The New York Times analyzed the efficacy of stop-and-frisk [[or its lack thereof):
What Donald Trump Got Wrong on Stop-and-Frisk
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/28/ny...and-frisk.html
Some key points from the article:
New York City began to drastically curtail the use of stop-and-frisk in 2012 under pressure from the ACLU and other defenders of our constitutional protection against unlawful search and seizure. Some, such as the New York Post editorial board, warned this would lead to "
more blood in the streets." But the opposite occurred. Stops have gone down 97% since their peak in 2011, and murder has gone down 32% along with it.
Meanwhile, it wasn't just "a few innocent folks" who were stopped. New York City police made more than 685,000 stops in 2011 alone. WNYC created a map that illustrates how many stops occurred block per block. Well over 100 blocks averaged more than 400 stops per year:
Stop & Frisk | Guns
https://project.wnyc.org/stop-frisk-guns
The New York Times reports
90% of those stopped were young black or latino men who committed no crime. In the few cases when a stop led to an arrest the vast majority were for marijuana possession.
Arrests for marijuana possession soared to as many as 50,000 per year -- approximately 1 out of every 8 arrests citywide. 86% of those arrested for marijuana possession were black or hispanic, despite
research that shows young white men are more likely to use it.
70% of those arrested had no prior convictions.
Ok, but the point of all this was to confiscate illegal guns. How did that work out? WNYC reports
only about 0.1% of stops resulted in the seizure of a gun. In fact, most gun seizures occurred outside of the stop-and-frisk hot spots. WNYC plots gun seizures on their stop-and-frisk map:
Map: NYPD Finds Most Guns Outside Stop-and-Frisk Hotspots
http://www.wnyc.org/story/222809-wny...and-frisk-less/
It looks like the net effect of New York's stop-and-frisk program was to run tens or hundreds of thousands of black and brown young men through the criminal justice system for minor offenses. It's difficult to find a benefit in the crime statistics. Meanwhile the harm was not limited to those young men and their families. Stop-and-frisk policing created a great deal of distrust and animosity against the police in the community.
Civil society rests with the people. Law enforcement is supplementary, and can only do so much. There are of course plenty of good people even in neighborhoods most affected by crime. But when policing becomes so aggressive it hauls many innocent folks into its net it doesn't just hurt the community, it's counterproductive for law enforcement. Fear discourages cooperation. We'd benefit from more cooperation, from all around.
Community distrust of police became so bad in 2013 Kenneth Thompson defeated a 6-term incumbent to become Brooklyn's District Attorney largely on a platform to rein in aggressive police tactics. He accused his opponent as
complicit in the excesses of the stop-and-frisk policy and promised to
effectively decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana [[with exceptions) so fewer otherwise law abiding people would get caught up in the system.
The New York Times agreed with his approach:
Safer Era Tests Wisdom of ‘Broken Windows’ Focus on Minor Crime
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/25/ny...york-city.html
Broken Windows, Broken Lives
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/26/opinion/broken-windows-broken-lives.html
Crime statistics in the years that have followed seem to agree too.
Broken windows policing may be one of those things that sounds good in theory but
can be problematic in practice. It killed Eric Garner and led to the protests that followed. It should not be implemented too broadly nor taken too far.