Police

The NYPD is a-changin’

Bratton Tells Chiefs He’ll Stop Sending Rookies to High-Crime Areas And, as you probably know, DeBlasio is dropping the city’s appeal to the stop and frisk lawsuit. But hoping to limit a federal monitor to 3 years. In response: “Four unions representing NYPD officers have filed appeals and motions opposing dismissal of the city’s appeal, which are pending.” Good times.…

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“Decreased Stop and Frisk Causes Crime to Skyrocket in NYC”

Well that’s the headline I would have expected to see after listening to Ray Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg (and almost all my police friends) over the past few years. They had me believe that each and every one of those more than 600,000 annual stops in 2011 was absolutely essential to prevent the city from descending into an Orwellian Escape…

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Five charts Ray Kelly Doesn’t want you to see!

(Can you guess I was just on buzzfeed? A better headline would be “Murders way down in NYC. And so are stop and frisks. And nobody seems to care.” But what kind of clickbaite would that be?) 1) Breakdown of NYC stops by race. Indeed, as often reported, 83% of stops have happened to black and hispanic people. 2) Breakdown…

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Shira Scheindlin Stop & Frisk Smackdown

I’m in beautiful Sydney. Spring is in the air and the birds make funny sounds just to remind me that I’m on the other side of the planet. Despite my focus on the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, I couldn’t help but notice that everything Judge Scheindlin decided regarding stop and frisk has been put on hold! The New York Times…

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This is a big deal

This is far more radical than anything Judge Scheindlin ruled in her well publicized stop and frisk decision. In a 3-2 decision (People v. Johnson is not long and worth reading in its entirety) the court managed to rule the following unconstitutional: In a New York City Housing Authority building, which the testifying officer characterized as a “drug-prone” location, the…

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Police

Stop & Frisk: They Had It Coming

A (cop) friend in Baltimore asked me with regard to stop and frisk: “What the hell is going on?” I emailed back: You know, leaving aside the decision was entirely predicable based on the judge not exactly being a friend of police, her decision is actually kind of mild. All she f*cking asks is for cops to stop making illegal…

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Worth Reading

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Stop and Frisk. It’s also well worth scrolling down to read his posts on Trayvon Martin and Zimmerman. Coates is one of the main reasons I haven’t written very much on the subject (another being I was on the road). Coates wrote what I was thinking. And he wrote it very well.

Police

Stop, Question, and Frisk in court

From the Times: Mr. Esposito insisted that a supervisor could conclude that a stop was legal based on reviewing that form alone. “If it’s filled out properly, it gives you reasonable suspicion. And if you have reasonable suspicion established, then you do not have racial profiling,” Mr. Esposito said. “It’s as simple as that.” Except it’s not. Here’s the “UF-250.”…

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