Law enforcement subculture and racial profiling

Crime

Arm New York

To curb crime, in recent years, New York City has enacted a "Stop, Question, Frisk" program, which involves a law enforcement officer briefly detaining an individual for a patdown to see if that individual is carrying any weapons or contraband. The biggest problem with the program is not the invasive nature of the search, but claims that the peace officers disproportionately target people of color, i.e. minorities. Facts would suggest those claims are accurate.

According to the New York Times, there were a record 580,000 stop-and-frisks in the city in 2009. Most of those stopped (55%) were black (a large portion were also Hispanic), most were young and almost all were male. For reference, according to the Census Bureau, there were about only 300,000 black men between the ages of 13 and 34 living in the city that year. A mere 6% of the stops resulted in arrests" (2010).

This is obviously a very delicate situation. But there is a rather simple and direct solution to the problem: eliminate the "Stop, Question, Frisk" program. it's inefficient and it disproportionately affects minorities. As Martin Luther King Jr. said in his letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" (McKnight 1998). What's going on in New York is injustice, plain and simple. it's immoral to discriminate against someone based on his/her race, ethnicity, gender, etc. NYPD is doing this everyday; whether consciously or subconsciously, there's no justification for it (NOTE: the SQF program is an acceleration of standard police protocol. While police should maintain the right to patdown suspicious individuals, they should reexamine the meaning of 'probable cause' and take a less aggressive SQF posture).

The truth is that under the auspices of Mayor Bloomberg, New York has become a soft tyranny. New Yorkers are no longer free. To explicate, Republican Presidential Nominee Ron Paul said, "Your safety has always, ultimately been your own responsibility, but never more so than now. People have a natural right to defend themselves. Governments that take that away from their people should be highly suspect" (Blannelberry 2011).

New York City has some of the toughest gun laws in the country. And it's essentially impossible for a normal, law-abiding citizen to acquire a concealed handgun permit. The result is that the majority of New Yorkers are defenseless against the criminals who wish to prey on them. As pointed out by the NY Times article, the SQF program does little to stop criminals, but does a great deal to strip away a New Yorker's fundamental right of self-defense. This is counterintuitive to public safety. While crime prevention is an important aspect of police work, the reality is the majority of the time law enforcement arrives after a crime has been committed.