Proportional Stop-And-Frisk

Christopher E. Smith’s son, a black Harvard student, was repeatedly stopped and frisked by the NYPD during his internship on Wall Street. In response, Smith recommends not curbing the practice – as is already happening - but to expand it to all New Yorkers:

As an intellectual exercise, why don’t we envision matching the application of stop-and-frisk to the demographic composition of a city? In New York City, if officers wanted to stop-and-frisk three African-American men on their shift, they’d also have to stop-and-frisk five white women and five white men – and proportionately equivalent numbers of Latinos and Asian-Americans. Someone might say, “Wait, it’s a waste of the officers’ time to impose these searches on innocent people instead of searching people who might actually be criminals.” But the evidence shows that New York City police were already imposing stop-and-frisk searches on innocent people nearly 90 percent of the time – it is just that the burden of those stops and searches has been endured almost exclusively by young men of color….

This suggestion isn’t entirely tongue-in-cheek. If police were to actually apply it, even for a short while, it would test society’s disregard for individualized suspicion and force us to think more deeply about what it means to impose stop-and-frisk on large numbers of innocent people. It is easy enough to rationalize away a “special tax” when we apply it to “them.” But how will we feel about that burden once it’s shared by all of us?

Update from a reader:

How about we just make the frisking fit the crime? The SEC should be doing “stop-and-audit”s on Wall Street.