The appeal to the “ignorant and unlettered” is that there is no difference between a legitimate search and a fishing expedition.
To address your straw man, cops are not required to wait for an assault or robbery to occur as loitering, behaving erratically, and casing people or locations are all reasonable and articulable behaviors to stop someone and ask their business. These actions are not however reasonable suspicion that one is armed or carrying contraband. It appears in NYC that many times the threshold for a stop and frisk was based soley on a cop's opinion, and occasionally his quota. One does not have to be a libertarian to make this distinction but one does have to be a nanny-stater to ignore it.
And there you have it.
Do you really think the NYPD have so much time on their hands that they are in the habit of just randomly stopping and frisking people?
The math behind the much complained about stops doesn't support that.
I've said this before: 450,000 stops a year. That's 1,250 stops a day. There are probably over 10 million people in NYC on any given day and about 25,000 cops on shift during the course of any given day.
That's about 18 stops per cop per year, or one stop every three weeks per cop.
People seem to have it in their heads that the average NYC cop stops 100 people a day for no reason.
That math just doesn't work.