Posted on 03/28/2010 3:09:46 PM PDT by ventanax5
The New York Police De partment recently released its stop-and-frisk data from 2009, triggering the usual denunciations from anti- cop activists and pundits -- none of whom understand policing or, apparently, the reality of New York crime.
These advocates purport to defend the interests of the city's black and Hispanic residents. If their agenda were realized, however, the result would be thousands more minority lives lost to violence and a return to the anarchy that once engulfed many minority neighborhoods.
Last year, the NYPD made 575,304 stops of civilians, an 8 percent rise over 2008. The stops led to the seizure of more than 7,600 weapons, including four machine guns, 36 assault weapons and nearly 700 handguns. Thousands more illegal weapons undoubtedly weren't carried to the streets in the first place, for fear of detection during a stop.
By no means coincidentally, crime in the city dropped 10 percent in 2009. Homicides fell an astonishing 19 percent from the prior year, to a low not seen since records were first kept in 1963.
NYPD critics ignore the crime decline and focus instead on the alleged racial disparities in police stops: Blacks were 55 percent of all stop subjects, though they are 24 percent of the city's population. Whites were 10 percent of all stops, and 35 percent of the population. Therefore, argue such lawsuit factories as the Center for Constitutional Rights, the department is illegally profiling minorities on the basis of their race. (The center is suing the NYPD over its stop policy.)
This argument suppresses the most important factor in determining what police do: fight crime. It is victims' experience of crime that drives police deployment and tactics. And those victims are found overwhelmingly in minority neighborhoods, preyed upon by local residents.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Whites, by contrast,....committed 1.8 percent of all shootings,
So 98% of those stopped and frisked should be black or Hispanic.
The NYPD is hardly profiling.
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