Feeling Frisky

As a follow up to my Nutter for Mayor discussion, Nuts for Nutter, one topic has drawn much controversy. The issue of Michael Nutter's proposed "stop & frisk" tactic as an answer to the violence plaguing Philly has been the subject of debate, from friends and foes alike. The Inquirer addressed the matter in, Stop-and-frisk controversy: What price for a safer city?:

One expert says such policies may well help get guns off the street - but carry a potential risk of civil-rights violations.

"The empirical evidence from New York City is that stop-and-frisk as a policy for getting guns off the street helped. I think that's fair to say. The fact is that more surveillance in society tends to be effective," said University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt.

"The only question is, where do you want to set the level of surveillance? It's a cost-benefit analysis," he said. Cities need to weigh the potential benefits against "liberty interests and the inevitable racial disparities and increased complaints of police misconduct" that have followed such programs, he said.

Nutter, for his part, is unswayed.

"We will protect people's civil rights, but no one has a right to carry an illegal weapon," he said in a recent debate. "People are desperately crying out for something to be done now. People have a right to be safe and not to be shot."

Clearly, the murder rate in Philly is at epidemic proportions. And I am somewhat insulated from the effects, as much as anyone can be -- I work in the suburbs and live in a relatively "safe" section of the City. Yet, as a member of the community, I want what's best for the city -- and its members. Nutter has garnered kudos for being one of the few candidates to so directly address the problems and search for viable solutions. As Phawker put it:

Nutter has been the only candidate courageous enough to state the obvious: That Philadelphia is in the grip of a “black genocide,” as self-inflicted from within as it is aggravated from without; that it simply a statistical fact that black people do most of the shooting and most of the dying in this city. It only perpetuates the crisis to pretend otherwise in the name of political expediency or white liberal guilt.

"But on the street, the line between a permitted frisk and an illegal one can be blurry," is how the Inquirer summed up the problems with stop & frisk. That's the ultimate problem. As the article continues:

This intense style of enforcement is often referred to as the "broken windows" approach - the theory that cracking down on minor problems can reduce larger crimes and violence.

Critics say the approach can backfire.

"You don't want to create unnecessary contacts that are debilitating to the community," said Harcourt. "Police have to proceed with extreme caution."

Proponents say it's also been effective.

Using stop-and-frisk to crack down on illegal guns in one high-crime neighborhood in the early 1990s, an elite squad of Kansas City, Mo., officers increased gun seizures by 65 percent.

Gun crimes, including killings and aggravated assaults, went down by 49 percent, according to University of Pennsylvania criminologist Lawrence Sherman, who helped create the program. Nutter often cites Sherman's work to support his stop-and-frisk proposal.

Similar programs in Los Angeles, New York and Minneapolis also have succeeded in dialing down homicide rates.

But New York's success has not been without controversy, including the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed man.

Also in 1999, a report by then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer analyzed data from 175,000 police stops and found stark racial disparities.

"Blacks were more than six times more likely to be stopped than whites, and Hispanics were more than four times more likely to be stopped than whites," wrote Pace Law School professor Bennett L. Gershman in a law-journal article that asked in its title, "How Far Can the Police Go?"

Unfortunately, human nature tends to err on the side of too far. As much as we like to think otherwise, it happens over and over again. When this occurs, it ends up reinforcing, rather than reducing, the opinion that the police engage in racial profiling, which results in more suspicions of police motives and conduct. Even putting aside the constitutional objections with the policy, that's the problem from a practical perspective. Coincidentally, Bill Maher addressed the issue of police abuse as his final New Rule this week.

Tags: Bill Maher, Commentary, New Rules, Philly, Election