Stop And Frisk Case Study

“Stop, question, and frisk” is a controversial practice that was used by the New York City Police Department, where a police officer would stop any person acting suspicious, the police officer would question them and if they felt that it rose to the level of reasonable suspicion; they would frisk them for weapons and other contraband. In other states it is known as the Terry stop. Stop-and-frisk was a useful tactic for the NYPD because statistics show that violent crime dropped while this procedure was in place. In 1972, The Supreme Court heard the case of Terry vs. Ohio. Terry vs. Ohio is a well-known case involving stop-and-frisk. In the summer of 1968, Officer Martin McFadden noticed two men acting suspiciously, on a street in front of several stores. Officer McFadden had noticed the men walking back and forth on the same street and each
He defends the policy of stop-and-frisk and tries to explain why it is one of the reasons New York City is the safest big city in America. Kelly was planning on defending his views on the situation when he was dropped as a defendant in the stop-and-frisk case. Mayor Bloomberg was dropped as a defendant as well. Kelly devoted a whole chapter to stop-and-frisk in his memoir, “Vigilance: My Life Serving America and Protecting Its Empire City.” In the book he defends stop-and-frisk on the issue of race, Kelly writes,

“Was it really plausible that the most diverse police department on earth, with officers hailing from 106 different countries and representing every imaginable race, would engage in a massive conspiracy to conduct street stops to deny minorities their Constitutional rights?...In fact, we had done exactly what we said we were doing. We went where the crime was, whatever color the perpetrators turned out to be.” (Vigilance: My Life Serving America and Protecting Its Empire