The biggest problem with "stop-and-frisk" policing is not that it is racist (an assertion that is arguable, but -- for our purposes -- beside the point). The biggest problem with stop-and-frisk policing is that it is not policing.
Mike Bloomberg, who is running for President as a Democrat, has recently -- and not for the first time -- come under attack for having endorsed stop-and-frisk while he was Mayor of New York City, on the grounds that it disproportionately affected black New Yorkers. As a matter of simple numbers, it certainly did -- but that is not necessarily a valid criticism.
For example, a cure for sickle-cell anemia, which mostly afflicts people of African descent, would disproportionately benefit black people; no one who invented such a cure could reasonably be accused of racism for having done so. So the (rather lazy) charge of "racism", leveled at advocates of stop-and-frisk, is wide open to the (equally lazy, but compelling) counterassertion that stop-and-frisk tactics have benefited the communities in which police use them.
Quotes have surfaced of Mayor Bloomberg speaking in less-than-politically-correct racial terms about the NYPD's use of SaF; this has led to a predictable series of public apologies and mea culpas from him. For that, he has been attacked by various right-leaning commentators: why, they ask, is he kowtowing to PC opinion by repudiating a successful strategy?
Of course, as applied to SaF, the term "successful strategy" is exactly 50% correct: it was a strategy, but there is little if any evidence that it was successful. According to the NYPD's own data (acquired from FOIA requests filed by the ACLU), there were more than half a million stops in 2012, resulting in the seizure of about 700 weapons: a seizure rate of roughly one-tenth of one percent.
If you were ill, and your doctor informed you of a risky new medical procedure which could cure you -- but which had a success rate of 0.1 percent, you might hesitate a bit.
And hesitate we should. Stop-and-frisk goes directly to the heart of the contract between individuals and the state. It is damaging to the trust between citizens and the police; the trust without which police cannot be effective investigators.
For agents of the government to randomly accost members of the public and search them -- absent a reason other than the color of their skin or where in the city they live -- normalizes the idea that citizens must answer to the state. This is an inversion of the small-r republican tradition, which is that the state must answer to us.
In American life, after any high-profile mass shooting, we are routinely treated to hysterical left-wingers calling for the state to impinge further upon (if not rescind completely) our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. But the conservative commentariat -- which can be relied on to (correctly) oppose such measures -- is deafeningly silent on the Fourth Amendment right of the people to be secure in their persons from unreasonable searches and seizures.
Now: to be fair, when they are not silent, those who pass for conservatives (along with a few who pass for liberals) often say that it is perfectly reasonable for police to randomly accost people in high-crime neighborhoods, precisely because those neighborhoods are high in crime.
This is a forgivable -- but catastrophic -- error in logic, and we can easily illustrate how wrong it is with a joke.
The joke starts in a familiar way: A man walks into a bar. But it's a working-class bar, and the man is (say) Michael Bloomberg. Now, the average person in that bar is a millionaire.
Across the street is a bar where millionaires drink. If all you know about both locations is the average net worth of the people inside, you have no idea where you are more likely to meet a millionaire.
To make the setting more relevant to matters of crime: a man moves into a community. But the man is a serial killer, and now the murder rate in that community skyrockets.
What should the police do there? Should they randomly accost men on the streets and (to use Bloomberg's words) throw them up against the wall? Are they likely to make headway against the high murder rate by using these methods? Or is it more likely that they will simply alienate members of that community and make people more reluctant to talk to them — and by extension, make it more difficult to apprehend the killer?
Almost 200 years ago, Britain's first Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel, established the London Metropolitan Police and, in so doing, laid the foundations of modern policing. He set out, in writing, a number of fundamental ideas: that public support is essential to the core police mission of preventing crime; that police must work to build their reputation with the community; that the use of force is sometimes justified, but an adversarial police force, operating without the trust and respect of the broad community, is by definition failing in its core mission.
Policing is not magic. It is the professionalized maintenance of public order. Police cannot be ubiquitous; they require members of the public to be their eyes and ears on the street. None of us should deceive ourselves about the difficulties and hazards of modern urban policing, conducted (as it often is) in black communities where the destruction of the family has given rise to profound disrespect for lawful authority, especially among young people. These problems are real, and they will not yield to pious sentiment from the Right or anti-police hysteria from the Left.
Sometimes, to put it bluntly, the police really do need to throw someone up against the wall.
But we would suggest that when the problem is a few dozen criminals terrorizing a few thousand citizens -- which is very often the case -- what is necessary is something more sophisticated: a strategy which includes the use of force, but also involves everything from regular street patrols and canvassing to long-term investigations and eventual arrests.
That strategy, in living memory, used to be called policework.