“Police are still stopping and questioning people in the city,” nypost.com reports. “The police tactic continues to be a useful tool for driving down crime, Police Commissioner James O’Neill said on the radio Sunday morning. ‘It’s something that we continue to do.'”
Paging George Orwell! When did the Big Apple po-po’s “stop-and-frisk” policing become “stop-and-question”? Maybe when mayoral candidate (now Mayor) Bill De Blasio pledged to reform the practice, amidst charges that stop-and-frisk amounted to racial harassment and profiling.
According to the new NYPD jefe, stop-and-frisk is now A-OK. His employees don’t do it so often anymore — and it works!
O’Neill acknowledged his department hasn’t been conducting the same number of controversial searches as it has in years past – but admitted the tactic is useful in ridding city streets of illegal guns.
“It’s very fruitful for us,” O’Neill said. “Our gun arrests are up around 20% this year. We’re still taking guns off the street.”
Just in case you feel compelled to take Commissioner O’Neill’s 20 percent stat seriously, please note that the NYPD has a long and ignoble history of cooking the books. And planting guns. Besides, arrests and convictions are two different things.
More to the point, O’Neill is arguing that “taking guns off the street” (and melting them out-of-state) fully justifies unpopular, indeed unconstitutional policing. This is my surprised face.
Government shills will say anything to get your vote, then remove your ability to lawfully protect themselves.
Stop and Frisk falls right below the Patriot Act as another act of immoral and unconstitutional infringement on our rights. We lost the war on terror the day the Patriot Act was signed. Everyone who endorses either of these policies should be removed from office immediately. Many should be put in jail.
Agreed. That’s another thing that pisses me off about Trump, is his full-throated endorsement and promise to renew the Patriot Act. All three candidates (Clinton, Trump, and McMullin) support the Patriot Act; at least McMullin says it should have some limits, Clinton is frustrated that it didn’t go far enough.
*rubs eyes* Where did the brand new .308 Galil ACE article above this one go? It was up for about five minutes and I was ready to throw in my two cents.
Posted early by mistake. It’ll be back soon.
Seems to be a lot of that going on lately.
Police, even in New York, know the that there’s a big legal difference between stop and talk and stop and frisk. And seizures are always consensual or ther’re always always incident to a valid arrest and based on “ptobab;e cause. That the way the game is played.
Going back to Florida v. Bostick 501 US 429, 434, 111 S. Ct. 2382, 115 L. Ed. 2d 389 (1991) the US Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment permits police officers to approach individuals at random in a public places to ask them questions and to request consent to search so long as a reasonable person would understand that he or she could refuse to cooperate.
There are three categories of police-citizen encounters that impose increasingly stringent standards: “
(1) the consensual encounter, which may be initiated without any objective level of suspicion;
(2) the investigative detention, which must be supported by a reasonable, articulable suspicion of criminal activity; and
(3) the arrest, valid only if supported by probable cause.”
United States v. Waldon, 206 F.3d 597, 602 (6th Cir. 2000)
So, bottom line. There ain’t no illegal stop and frisk goin on here, Just a little friendly police citizen talk goin on. The perp just wanted to show me his new gun but kinda forgot those last couple of felony convictions. So I let him show me, then and only then did I arrested him and seized the gun. Oh and the drugs he had with him. It’s all good based on probable cause that Johnny was committin a crime right in front of me.
Or Johnny got the dropsies when I just wanted to talk to him and there was this big ol 40 and a couple of baggise right there at his feet. So I just lawfully took his sorrar ass to jail for littering. Oh and for having a gun and some drugs too. We’re all good. We’re all legal.
Your Friendly NYC street cop.
NYC is an experiment that proves that if you’re going to eliminate the 2nd Amendment you’re going to have to eliminate the 4th as well.
My response would be along the lines of “no”. If the officer continued to badger me, it would turn into a “go fuck yourself”. If the officer then decides to act like a tyrant, FLAME DELETED
And that’s when you got shot in the back.
Or rather, since this is NYPD, missed 17 times, grazed in the butt and Achilles heel and hit in the back of the head from point blank range from 30 yards away.
I don’t talk to the police without benefit of counsel.
“Am I free to leave?” – If yes, I leave.
If no, or no answer, “This is a custodial interrogation. I have nothing further to say without benefit of counsel.”
The police are not your friends, nor are they there to “help” you, ESPECIALLY in crapholes like NYC and Chicago.
If they want to go fishing, let them buy a rod and a reel and head for the nearest pier.
Righhhhhhhhhhhht … New York City police no longer frisk random people, they just talk. And truckloads of those random people are voluntarily incriminating themselves and agreeing to searches. At least that is what arrest reports will claim.
Why do I get the idea that standard operating procedure now is to stop and frisk people and fabricate consent, reasonable articulable suspicion, and/or probable cause to justify the frisk?
I could support “stop and talk,” but only if I was stupid enough to believe the New York cops. Which I’m not, so I don’t.
But you would be surprised at how much support “stop and frisk” has in NYC among people who have never been either.
Because they only engage in this practice if you fit a certain set of nonspecific characteristics.
The characteristics for stop and frisk in NYC are very specific — being black or Hispanic-looking are two of them.
And, of course, male.
It’s amazing and disturbing how so many men don’t find the policy to be an outrage. If there was an unconstitutional search-and-seizure action that presumed women to be criminals and targeted them 93% of the time, large swaths of the culture would be howling about it (and that’s not even counting the feminists and the white-knight males).
If you don’t want to talk while being stopped, it is reasonable suspicion and justifiable cause for a frisk!
Remember kids, the house always wins.
I wonder … They take an illegal gun but do not arrest the person? Perhaps because they didn’t have probable cause for the stop in the first place … So, are not the firearms illegally removed, held and destroyed by the police / the city?
Interesting, there is a caplock pistol at the front of that pile.
Just goes to show they’ll use whatever they can get their hands on.
Makes sense though, no restrictions on the purchase.
The problem with stop and frisk arose when it became a numbers game, as everything does in big cities. As soon as you introduce stats to a practice, it follows the same road. One precinct has more stop and frisks than another, so the boss hears about it. He tells his underlings, so they worry about it. And soon every cop is getting compared to every other cop and being asked “Hey, McVito over there had 5 stop and frisks yesterday and you only had 1, why?” ‘Well, because I didn’t see anyone who looked like they had a gun.’ “So you’re saying McVito’s a better cop than you are, right?”
Then the guys with the good numbers- not convictions, mind you, though BS stops increase those by chance- get the good assignments. The right days off. The promotions. There’s no ‘quota’ but when you institute things like ‘computstat’ you can believe it’s going to put enormous pressure on to feed the beast.
And when it blows up you always hear that the department will be giving ‘new training’ which the bosses that created the structural problems don’t have to take so no one has to change anything.
Has to be a stock photo! Or they bring the same pile out of storage to impress journalists
Several people on another site identified the large tube as a Lewis Gun cooling jacket something my grandfather carried in WW1. Weight for complete item about 18 pounds. Can’t imagine they are seen that often even in New York
Even here in Australia police have to have more probable cause than New York (based on one short visit and lots of reports about it)
New York, treating the Constitution like 2-ply for everyones “safety”. You couldn’t pay me to live in New York state or in NYC. A city that had over 1,000 slashing by April ’16, but doesn’t afford their citizens a means to defend themselves. Brilliant concept.
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