Dear Friend:I wanted to bring you up to date on progress we have made recently to reform the New York Police Department's widespread use of "stop and frisk," a practice that disproportionately affects too many of our city's young black and Latino males.
The intended purpose of the strategy, which has expanded two-fold since 2004, is to recover illegal weapons, a goal that I know we all share. But of the approximately 600,000 stops carried out last year, no guns were found 99.8% of the time.
We must turn a critical eye to any crime-prevention strategy whose success rate is so low, and which at the same time inflicts such significant collateral damage on communities. Eighty five percent of those stopped last year were black or Hispanic, a fact which has bred distrust of the police in too many of our neighborhoods and made it harder, not easier, to solve crimes with help from community input. At the same time, it costs the City $75 million a year to process the low-level charges that stem from stop and frisk - money that I believe can be better spent on hiring more police officers at a time when violent crimes are inching back up.
Hoping to spark a long-overdue dialogue about this issue and to call for broad reform in how stop and frisks are carried out, I spoke last Saturday at the national Think Outside the Cell Symposium . The New York Times wrote about the symposium and about my proposals that aim to strike the right balance between policing and civil rights.
I believe we need to train police officers to make stops more constitutional and less confrontational. We need to hold commanders more accountable for the proper executions of stops in their precincts, and we need to track their performance on Compstat. And we need to pilot alternative policing techniques - developed by John Jay College Professor David Kennedy -- that have successfully driven down crime in other cities by working with communities.
The day we do that, New York will be a better, safer city for all of us.
Sincerely,
Scott M. Stringer
Manhattan Borough President