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Comment by TeeMassive | Hacker News Reader

The big question is it because of their race or is it coincidental with the higher crime rate?

No. The big question is whether we want cops to be "randomly" stopping and frisking any people regardless of race/location. The idea that armed people are allowed to just accost people on the street to conduct cursory searches seems incompatible with basic liberties. It is a stone's throw from the "papers please" interaction that so many Americans loath. (I was about to say uniformed, but cops don't always wear uniforms these days.)

Yea my apologies, my statement was ambiguously two-parted

Stop and frisk was ruled unconstitutional due to general shitting on the 4th amendment.

Separately, the federal government still claims that it's disproportionately targeting minorities (and that it's still occurring generally).

My vague recollection of the decade-ago ruling was that it didn't have any 14th amendment or w/e statements

No. The big question is whether we want to live in a society that requires the police to randomly stop and frisk people in order to stop crime. There is crime, I don't think anyone can dispute that.

Honestly, I personally have no problem with criminal-looking individuals being stopped and frisked in high-crime areas. And I say this as someone that's been profiled as a white person in a black country, and held at gunpoint by assault-rifle wielding police.

And if stop-and-frisk is extended to vehicles? Would America tolerate cops randomly pulling over cars that looked "criminal"? Or we could take it a step further and just randomly search homes.

Sure, it could be a slippery slope, but the problem is that no one can strictly define what “criminal-looking” means. That term is often used synonymously with “urban style,” which means “black people, and others who dress like black people.”

If stop and frisk were started in the rural south and had this loose “criminal-looking” definition applied to it, all those MFers would get stopped every day for being skinny, having shitty teeth, etc.

The point being that criminals look exactly like normal, non-criminal people.

But can't you define everything as a slippery slope?

If we allow cops to arrest people for discharging a firearm in public, next they'll arrest people for simply pulling a gun in public...then eventually just having a gun in public!

> Would America tolerate cops randomly pulling over cars that looked "criminal"?

Sadly, it already does. The pretext stop is a core element of highway patrol, and policing in general.

Strictly define criminal-looking.

There's an elegant paper and analysis that addresses this in Minneapolis, another city that's had some DOJ attention for policing. https://lawandinequality.org/2020/11/24/does-the-minneapolis...

The TLDR is that you can analyze the difference between stops on summer evenings (sunny) and winter evenings (dark) and detect a racial bias depending on whether officer can see the driver or not. The raw data is also available through Minneapolis' Open Data website, so you can repeat the analysis yourself.

The problem with that methodology is that it doesn't only hide race. Criminals tend to be repeated offenders. It only proves that the police couldn't recognize them.

Who is reporting detecting and reporting crime that dictates those rates? Why are some areas of towns so racially segregated?

> Why are some areas of towns so racially segregated?

In NYC's own words:

https://a816-dohbesp.nyc.gov/IndicatorPublic/beta/data-stori...

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