Laws can be good or bad, depending on the intent of the framers. The Georgia Voter Suppression Laws, which came out of the Trump election lies are bad because they intend harm to certain segments of the Georgia population and to benefit others.
The 90’s drug laws ended up causing untold harm to Black and Brown Communities, even though tough laws were needed to stem the tide of killings within the Black community from the trade of illicit drugs.
In New York City, Rudolph Guiliani, a racist demagogue, rode to power on an anti-black backlash of the city’s first African-American Mayor, David Dinkins.
His racist contemporary Donald Trump did the same thing nationally, on the back of the Nation’s first African-American President, Barack Obama.
The broken windows policy that Guiliani initiated, and which Michael Bloomberg continued may not have been bad, in that it allows police [acting with integrity] to use their local knowledge and policing instincts to stop where warranted, people they reasonably suspect of carrying weapons and frisk them.
If the police carried out that function with respect, without violating constitutional rights or demeaning, embarrassing, and criminalizing people they do not like, it would have worked fine.
But NYPD officers used the new powers to create hell for people they did not like aided and abetted by a demagogic sociopathic & racist Mayor.
Speaking as a former police officer, albeit in a different environment, we had the legal option of stopping people we reasonably suspected of carrying weapons, and true to form, we utilized those options with marked success.
Those options were not without criticism; nonetheless, despite those successes, our department did not have the good sense to measure them so that a credible response could be formulated.
During Guiliani’s long and divisive tenure as Mayor of New York City, crime went down in the city as it did nationally. However, his time at the helm was fraught with anxiety and distrust between the city’s many communities.
Guiliani would have been happy never to see the face of an African-American person in New York City ever. That enmity and hatred guided how police executed his broken windows policy.
Fast forward to Trump’s presidency, and that same enmity and hatred guided his National policy, one that was always at odds with African-Americans, and one that would have but for wiser heads, resulted in American troops opening fire in 2020 on peaceful African-American and other protesters that were demonstration for racial justice.
It is not a bad idea for a criminally intent person who picks up a gun and goes onto a New York City street to understand that there is a strong possibility that he will be stopped and arrested by the police.
On the other hand, everyone should feel safe that when they leave their homes, the last thing they have to fear is police officers who are paid by their tax dollars throwing them against walls, beating them, and manufacturing criminal charges against them because of any identifying characteristics, usually the color of their skin.
Guiliani’s anti-Black invectives aided the NYPD in following a path along stop-and-frisk that was borne out in the numbers. Disproportionate numbers of African-Americans and Latin X people abused beaten and arrested while only a small amount of weapons were found.
In the end, the NYPD’s own recording showed that people of color suffered more than whites, were incarcerated and abused even though they did not commit any crimes before their interactions with members of the NYPD.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice; Concerns about the program first arose under Mayor Rudy Giuliani during William J. Bratton’s first tenure as police commissioner.2 After growing slowly in the early 2000s, stop-and-frisk began to rapidly increase in 2006, when there were 500,000 stops citywide. By 2011 the number peaked at 685,000. It then began to fall, first to 533,000 stops in 2012. Stop-and-frisk became a central issue in the 2013 city mayoral race because of a concern that the program unconstitutionally targeted communities of color. The program’s supporters disputed this, insisting that stop-and-frisk was essential for fighting crime in such a huge city.
In August 2013, federal district court judge Shira Scheindlin found that stop-and-frisk was unconstitutional.3 The stop-and-frisk era formally drew to a close in January 2014, when newly- elected Mayor Bill de Blasio settled the litigation and ended the program. Given this large-scale effort, one might expect crime generally, and murder specifically, to increase as stops tapered off between 2012 and 2014. Instead, as shown below, the murder rate fell while the number of stops declined. In fact, the biggest fall occurred precisely when the number of stops also fell by a large amount — in 2013.
By the numbers, the Brennan Center concluded the following; Statistically, no relationship between stop-and-frisk and crime seems apparent. New York remains safer than it was 5, 10, or 25 years ago. As analysis by the Brennan Center has shown, a part of this was the introduction of CompStat, which allowed police to consult data when making decisions about where and how to respond to crime.
Police and good policing techniques are very important in fighting crime. But to know what works and what doesn’t, we need to listen to the data.
For the most part, neither law enforcement agencies nor the government has credibly pointed to a single defining characteristic that is responsible for the downward trend crime took over the last two decades or so.
Law enforcement agencies and their proxies would have you believe that the upward tick in crime statistics nationally and locally is caused by calls to defund the police, and racial justice calls for accountability in policing.
It is a lie.
It is a red herring.
Please do not allow them to give police more illegal power to violate rights; they already receive more resources than is necessary to do the job they are paid to do. Let them get up and do the job they are paid to do without favor or affection, malice or ill-will.
The country deserves no less; at every turn, it is racist, mal-intentioned police officers who create the mess that the laws were not intended to create.
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Mike Beckles is a former Police Detective, businessman, freelance writer, black achiever honoree, and creator of the blog mikebeckles.com.