Era of Crime Reduction Ends
A FEDERAL judge ruled yesterday that the New York City Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy violated the constitutional rights of nonwhites. In related news, Eric Holder announced that federal prosecutors would begin to avoid charges that involve mandatory minimum drug sentencing. Both decisions are expected to reduce the number of nonwhites charged with crimes and in prisons.
Heather Mac Donald wrote in the Wall Street Journal in June:
A decision against the NYPD would almost certainly inspire similar suits by social-justice organizations against police departments elsewhere.
The national trend of declining crime could hang in the balance. And the primary victims of such a reversal would be the inner-city minorities whose safety seems not to figure into attempts to undermine successful police tactics.
New York-style policing—including the practice of stopping, questioning and sometimes frisking individuals engaged in suspicious behavior—ought be the city’s most valued export. Since the early 1990s, New York has experienced the longest and steepest crime drop in the modern history of policing. Murders have gone down by nearly 80%, and combined major felonies by nearly 75%. No other American metropolis comes close to New York’s achievement. Bostonians are twice as likely to be murdered as New Yorkers, and residents of Washington, D.C., three times as likely. (more…)




