-By Warner Todd Huston
On the August 18 broadcast of NBC’s Meet The Press, New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said in direct terms that more people will face life threatening situations if the courts are successful in stopping the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program.
Host David Gregory asked Kelly directly if people will die should the policy grind to a halt.
“Well, I think no question about it, violent crime will go up,” Kelly replied.
Kelly also denied that this is a singular “program,” but that it is part and parcel to the whole of policing.
“This happens throughout America in any police jurisdiction. You have to do it. Officers have to have the right of inquiry if they see some suspicious behavior. So, I can assure you, this is not just a New York City issue; it’s an issue throughout America. And this case has to be appealed, in my judgment, because it will be taken as a template and have significant impact in policing throughout America,” Kelly said.
The commissioner also pointed out that violence occurs in the minority communities far more than in other areas.
“We need some balance here,” Kelly said. “The stark reality is that violence is happening disproportionately in minority communities. And that unfortunately is in big cities throughout America. We have record low numbers of murders in New York City, record low numbers of shootings, we’re doing something right to save lives.”
Host Gregory focused on that the main criticism is that the current statistics show that African Americans are stopped at a much higher rate than others and that fully 88 percent of those stops lead to no further police action.
Kelly went on to say that the Rand Corporation warns that you can’t see if racial profiling is occurring until you first factor in the people who are identified as perpetrators of crime. Kelly insisted that such crime stats need to be taken into account, and if they are those stats “certainly comports to the racial makeup of the people who are being stopped.”
Once crime stats are taken into account, Kelly insisted that in his city the crime statistics “certainly comports to the racial makeup of the people who are being stopped.”
Kelly also waved off any comparisons of stop-and-frisk to what went on in Florida between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman. “I would also submit though that the Trayvon Martin case is a little bit different. These are two civilians. It clearly was a tragedy, but it didn’t involve sworn police officers,” he said.
But later in the segment, Gregory spoke to Trayvon Martin’s mother as well as Martin’s attorney, Benjamin Crump. They continued to characterize New York’s policies as illicit racial profiling with Crump calling it a “slippery slope.”
“No matter what you want to call it, essentially it’s racial profiling. And we know Trayvon Martin was profiled for something that night on February 26, 2012. And he had broken no laws. He was just walking home. That’s the problem with racial profiling. It’s a slippery slope. And it’s so bad for so many in the community,” Crump said.
For her part, Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, insisted that the stop-and-frisk policy was little else but racism made law.
“You can’t give people the authority, whether a civilian or police officers, the right to just stop somebody because of the color of their skin,” she said.
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, MrConservative.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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