Bloomberg candidacy renews attention to ‘stop and frisk’

a critical voting bloc in the Democratic primary.

Stop and frisk is a term for a tactic police have long used: accosting, questioning and sometimes patting down people who officers think might be doing something illegal, but the suspicions didn’t necessarily amount to probable cause for an arrest.

A spike in the 2000s

The New York Police Department began increasing its emphasis on stop and frisk in the mid-1990s, when Republican Rudy Giuliani was mayor. But stops soared under Bloomberg – who held office as a Republican and later an independent — rising from about 97,000 stops in 2002 to a high of about 685,000 in 2011. There were fewer than 13,500 stops last year, according to NYPD data.

Over 80% of the people stopped during the surge of stop and frisk were black or Latino.

They include Hawk Newsome, 42, who said he was stopped dozens of times while living in the Bronx when Giuliani, then Bloomberg, served as mayor.

Too often, people overlook the psychological effects of the policy, he added.

“We felt like these cops could murder us. They were pulling out weapons on us and pushing us against the wall. There was this anxiety — we could be killed at any time,” said Newsome, chairman of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York. “Just growing up in it, it made you feel hopeless, like, ‘Damn, this is all my life will ever be. This is how they treat me. Look at our schools, look at our police. My life isn’t worth much.’”

Police and Bloomberg insisted that the stops helped drive crime down to recordlow levels and that the tactic was legal.

Critics said stop and frisk amounted to racial discrimination with little impact on crime. About 10% of stops led to arrests or summonses, and only about 1% to weapons seizures.

In 2013, a federal judge declared that New York City’s use of the stops had violated civil and constitutional rights.

Bloomberg’s administration appealed the ruling. His successor dropped the appeal and agreed to reforms and a court-appointed monitor.

‘It’s complicated’

It remains to be seen whether voters of color in and outside New York will see past the practice and give serious consideration to Bloomberg.

But the national conversation in recent years about racial inequity in the criminal justice system could keep stop and frisk in focus during the rest of the campaign cycle.

“It’s complicated,” said Dayvon Love, director of public policy of the grassroots think tank Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle in Baltimore.

“I think there’s more of a recognition that that approach doesn’t work to solve the problem of violence and homicide in communities around the country,” he said, but some people living in neighborhoods plagued by violence “would see the strategy, not necessarily to the extreme of Bloomberg’s approach, as the best option available to them to meet their immediate needs.”

From Love’s perspective, black people who are politically well-connected and “more interested in their own personal success” could gravitate toward someone like Bloomberg.

Many young voters outside New York don’t know much about Bloomberg’s record as mayor.

But for Brandon Kolawole, 24, of Chicago, mention of stop and frisk triggers a response of familiarity and dread.

“I’ve seen it, and I’ve dealt with it,” said Kolawole, who is black. “If the police see you, they can just pull you over, stop you and frisk you for whatever reason.”

Kolawole, who said he won’t vote in November, knows “very little” about Bloomberg and his role in expanding the policy. Kolawole has seen the presidential candidate’s ads on television promoting his work with former President Barack Obama but doesn’t know much about the former mayor’s time in office.

Warren Evans spent about 30 years in law enforcement in the Detroit area — six of those as a county sheriff and one as the city’s police chief. On Thursday, he endorsed Bloomberg for the Democratic nomination for president.

Evans, who is black and has been Wayne County’s elected executive for the past six years, understands the initial purpose of stop and frisk. But he says it failed because of “bad police practice and the inherent bias many officers have about communities of color.”

“I don’t think it’s going to resonate negatively over the long term” for Bloomberg, Evans told The Associated Press. “I agree with his final determination that when he looked at the data and understood what was going on, it wasn’t good policy and it wasn’t implemented well. But he has done what a lot of politicians don’t do. He didn’t fake an answer.”