Stop and Frisk is about Values not Numbers

A federal district court this week began hearing testimony in a class action lawsuit questioning the constitutionality of the New York Police Department’s “stop and frisk” (S&F from now on cause I’m lazy) tactic.  NYPD officers conducted 533,000 stops in 2012.  Eighty-seven percent of New Yorkers stopped were black or Latino, and eighty-nine percent of those stopped were innocent of any crime.  Critics and defenders of the tactic have often faced off over its effectiveness and legality, but the real focus should be on whether stop-and-frisk violates the fundamental values of freedom and equality.

The framing of the stop and frisk debate assumes that effectiveness equals legitimacy

The New York Times provides a great example of how framing of the S&F discussion actually masks the fundamental issues involved.  The Times recruited six experts in July 2012 to answer the question “Does Stop and Frisk Reduce Crime.”  Implicit in this question is the assumption that the right or wrongness of S&F depends on how useful it is at stopping crime, not whether, regardless of impact, it has a place in a free and equal society.  Supporters argue that it has dramatically reduced crime, while opponents disagree and offer better ways to fight crime.  However, as soon as people accept this framing, the question of whether S&F is legitimate if it proves to be effective has already been answered in the affirmative.

America’s about being free, not risk-free

Policies like this, which rely on distorted utilitarian calculations about harm reduction to trample all over fundamental freedoms, have no place in America.  I’m sure if we locked everyone in a 6×6 dog cage (or fluid-filled Matrix dreampod), and played 2 ½ Men re-runs all day long, crime would be drastically reduced.  But that’s not the fucking goal of the American experiment.  Even if the state employed Orwellian monitoring systems or Minority Report-esque crime prediction models that allowed citizens to walk about “freely” unless they decided to commit a crime, this would STILL be completely unacceptable.  Freedom’s important because its freedom, not because of some marginal benefit/marginal cost calculus.  Forcing people to spread eagle in front of their parent’s house while they humiliatingly have their pockets checked for the 2% chance they might have a weapon is fucking anti-freedom and un-American.

Stop and frisk violates equal treatment before the law

The other major (and oft-cited) problem with S&F is that it’s racist as shit.  These aren’t upper Westside society ladies getting patted down for pills; these are black and brown kids being systematically stopped and harassed by the police.  The question of whether more crime is committed by/against black and Latino youth is totally irrelevant.  By the time you’ve started debating whether the percentage of X-type people stopped is higher or lower than the percentage of crimes committed by X-type people, you’ve already conceded that utilitarian notions of safety trump equal rights.  In America, everyone is equal before the law.  Everyone should be treated as an individual, and no one should be immediately judged, intimidated and manhandled by a heavily armed group of badge-wearing street enforcers, based solely on their race.

We’re becoming a society that tosses aside freedom and equality to obsess over utilitarian measures of security

America, especially in the post-9/11 era, has been sliding steadily away from a focus on freedom and equality towards a coldly-calculating techno-rationalism myopically focused on absolute safety (typically for the powerful or the majority).  This can be seen in the opinions of people like jury foreman Joseph Cote, who argued during an Islamic radicals’ trial in 2006 that “it was ‘absolutely’ better to run the risk of convicting an innocent man than to let a guilty one go.”  It can be seen in the plurality of public support for domestic drone surveillance, which sacrifices freedom for all-seeing security.  And it can be seen in the dramatic jump in “preventative” stops by the NYPD in the years after 9/11.  We must completely reject this thinking and the false utilitarian calculus that underlies it, or America will risk overturning decades of progress on freedom and equality.