Letter: Bloomberg and Police Stops

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Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is wrong to attack The New York Times, the Democratic candidates for mayor and others because of their positions on stop and frisk ("Critics of Police Would Make New Yorkers Less Safe, Bloomberg Says," news article, May 1).

During Mr. Bloomberg's 11-plus years in office, the New York Police Department has engaged in millions of frisks but has turned up a tiny number of guns. In 2011, of the 380,000 frisks conducted, the police found 780 guns, a hit rate of less than one-quarter of 1 percent. And this same, vanishingly small rate of success has been true for many years.

If the police officers had fact-based reasons to believe that people were "armed and dangerous," how could they be wrong almost 100 percent of the time? The answer is that they are most likely frisking illegally — without legally sufficient basis. And they are doing it nearly exclusively to black and Latino youths.

The police are not finding guns. What they find as a result of frisks, if anything, is small amounts of marijuana. And marijuana was not a cause of the death of Alphonza Bryant, a 17-year-old who was wrongly shot to death last week in the Bronx.

The mayor undermines his other work to reduce gun violence when he engages in such demagogy and pretends against all the evidence that his stop-and-frisk program has something to do with reducing such violence.

NORMAN SIEGEL
IRA GLASSER
New York, May 1, 2013

The writers are former executive directors of the New York Civil Liberties Union and the American Civil Liberties Union, respectively.

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