The theory behind the program had evolved—by making people in certain neighborhoods aware that they could be stopped and/or searched at any time, for any reason, it would discourage them from bringing guns or drugs out on the street. A black state senator named Eric Adams would later testify that Ray Kelly, the city’s commissioner throughout the Bloomberg years, had told him openly that the goal was to change the psyche of young black and Latino men by “instill[ing] fear in them that every time that they left their homes they could be targeted by police.”
