Please Stop-and-Frisk Us!

The full circle came around pretty quickly this time:

• A surge in New York City murders — including four people slain in just five bloody hours as the weekend began — has grieving family members begging Mayor de Blasio to bring back the NYPD’s right to search for guns.
  
  “We need stop-and-frisk,” Stacey Calhoun, the devastated uncle of one of the four fatalities, said Saturday afternoon, tears filling his eyes over the nephew he had just lost.
  
  Jahhad Marshall — a charismatic 23-year-old with a promising future as a chef — had died of a stray bullet to his back early that morning outside the Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City, police said.
  
  “Somebody has to put their foot down,” the anguished uncle said.
  
  “A lot of people would agree with stop-and-frisk if it’s for the safety among us,” he said.

Really? So you're willing to have the police conduct wholesale violations of Civil Rights in the name of taking illegal guns off the street and save the lives of innocents?

• “It’s scary how many guns are out here now,” said a resident of the Brownsville project, who gave her name as Ann and her age as 72.
  
  “They shouldn’t just stop and frisk any of our young black men — but they need to do something about these guns,” she said.

Well Ann, if we were NYPD, we'd tell you "too damn bad." It looks like you'll be going to a lot of funerals in the foreseeable future.

And do you know why? Because you perpetuate the stereotype that NYPD was stopping young black men indiscriminately and tossing them up against the walls and going through their persons violating all sorts of laws, procedures and Civil Rights. And nothing is further from the truth.

NYPD operated in a very narrow legal window involving reasonable articulable suspicion and probable cause - as do the vast majority of Departments. That's not to say there aren't officers who choose to operate outside of the boundaries set by the Law and the Courts, but that is a miniscule percentage. But hey, Al and Jesse and Eric and BO say that police are the problem and minorities are being picked on and the deck is stacked against people and blah blah blah. It's all bullshit. No one legit study or survey indicates anything like that. But the perpetual victims need someone to blame for their inadequacies and failures as non-functional societal castoffs.