America has a long history of racial discourse, a police practice in New York City is a recent addition to this history. This police practice has conveyed a message about America’s dedication to upholding its ideals of liberty, democracy, and political equality. In this essay I use Rogers Smith’s multiple traditions theory as well as Schneider and Ingram’s social constructions to explain the outcomes of the stop and frisk policy. In addition to this topic, I discuss how individual rights relate to the Federalist 51. The idealistic America is egalitarian however with the stop and frisk policy we further ourselves from our ideals.
Stop and Frisk was a policy implemented in New York City while Rudy Giuliani served as mayor (1994-2001). This policy gave police officers the authority to detain and search individuals who were deemed suspicious; though it was very vague what constituted this. If the individual was found to be in possession of an illegal item they were then arrested. This police practice has been in use since the 1990s though much less frequently since 2013 when it was deemed unconstitutional by a federal judge. Stop and Frisk is often associated with the drop in crime rates that occurred in NYC during the time it was implemented and is a very controversial topic. According to the NYCLU (New York Civil Liberties Union) analysis of released stop-and-frisk data by the NYPD, more than half of all people who are stopped annually are black and one third are latino. This data ranges from 2003 when it was first publicly released up until the first quarter of 2017 and has retained the same trend of blacks and latinos being stopped almost 80% of the time. This is a far cry from political equality which by definition means that everyone has equal treatment under the law. If everyone has equal treatment under the law, why are minority groups targeted at much higher rates? For example, white individuals only consist of around 10% of annual stop-and-frisks while according to a 2006-2008 American community survey for the U.S. census they made up 44.6% of the NYC population, while African Americans made up 25.1% of the population yet account for half of annual stop-and-frisks. There is not even room to make an argument that race does indeed play a factor, this is shown in the analysis of the NYPD’s data that shows 80-90% of the people who are stop-and-frisked annually are completely innocent. If the majority of the people who are targeted are minorities, and the majority of people are innocent, then you cannot draw a reasonable justification for this discriminatory and borderline racist profiling.
Liberty is defined as the state of being free. One's liberty is taken from them when they are detained for a stop and frisk. According to data released by the NYPD regarding stop and frisk, from 2003 until 2013 the amount of people stopped annually ranged between 160,851 to 685,724. The reasoning for removing these people from their state of liberty is often vague and as mentioned in the last paragraph, racially biased. Do we truly live in a society that values liberty if people are being deprived of it left and right for little to no reason? Data released by the NYPD in 2011 shows various reasons for stops and outcomes. One example of which is that “on 4/22/11 police stopped a 36 year old man in Manhattan, citing “furtive movements” and found no weapon”. Furtive movements are movements that seem to be suspicious, but how is this defined, what makes it so that someone is moving suspiciously? In many of these cases what officers find to be suspicious results in no arrest. That connects with what warrants a police officer to be able to stop someone, with the stop-and-frisk policy police officers only need to have a reasonable suspicion that someone is doing something illegal. Most of the time the police officers are wrong but because they only need to fulfill a reasonable suspicion anyone can be stopped and lose their protection under the 4th amendment just for walking funny. America’s commitment to liberty is not reflected at all in this policy, in fact it grossly undermines one’s constitutional rights under the 4th amendment which protects individuals from unreasonable searches.
The stop and frisk policy has a unique connection to democracy. Democracy is defined as a system of government in which officials are elected by the people. On the one hand, it is a police practice that was popularized inside the NYC police department. On the other hand, it was popularized and supported by previous mayors of NYC such as Rudy Giuliani. Voters are the ones who put men like Giuliani, and Bloomberg, the mayor who succeeded him, into office. While this policy does not have much to do with the democratic system of government, it is related to our democratic process of electing officials who may or may not agree with it. When it comes to the question of whether America’s commitment to democracy is upheld with stop-and-frisk, the answer is yes. Voters choose who they want in office and knowing who they vote for they know what policies may be implemented. In the recent 2013 New York City mayoral election, stop-and-frisk was a large topic that came up. The winner of the election was Bill de Blasio who when asked about the practice said that he intended to “end a stop and frisk era that targets minorities”.
Rogers Smith’s multiple traditions theory states that there are traditional American ideals such as liberty, democracy, and political equality but there are also other traditions such as Ascriptive Americanism. Ascriptive Americanism is a system of racial and gender hierarchies in which white men reign at the top. Another aspect of this theory is that the road to equality in America is serpentine, similar to taking two steps forward and one step backward. When it comes to stop-and-frisk there is no direct language that indicates the practice is meant to discriminate. However, minority groups are affected at much higher rates from stop and frisk. This connects to the Ascriptive Americanism racial hierarchy where even if there is no language regarding race, white people benefit as a whole while minority groups suffer from the racial profiling the comes with stop and frisk. When it comes to fitting in the serpentine pattern toward political equality, New York City is currently pushing forward with reforms on the stop and frisk program as well as a stark decrease in the usage of the practice.
Schneider and Ingram’s social construction of target populations theorizes that social construction influences policy agenda and selection of policy tools. Social constructions are stereotypes about particular groups of people. The stereotypes of these particular types of groups play a role in public policy. This affects their behavior and well-being. This theory explains the outcomes of stop and frisk because it shows it is beneficial to some social constructions rather than others. For example, Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that the way stop-and-frisk was being carried out was unconstitutional and a “policy of indirect racial profiling”. Judge Scheindlin made the point that many “blacks and hispanics would not have been stopped if they were white”. This goes to show that the negative social constructions of blacks and hispanics led to them being stopped more frequently than their white counterparts who are seen with positive social constructions.
James Madison would argue that the constitutional structure does indeed have sufficient safeguards for individual rights. In Federalist 51 Madison writes that government will contain different branches, each of which is to function independently and have representatives that are elected by the people. He describes a part of the system of checks and balances in this line, “But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others”. This allows each branch to function on its own without having another branch necessarily have power over it. He then describes that the branches will be able to check each other, each having their own checks on each other so that no one branch will be too powerful. James Madison would argue that this relates to individual rights because in a democratic government the power that we as individuals surrender is then granted to the government who in turn are unable to impede on our rights easily due to the structure of the government. He also makes a point that individual rights will be protected in this line, “Whilst all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.”. He states that while all of the power of the government may come from the people, people will be broken into many groups which protects their individual rights from that of the majority. Madison makes a convincing argument that individual rights are protected. Afterall, under our government we as the people are the ones who elect our government officials to represent our personal interests.