I have been paying more attention to the STOP & FRISK
situation in New York since the same company that designed New York’s police
program is now designing a program for Detroit.
When I was growing up in Detroit, we had a police program
called STRESS (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets) and by all accounts it
was pretty successful but if I remember correctly, it used entrapment
techniques which means situations were set up to entrap a criminal.
This method made criminals very wary of committing certain
crimes because they never knew if the crime they were thinking of committing
was actually a police sting.
This police program was ended by our first black mayor,
Coleman Young, mainly because most of the criminals were caught were black and
that situation is still a problem today; racial profiling.
The New York plan has been challenged on constitutional
grounds because of racial profiling.
New York is defending their plan because it has produced
such great results by lowering the crime rate considerably and that in turn
makes the city and its citizens much safer than before the plan; this is a good
thing.
I understand the issue of racial profiling which is against
the law and police are not allowed to use racial profiling to stop and frisk;
driving while black or Hispanic?
In Detroit, police are saying their plan will not follow the
New York stop & frisk plan but will mainly involve traffic cops who will do
“investigative stops” based on certain clues and suspicions.
All these plans have something to do with the general “broken
windows” criminology theory that dictates doing something about even small
crimes like vandalism, etc. and not waiting till a major crime occurs. In this
way the crime rate in an area drops because of such police actions according to
the theory.
In Detroit, we have not seen any pro-active anti-crime
programs and only police reactions (often very late) to actual crimes;
something needs to change.
One can understand why blacks and Hispanics are against such
programs because they are the main targets of such programs for the very well-known
reason that most of the crimes in an urban setting are committed by blacks or
Hispanics; statistical fact.
The problem is when law abiding blacks and Hispanics are
caught up in the program; they obviously resent it vehemently as any innocent
person should.
What is the solution? Everyone wants crime to go down and
everyone wants to feel safe in their community which is exactly what happens
where stop & frisk programs are in affect so doing away with these programs
will bring crime back…is that what everyone wants?
I feel that unless statistics change the profile of the
criminal; there is no other way. We can make sure that the current laws and regulations
in stop & frisk are followed very closely with zero tolerance for police
misbehavior.
No comments:
Post a Comment