amplify leftist voters’ core belief that policing was out
of control.
Today in New York City, use of stop-and-frisk, which the department
justified via the 1968 Terry v. Ohio Supreme Court ruling, has crashed.
Yet the statistics are clear: Crime is lower than ever. It’s possible
that crime would be even lower had stop-and-frisk been retained, but
that’s moving the goalposts. I and others argued that crime would rise.
Instead, it fell. We were wrong.
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Source: The National Review
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