US police stop more than 1M on street in a year

NEW YORK (AP) — A teenager trying to get into his apartment after school is confronted by police. A man leaving his workplace chooses a different route back home to avoid officers who roam a particular street.

These and hundreds of thousands of other Americans in big cities have been stopped on the street by police using a law-enforcement practice called stop-and-frisk that alarms civil libertarians but is credited by authorities with helping reduce crime.

Police in major U.S. cities stop and question more than a million people each year — a sharply higher number than just a few years ago. Most are black and Hispanic men. Many are frisked, and nearly all are innocent of any crime, according to figures gathered by The Associated Press.

And the numbers are rising at the same time crime rates are dropping.

Ronnie Carr’s experience was typical: He was fumbling with his apartment door after school in Brooklyn when plainclothes officers flashed their badges.

“What are you doing here?” one asked, as they rifled through his backpack and then his pockets. The black teenager stood there, quiet and nervous, and waited.

Carr said the officers told him they stopped him because he looked suspicious peeking in the windows. He explained that he had lost his keys. Twenty minutes later, the officers left. Carr was not arrested or cited with any offense.

“I felt bad, like I did something wrong,” he said.

Civil-liberties groups say the practice is racist and fails to deter crime. Police departments maintain it is a necessary tool that turns up illegal weapons and drugs and prevents more-serious crime.

Police records indicate that officers are drawn to suspicious behavior: furtive movements, actions that indicate someone may be serving as a lookout, anything that suggests a drug deal, or a person carrying burglary tools such as a slim jim or pry bar.

The New York Police Department is among the most vocal defenders of the practice. Commissioner Raymond Kelly said recently that officers may stop as many as 600,000 people this year. About 10 percent are arrested.

“This is a proven law-enforcement tactic to fight and deter crime, one that is authorized by criminal- procedure law,” he said.

The practice is perfectly legal. A 1968 Supreme Court decision established the benchmark of “reasonable suspicion” — a standard that is lower than the “probable cause” needed to justify an arrest.

But in the mid-1990s, then- Mayor Rudy Giuliani and NYPD Commissioner William Bratton made stop-and-frisk an integral part of the city’s law enforcement, relying on the “broken windows” theory that targeting low-level offenses helps prevent bigger ones.

Street stops started to go up, and overall crime dropped dramatically in a once-dangerous city.

Last year, New York police stopped 531,159 people, more than five times the number in 2002. Fifty- one percent of those stopped were black, 32 percent Hispanic and 11 percent white.

Not all stops are the same. Some people are just stopped and questioned. Others have their bag or backpack searched. And sometimes police conduct a full pat-down.

David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert on street stops, said few searches yield weapons or drugs. And the more people are searched, the more innocent people are hassled.

“The hit rate goes down because you’re being less selective about how you’re doing this. That has a cost. It’s not free,” Harris said.

When officers make a stop, they are required to fill out a form, including the time and location of the stop and why police were suspicious. Age, race and whether the person was frisked are also recorded.

In Philadelphia, stops nearly doubled to more than 200,000 from 2007 to 2008. Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter deployed an “aggressive” stop-and-frisk policy in the year since his election in November 2007, and overall crime has dropped.

In Los Angeles, where Bratton recently stepped down as police commissioner, pedestrian stops have doubled in the past six years to 244,038 in 2008.

The number of people stopped in cars is higher.