Ending Stop-And-Frisk Didn't Boost Crime, New York Daily News Admits

Pundits and other commentators on public policy rarely admit when they're wrong, so it's always notable when they own up to their mistakes — especially about particularly sensitive and divisive issues. So the New York Daily News' editorial board's about-face on stop-and-frisk, a policy that encouraged New York City police to routinely question and pat down pedestrians with limited justification, is something to behold.

Data had long showed that black and latino residents were disproportionately targeted by the policy, but many, like the Daily News, argued fervently that the city's policy was key to keeping crime rates down and rolling it back could lead to a spike in criminal activity.

But this week, the Daily News publicly admitted that it made a mistake by predicting chaos when the policy was found to be unconstitutional by Manhattan Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin in 2013. Since that ruling, the New York police reduced the number of stops in New York City by an order of magnitude, the crime rate didn't rise and even noticeably declined.

Many experts believed that excessive policing was more of a problem than a solution at the time.

"It was abundantly clear a few years ago that there was a sea change in the city," said Eugene O'Donnell, a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, as well as a former NYPD police officer and prosecutor. "One of the great failures historically is the failure to stop over-policing."

Dire predictions about the consequences of ending stop-and-frisk came not just from organizations like the Daily News, but by then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

"Think about what that change really means: if murder rates over the last 11 years had been the same as the previous 11 years, more than 7,300 people who today are alive would be dead - and many of those lives were saved by stop and frisk," Bloomberg said in response to Scheindlin's ruling. "I worry for my kids and I worry for your kids."

Police stops reached a peak of 685,700 in 2011, and fell to just 22,900 in 2015 after the city's practice were found to be unconstitutional. Were Bloomberg and the Daily News correct in their original prognostications, such a drastic reduction in police interventions would have led to a surge in crime. As the data clearly shows, no such surge occurred:

The city does not yet have complete data for the year 2016, of course, but as the Daily News points out, this year looks to be even safer so far.

The Daily News' editorial team was forthright about its mistake in a new piece this week: "There is no doubt that, heavily grounded in memories of past horrors and too little informed about the potential of smart new strategies, our fears were baseless."

Even more clearly, they wrote, "We predicted a rising body count from an increase in murders. We are delighted to say that we were wrong."

Reckoning with evidence that conflicts with its preconceptions is commendable, and the Daily News deserves to be recognized for its candor.

But its also worth noting that its original condemnation of Scheindlin, who the Daily News still insists made the wrong ruling, was incredibly incendiary.

At the time of the ruling, the Daily News wrote, "Make no mistake — Scheindlin has put New York directly in harm’s way with a ruling that threatens to push the city back toward the ravages of lawlessness and bloodshed."

This frightening message was delivered in support of a policy that, according to Scheindlin's ruling, was grossly unjust toward minority citizens:

The City’s highest officials have turned a blind eye to the evidence that officers are conducting stops in a racially discriminatory manner. In their zeal to defend a policy that they believe to be effective, they have willfully ignored overwhelming proof that the policy of targeting “the right people” is racially discriminatory and therefore violates the United States Constitution. One NYPD official has even suggested that it is permissible to stop racially defined groups just to instill fear in them that they are subject to being stopped at any time for any reason ....

These methods were endorsed, of course, because they purportedly made life safer for everyone, including the minority groups who were targeted. But as the Daily News now admits, "precision policing," which focuses specifically on individuals and locations likely to be involved in crimes, rather than on entire racial groups, is as effective or more than old stop-and-frisk practices with far less intrusion into public life.

Proponents of stop-and-frisk may criticize the Daily News' recantation, pointing out that little can be deduced from a single trend line. In theory, it could be true that stop-and-frisk helped to reduce crime, and that it's rollback only failed to cause a spike because there were other mitigating trends occurring at the same time.

But this hypothesis is belied by indications that crime in some U.S. cities has increased in recent years. New York City's success in continuing to keep crime down in spite of this pattern suggests that stop-and-frisk provided little benefit.

“Slogans and so-called strategies, and even something like ‘broken windows [policing],’ should be taken with a grain of salt,” said O'Donnell, the former police officer. "You should look at real crime patterns and swear off orthodoxy."

He argued that policing needs to be community-specific, and that it makes little sense to try to apply the same solutions and methods to every city, regardless of the circumstances. And while New York was once a very dangerous city, it has changed drastically since the peak of the twentieth century crime wave.

And excessive police stops, especially those that emphasized quotas over the legality of stops, were both hard on cops and on the people who were stopped, O'Donnell explained.

"It compromised the professionalism of the job, and it did exacerbate tensions," he said. "I do fear that there’s irreparable damage done to the police profession."

Photo credit: Graeme Stoker via Flickr