We were wrong

[The Barbarian]

Like many conservatives, I had grave concerns about curtailing the New York City police department’s controversial tactic of stopping and frisking potential suspects for weapons. I was inclined to defer to the police when they protested that they needed the option to stop, question, and frisk New Yorkers on a mere reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing instead of probable cause that the targeted person had committed a crime. Restricting the tactic, I thought, would cause an uptick, maybe even a spike, in crime rates. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who made ending stop-and-frisk the centerpiece of his successful 2013 campaign for mayor, struck me as a man who was cynically willing to tolerate an increase in crime if he thought it to his political advantage to amplify leftist voters’ core belief that policing was out of control. Today in New York City, use of stop-and-frisk, which the department justified via the 1968 Terry v. Ohio Supreme Court ruling, has crashed. Yet the statistics are clear: Crime is lower than ever. It’s possible that crime would be even lower had stop-and-frisk been retained, but that’s moving the goalposts. I and others argued that crime would rise. Instead, it fell. We were wrong. Major crime in New York City has continued to decline almost across the board in the four years of the de Blasio administration, to the lowest rates since New York City began keeping extensive records on crime in the early 1960s. Crime is literally off the charts — the low end of the charts. To compare today’s crime rate to even that of ten years ago is to observe a breathtaking decline. New York City saw a record-low 333 homicides in 2014, the first year of the de Blasio administration. Though that figure was slightly higher in 2015 and 2016 (352 and 335), four of the five least-murderous years in New York City since 1960 have been in the de Blasio era. Other crime statistics have largely followed suit, with the total number of major crimes down in 2017 by about 6 percent since 2016, which was itself a record-low year. As of December 27, New York City saw 286 homicides in 2017, down 12 percent from the previous year, itself a near-record low. That is a rate of about 3 per 100,000 population. By contrast, Chicago’s homicide rate for 2017 was about 24 per 100,000. The figure for Baltimore is about 56. There were more murder victims in Baltimore than in New York City in 2017, even though New York has nearly 14 times as many residents.

http://www.nationalreview.com/artic...p-and-frisk-crime-decline-conservatives-wrong

 

[Gary K]

LOL. To call Kyle Smith conservative is to call a cat a dog.

 

[The Barbarian]

He favored the stop-and-frisk program beloved by conservatives. He's just pointing out that he was wrong to do so. When it stopped, crime actually went down.

And it's not hard to see why. The program had to be pushed hard from the top down, because cops on the street didn't like it. It didn't stop crime, and it made people see them as the bad guys. Hence the much-denied quotas that force police to stop more and more people.

And to avoid trouble, the police responded by jacking up those who are least able to defend themselves: black people and young people, in a vicous cycle of mistrust and abuse.

It's going to take a long time to repair, but at least it's underway.

 

[THall]

There is never a good excuse to violate someone's God given rights Barbarian, you should have learned that in Jr. High or your parents should have taught you that a long time ago. The state commits crime at a rate and damage level that blows away even the best efforts of our worst non state criminals. Our Bill of Rights was passed to keep the government in check for that very reason.