The Culmination of Stop and Frisk

        The Stop and Question Program is not a fairly new program. It has been around since the 1960's from the Police Department's common right of enquiry, meaning they have the right to ask questions about almost anything they see on the street. This was adopted by a number of American courts from the English common law. Mayor Rudy Giuliani was the one who officially implemented the program as Stop and Frisk in New York City, but its climax was not until Mayor Bloomberg took office in January 2002.
         After Mayor Bloomberg took office in 2002, the Stop and Frisk program continued and increased 600 percent. Despite all the criticisms that were directed towards the program, Mayor Bloomberg and his police commissioner Raymond Kelly continued to defend the program saying it saves lives. The NYPD and local politicians have again and again defended the racial disconnect in the program by saying that, minorities are likely to commit violent crimes. According to Mathias for The New York Times, "The NYPD and local politicians have repeatedly justified the racial disparity in stop and frisk, saying that the Cops go where the guns are, i.e.minority neighborhoods. Yet only 1.9 percent of frisks in 2011 turned up weapons and interestingly, according to the NYCLU, a weapon was found in 1.8 percent of Blacks and Latinos that were frisked as compared to a weapon being found in  3.8 percent of Whites frisked".
        The Police Department's own record on the Stop and Frisk program showed that the police were stopping hundreds of thousands of law abiding New Yorkers every year, and the majority were Blacks and Latinos. The New York Civil Liberties Union exposed that innocent New Yorkers have been subjected to police stops, and street stops and questioning more than 4 million times since 2002, which of course, Black and Latino communities continued to be the victims. Statistics provided by the New York Civil Liberties Union shows that "In 2011, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 685724 times. 605,328 were totally innocent(88 percent), 350,743 were black(53 percent), 223740 were Latino(34 percent), 61,805 were white( 9 percent), 341,581 were aged 14-24( 51 percent)". This was the highest data on record for the program.

Works Cited

Mathias, Christopher, "15 Shocking Facts About a Controversial Program". www.huffintonpost.com, 15 May 2012. web.15 October 2017.

"Stop and Frisk Data". www.nyclu.org, 23 May, 2017. web. 15 October 2017.