Mayor-elect Parker will make a big mistake if she repeats NYC’s stop-and-frisk abuses

It’s been just over 10 years since a federal judge in New York City ruled that the then-routine practice by city police called stop-and-frisk — in which, at its 2011 peak, police stopped and questioned people on the street and often patted them down for weapons — was unconstitutional, with cops stopping “blacks and Hispanics who would not have been stopped if they were white.”

But despite the ruling, and 2013′s election of a liberal new mayor in Bill de Blasio promising to end the practice, stop-and-frisk never fully went away. Just ask Terron Belle, a young Black man with no criminal record who sued the police for violating his civil liberties when New York Police Department officers jumped out of a car in 2017, told him to put his hands up, and searched him — a moment he says “has haunted me ever since.”

Or the family of Antonio Williams, also Black, a 27-year-old father of two waiting for a cab on a Bronx street corner in 2019 when plainclothes NYPD officers abruptly jumped from a vehicle in a stop that rapidly escalated into a scuffle between Williams and a cop, who were both fatally shot by other officers. (Williams did have a revolver but never fired it.)

Both incidents happened in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a spike in crime rates, and before voters in America’s largest city elected an ex-cop, “tough-on-crime” mayor in Eric Adams. He promised the return of controversial anti-crime units that had been disbanded, in part because they’d been linked to a disproportionate number of police shootings.

It probably won’t shock you to learn that a court-appointed monitor found a surge in unconstitutional police stops since the Adams administration brought back those anti-crime patrols, and what’s more, that the racial profiling of Black and brown suspects had actually risen to some 97% of stops that were examined — higher than the early 2010s peak of stop-and-frisk.

Christopher Dunn, legal director for the New York Civil Liberties Union, told me that the NYPD is underreporting the number of actual encounters and that despite the decade-long push to clean up stop-and-frisk, it remains a traumatic experience for those — prominently Black and brown young men — targeted by the cops.

“The biggest problem that has been the problem here for 15 years,” Dunn said, “is that young Black men get thrown up against fences and cars by police officers, get stopped and frisked and searched, and then go on their way because they’ve done nothing wrong and nothing is found on them. And that’s a traumatic experience for anybody, but particularly somebody in that community.”

But the renewed civil rights uproar in New York hasn’t stopped a next generation of big-city leaders from echoing Adams’ aggressive law-and-order, fund-the-police tactics, with Philadelphia about to feel the cutting edge of these anti-crime strategies when its 100th mayor takes office in January.

Democratic Mayor-elect Cherelle Parker, the landslide winner last Tuesday, made fighting crime her top issue, winning a May primary by promising a return to what she calls “constitutional” stop-and-frisk. The idea is to empower cops on the beat to more aggressively investigate pedestrians who fall under a standard set by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968, defined as “reasonable suspicion” that a person might be unlawfully carrying a weapon.

“We cannot afford to take any legal tool away from law enforcement so that they can ensure that our public health and safety is our number one priority,” Parker said while campaigning earlier this year, in a stance that set her apart from her Democratic rivals as well as current Mayor Jim Kenney — elected in 2015 running against stop-and-frisk policing. Kenney has overseen a sharp reduction in stops, although there were still nearly 10,000 last year. The NYCLU has found that Black citizens are still targeted at rates higher than whites.

Parker’s plan for “Terry stops” — named for that Supreme Court case 55 years ago — is just one piece of the mayor-elect’s aggressive anti-crime agenda, marking a sharp reversal from the political zeitgeist just three years ago. Then, thousands of people protesting the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd clogged Center City streets, and Parker’s then-colleagues on City Council pledged cuts in police funding.

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Instead, Parker has centered her promise to hire 300 additional officers who’d be focused on the community beat, patrolling neighborhoods on bicycles and on foot. Much more controversially, she has recently broached the idea of calling out National Guard soldiers to patrol Kensington, the epicenter of the city’s drug abuse crisis. Even political ally Gov. Josh Shapiro has thrown cold water on that idea, which would require his support.

“You won’t be able to go into a store and steal $499 of merchandise and think it’s OK,” Parker told supporters on election night, referring to a controversially high threshold for criminal shoplifting charges under progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner. “We have to have a sense of order.” The incoming mayor will be hiring a new police commissioner to replace the departed Danielle Outlaw, who left her post in September for a new job. Parker will also be negotiating with a new head of the Fraternal Order of Police, as hard-line ex-leader John McNesby leaves for a job in the Shapiro administration. Parker has been handed a clear path to reinvent policing in a city where crime is consistently the number one issue.

Some 100 miles up I-95, New York is now nearly two years into its experiment with the cop-centered approach of Adams, a 22-year police veteran before switching to politics. While murders there have fallen since he took office — in line with national stats suggesting the early 2020s’ crime spikes were tied to the chaos of the pandemic — his police spending amid cuts to other programs has been one factor in a steep decline in Adams’ political popularity.

This spring, the Adams administration inked an eight-year deal with the city’s police union with billions of additional dollars for cop raises; at the same time, the New York Public Library system was threatening to close branches on weekends after City Hall slashed its budget by $36.2 million. This came at the end of a year when police overtime roughly doubled, costing New York an additional $366 million.

It’s a jarring example of the mindset that caused millions of Americans to protest in the late spring of 2020: prioritizing military-grade policing over social services for crime-plagued neighborhoods. Adams — accused of brutal anti-homelessness policies, beset with an influx of refugees, and now facing a corruption scandal — saw his approval rating plunge quickly from 63% to just 29%.

Meanwhile, those NYPD cops working overtime have been busy stopping more citizens, and not just on the sidewalk ― although pedestrian stops were up 61% last year. First-time data on police traffic stops in New York showed there were 673,000 such encounters last year, the motorists were, again, predominantly Black and brown, and very few (about 2%) resulted in arrest. That puts New York on an opposite path from Philadelphia, which last year passed a law preventing cops from pulling cars over for minor offenses. Philly’s move was an acknowledgment that too many traffic stops have gone bad — putting not just motorists but also police officers at risk.

Dunn, the civil liberties attorney, said what’s striking is that the de Blasio administration’s push to drastically reduce stop-and-frisk coincided with New York’s steepest decline in crime rates, bolstering the argument by reformers that the controversial practice is not just ineffective at fighting crime, but arguably counterproductive. “Any elected office who thinks stop-and-frisk is stopping crime is making a grave mistake,” Dunn warned. “All it does is generate hostility in the community and invite racial profiling.”

That seems like good advice for Philadelphia’s incoming mayor. Some civil rights advocates here still hope that Parker will listen between now and when she takes office on Jan. 1 and recalibrate the balance between aggressive policing and social services. Lawyer Michael Coard told me he’s impressed with the political skill and charisma of the city’s first female mayor-elect, but also said the National Guard to Kensington idea sounded like something the late law-and-order strongman Frank Rizzo would have proposed.

“The solution isn’t more cops and more constitutional infringements and more punishment to address the cancerous lesion of crime,” Coard said. “It’s more drug rehab and more mental health services and more education and more employment to address the actual cancer of crime.”

I generally agree with Coard. Homicide rates in Philadelphia have plunged about 30% from their 2021 pandemic peak, but crime is still too high, and a true commitment to community-oriented bike cops and foot patrols — as opposed to the discredited warrior cop model — and a new FOP contract that allows for bad cop accountability would mean real progress.

Parker’s new police commissioner should work to reduce dangerous, intimidating, and unnecessary police encounters — responding to more mental health calls with trained professionals, not armed cops, for example — instead of increasing them with expanded stop-and-frisk.

Consider New York City a failed pilot project. Our new mayor can still play good cop to Eric Adams’ bad cop.

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