Justice
Decline of the Day: Stop and Frisk Down 34 Percent in New York
With legal challenges mounting, the NYPD conducted 70,000 fewer stops last quarter.
The New York Police Department announced today that the number of "stop-and-frisks," the city's controversial program of searching people who look suspicious, had dropped 34 percent from the previous quarter. According to the New York Post, 133,934 people were stopped and searched by the NYPD between April 1 and June 30, down from 203,500 in the first three months of the year.
The city has endorsed the stops for years, pointing to the number of illegal guns seized by cops - in 2011, 770 guns in 685,000 stops - and the city's low and declining level of violent crime. But opponents say the practice is unconstitutional and inefficient, and amounts to a systematic humiliation of the city's black and Latino residents.