From the LawOfficer Facebook page: “What do you think of NYC’s stop-and-frisk program?”
First, what I know about the NYPD: almost nothing—except that they have about 40,000 cops and work where I grew up thinking was actually Gotham City. I remember walking through New York as a teenager with my parents and having hookers hit on me and my brother, with my dad and my mom standing right next to us. When I was about 20, a homeless guy got mad at me for refusing to give him money, which I did politely, and came at me with a bottle. I remember thinking, “Damn! I’m going have to kill this guy and mom isn’t going like that.”
Just then Battleshiphead—my dad—walked up and yelled, “Officer!” and pointed. The homeless guy dropped the bottle and ran away.
Then I said, “Dad, I don’t see any cops.” So he lectured me on the idiocy of planning to kill a homeless guy in front of my mom. As usual, he was right.
Well, there you have it. My knowledge of NYPD is almost nil. What I do know is that every issue a department has is magnified by the number of officers and the number of people living there. The span of control dictates that the amount of separation between a street cop and the head shed is similar to the difference between a rubber band gun and a .45. So all the head shed in an agency like the NYPD has to go on is statistics.
How many cops working how many hours contacted how many people? When the smart folks in the suits start to look at the numbers, they might just think they aren’t getting their bang for their buck if the number of contacts isn’t high enough. The way they push this is with programs like “stop and frisk.”
Stop-&-Frisk Program
In reading up on the program, it sounds like the NYPD brass told the cops to go out and contact as many people as possible, under the Constitutional rules established under Terry vs. Ohio. What I find the most interesting about this program is that it had to be a program. I’ve worked at two different agencies and most of the cops at both agencies went out just about every shift and did exactly that. We just call it being cops. If you want to meet standards, you’ll go out and contact a few people, you’ll write a few field interview cards and you might even take a bad guy to jail without being sent to meet them through a radio call.
Again: I don’t know a thing about the internal workings of the NYPD. I don’t know how suppressed the cops had been prior to a new set of bean counters coming up with the idea of telling them to go out and do their job. So this program was probably needed to tell the cops it was OK to be cops again.
My guess is the cops like it. They like knowing they aren’t going to be called on the carpet for doing what they’re supposed to be doing. They know they’ll get some complaints, but instead of getting in trouble, they have the backing of the agency to go out and look for crooks. Reminds me of my first lieutenant who proudly said, “If you don’t get any complaints, you aren’t doing your job.” He may be from a bygone era, but you get the point.
The ACLU
While looking at this, I also found that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is upset about the program. Get mad if you want, but we need groups like the ACLU so that all sides are represented. They do a pretty good job at what they do. I don’t think the ACLU and cops should always be at odds: We’re both there to stick up for the oppressed. Without someone watching for the other side, we all know plenty of cops who would kick in every door and take shortcuts.
What I’m not sure about is why ACLU care about the NYPD program so much when just about every other agency in the country is already doing essentially the same thing. All I can figure is that it is fairly new for the NYPD and the ACLU has to answer to their constituents. For now, all I can say is go stop and frisk.
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