Letter: Data on NYPD’s Stop-and-Frisk is Troubling (Staten Island Advance)

Daniel Leddy overlooks convincing evidence that New York City Police Department officers unlawfully stop and frisk hundreds of thousands of innocent people annually (“NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy is prudent, lawful, Advance, May 8”).

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Terry v. Ohio and subsequent case law established clear legal justifications for stops-and-frisks. To stop a person, a police officer must have reasonable suspicion the individual has committed, is committing, or is about to commit an unlawful act. To frisk a person, an officer must have reason to believe the individual has a weapon that threatens the officer’s safety.

Now consider these facts: Last year, 605,328 of the 685,724 stops, more than 88 percent, were of innocent people as the encounter did not result in a summons or an arrest. Less than 2 percent of the 381,704 frisks conducted produced weapons.

These statistics clearly show that police officers routinely stop-and-frisk people without legal justification. How else to explain the massive numbers of innocent people stopped and unarmed people frisked?

Used lawfully, stop-and-frisk is an acceptable law-enforcement tool, but the NYPD’s rampant abuse of the tactic represents a wholesale violation of civil rights that sows mistrust between police officers and the public they serve.

Donna Lieberman
Executive Director, New York Civil Liberties Union