Crime & Safety

Report: Rate of Stop-and-Frisk, Crime Down so Far in 2013

The report also showed a 43 percent reduction in the number of weapons recovered

By C. Zawadi Morris

New York City Police Department data shows that the number of stop-and-frisk reports fell by 51 percent in the first three months of this year, compared with the same period last year, with a 30 percent decrease in murders and a 2.7 drop in overall crime, The Wall Street Journal writes.   

From January 1, through March 31, officers conducted 99,788 stop and frisks, compared with 203,500 during the same period in 2012.   

Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, a group that has sued the city in the past over stop-and-frisk, said the new data was "encouraging" and was a challenge to the Bloomberg administration's assertion that wide-ranging use of the practice helps reduce crime. 

"I think it's significant to note that while stop and frisk numbers have gone down, crime has also gone down," Lieberman said. "It's important that we ensure that we get to a point as a city where the prospect of being stopped for doing nothing wrong is an aberration not the expected course of events in your life if you are a person of color."   

However, NYPD Spokesman Paul Browne, said the decrease in stops is a reflection of the department’s progress in policing Impact Zones where rookie officers are now in a better position to observe suspicious activity, versus stopping and then frisking individuals.   

“…[T]he bottom line is that the total number of stops in any given quarter reflects what the police officers on duty during that quarter observed," Browne said.     

The report also showed that the reduction in the number stops in the first quarter of 2013 resulted in a 43 percent decline in weapons recovered, compared with the same time period in 2012.


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