Introduction
Laws and regulations limit persons from violating the constitutional rights of others. States’ laws prevent and or reduce crime rates (Peak, 2012). However, such laws should reflect both legal and ethical soundness in their application. As one of the constitutional rights, people have the right and freedom of movement without violation of their privacy unless a court order justifies such a violation.
However, this freedom is impinged on in the State of New York. In the early 1990s, “the ‘stop and frisk’ law found its way into the State’s laws to promote proactive policing” (Kuh, 2005, p.34). Procedural laws for the State of New York under section 140:50 make provision for it. The ruling by the US Supreme Court on the case of Terry v. Ohio informs this law.
It gives the New York Police Department (NYPD) legal justification for stopping and frisking pedestrians in search of contraband such as weapons. Although one of the mandates of the NYPD includes preventing crime from occurring by deploying legal means, this paper questions the legal and ethical foundation of the ‘stop and frisk’ law applied by the NYPD. It also discusses the pros and cons of the law.
Pros
Police not only target to arrest crime perpetrators, but also they seek to prevent the occurrence of crime. This assertion implies that the police have to recover weapons in the wrong hands before their utilization to commit a crime such as murder. When applied properly, in theory, the ‘stop and frisk’ law is advantageous along this line of argument. The interpretation of this pro in the context of the criminology theory of the ‘broken window’ better elaborates this perspective.
The broken window theory argues that maintaining and monitoring urban areas to ensure orderliness conditions incredibly aids in the prevention of additional vandalism and a series of crimes. For example, a house with only a few of its windows broken presents no harm to any person; however, when vandalized by breaking more windows, homeless people acquire a better view and access to the building. They soon realize that the house has no occupants. Therefore, they settle and light fires inside, which causes more destruction of the house, and ultimately, it becomes a squatters’ abode.
In the context of crime prevention, the ‘broken window’ theory suggests that more crimes have possibility of becoming major crimes if they remain unchecked, which is analogous to failure to maintain the house in a good condition. This reason underlines the importance of the ‘stop and frisk’ law as it enables the police to stop people, especially within areas with high crime prevalence rates, and search them for dangerous substances coupled with weapons. This move helps in the elimination of guns from the streets.
Hence, the law curtails incidences of occurrence of serious crimes. Through the law, the NYPD can repair the house’s broken window much earlier before it becomes a squatters’ abode. By deployment of this approach to crime prevention, murder crimes in New York went down by 30 percent between 1990 and 1994 (Kuh, 2005). This occurrence corresponds to the time of implementation of the ‘stop and frisk’ law in the state of New York.
The ‘Stop and frisk’ rule helps in the reduction of crime rates. Citing a CNN report, Berginski (2013) evidences that in “1990, the serious crime rates in New York were over 500 thousand and there were over 2,200 murders while in 2011, there were over 100 thousand serious crimes and over 500 murders” (p.1s). This assertion indicates the effectiveness of the ‘stop and frisk’ law in reducing crime rates by 23 percent from 1990 to 2011. However, the law fails to be acceptable both ethically and morally. It does not apply equally to all citizens amid their demographic characteristics.
Evidence of demographical traits of people stopped and frisked by the NYPD since inception of the law shows the disproportionate application of the law based on racial characteristics (Kuh, 2005). The law targets the Blacks and Hispanics and this element underscores one of the biggest cons of the ‘stop and frisk’ laws discussed further in the following section on cons of the law.
Cons
In 2011, the NYPD stopped and frisked more than 684000 people, with the majority being Latinos and of African American racial background (Berginski, 2013). According to Berginski (2013), from 2004 to 2012, the NYPD had stopped more than 4.4 million people in the effort to implement the ‘stop and frisk’ policy. Between 2011 and 2012, 87 percent of those stopped were Hispanic or African Americans (Berginski, 2013). Of all these people stopped, only about 12 percent found viable suspects for criminal activity, which suggests that the application of ‘stop and frisk’ law even though as discussed above has the pro of enhancing the reduction of crime rates, they have the cons of racial undertones.
Racial discrimination comes out clearly as evidenced in the statistics of the illicit material arrested on stoppages between 2004 and 2012. For the 4.4 million people stopped during this period, whites accounted for a paltry 10 percent. Blacks took the biggest share of 52 percent, while Hispanics accounted for the rest.
Amid this racial preference in stoppages, according to Berginski (2013), “Both blacks and whites had the same total amount of illicit materials seized, 16,000, and there were 14,000 illicit materials seized from Hispanics” (p.18). This realization suggests that even though many whites went without being stooped and frisked simply because they did not look ‘suspicious’ as Terry v. Ohio holds, they posed higher security threats than the groups of people targeted more by the ‘stop and frisk’ law. In the context of these statistics, a significant question arises on whether ‘stopping and frisking’ of people has any legal foundation.
Another con of the ‘stop and frisk’ law entails the violation of the fundamental right protection of individuals’ privacy. On March 18 this year, a US district court presided over a case challenging the constitutionality of the ‘stop and frisk’ law applied by the NYPD. The case, Floyd v. City of New York, was a class-action suit against breaking into privacy of minority communities without possession of the necessary legal documents such as a court’s warrant of search to authenticate such a violation of human rights anchored in the US constitution.
The plaintiffs in the case, Clarkson, Dennis, Ourlicht, and Floyd, were all of black American origin and the alleged violation of their rights by the NYPD through stoppage in search of weapons and dangerous substances. They claimed that the stoppage act violated their privacy, a basic right provided for in the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution.
The presiding judge granted the case by ruling that the NYPD policy for ‘stop and frisk’ amounted to a violation of the fundamental right for privacy for the Hispanics coupled with black Americans. The plaintiff argued that simply ‘appearing suspicious’ is not sufficient grounds for stopping people and breaching their rights to privacy.
Shira A. Sheindlin (the presiding judge) directed the establishment of a pilot project where police officers would equip themselves with cameras, which they would wear on their bodies to help them detect weapons and dangerous substances instead of stopping people and frisking them. After one year of testing the pilot project, an independent body would evaluate the capacity of the project to reduce the high number of stoppages. The ruling termed the stoppages illegal to the extent they violated people’s right to privacy.
Even though the ruling was a major resolution to the con of breaching the right of privacy for people through the ‘stop and frisk’ NYPD policy, the defendant considered the ruling not convincing by claiming that it negated the function for which the law endeavored to achieve. Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of the New York City, expressed his interest to file an appeal claiming that ‘stop and frisk’ program policy helped to reduce crimes, especially in areas with high prevalence rates (Berginski, 2013). He argued that the law had saved an immense number of lives of African Americans and those of Hispanics.
The above argument suggests that the defendant believed that these two groups of people were responsible for many crimes committed in the city of New York. Hence, arguably, the law helped to keep them checked from indulging in serious crimes. Sheindlin stated, in his ruling, that by comparing the lives of minorities saved by the law, the number of stoppages was overwhelmingly disproportionate. This ruling expresses the cons of the ‘stop and frisk’ law even in legal reasoning in the extent that it continues to violate the right of people to privacy and has racial discrimination aspects ingrained in it.
Ethical Concerns
Ethics entail the principles that dictate what is bad and good. From the paradigms of ‘stop and frisk’ law, the main question underscores the ethical rightness of stopping and frisking people simply because they look suspicious. A major ethical issue encompasses how the NYPD determines ‘suspiciousness’. How do suspicious people look? From the arguments raised before and from the statistics of people stopped and frisked, suspicious people are more likely to come from a particular racial background. This assertion suggests a relationship between suspiciousness and the racial orientation of a given person. It is unethical to label people as more likely to carry a weapon or a substance for simply belonging to a particular race.
Although from the discussion of the pros of the ‘stop and frisk’ law, it is clear that the application of the law leads to prevention of minor crimes from escalating into mega crimes and in some situations suspects getting apprehended, from an ethical perspective, the law negates the right of people’s privacy. Infringement of rights to privacy, as a basic human right, increases instances of negative stereotyping of law enforcing agencies as racial instruments for the implementation of the law.
The policy leads to the humiliation of large numbers of people while no substantive evidence justifying such humiliation exists. It is only morally and ethically right to frisk an individual when sufficient evidence in support of the likelihood for a person to pose a danger to other people exists. Simply suspecting an individual perhaps does not amount to the existence of such evidence’s sufficiency.
Police interference with people’s normal activities either aggressively or is otherwise considered non-aggressive ways such as frisking frightens and leaves the victims psychologically tortured. Looking ‘suspicious’ does not adequately provide legal, ethical, or even moral justification for breaching people’s fundamental right of privacy in the justification of execution of the police’s mandate to protect the fundamental right to life and owning property without fear or threat emanating from external actors or agents (Peak, 2012).
The NYPD records, as discussed in the cons section, show discrimination in the application of the ‘stop and frisk law’. African Americans coupled with Hispanics are highly vulnerable victims of the laws when compared to whites. This segregation of people enhances loosening of interracial relationships, which any ethically appropriate law is supposed to enhance. The effect is to erode people’s right to equal and impartial treatment. This assertion implies that the law of ‘stop and frisk’ could only pass the ethical sound test if the NYPD equally and impartially implements it without targeting a particular group or even creating the perception that it targets people from a particular race.
Conclusion
The ‘stop and frisk’ law found its way into the procedural law for the State of New York in the early 1990s and it was justified by the ruling of the case of Terry v. Ohio. The criminology theory of the broken window highlights the importance of frisking people for weapons and dangerous substances to reduce the escalation of minor crimes into major crimes. Although this aspect constitutes a major pro of the ‘stop and frisk’ law, the law has severe cons as it breaches people’s right to privacy. In addition, the criterion used to label people as suspicious to qualify for frisking attracts an ethical dilemma.
References
Berginski, B. (2013, August 16). “Stop and frisk” practice ethically morally wrong. The Tribune, p.18.
Kuh, R. (2005). Reflections on New York’s stop-and-frisk law and its claimed unconstitutionality. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 56(1), 32-38.
Peak, K. (2012). Justice administration: Police, courts, and corrections management. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson: Prentice Hall.