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.

Proven indeed.  Overshoot your authority by 900,000 people are you’re bound to catch a few criminals.  Isn’t it worth it?  Aren’t we prepared to sacrifice a few minutes of our time, and sneak peak into our personal possessions, if it catches even one heinous criminal?  After all, do we want another 9/11?

That it’s claimed to be authorized by law is both a truth and a lie.  The law requires mere “reasonable suspicion,” a phrase so fundamentally convenient and meaningless as to make it sound, to the ordinary citizen, perfectly “reasonable” while handing police a free hand in stopping anyone they want at will.  Resort to such amorphous phrases is a judicial cop out, a failure to come up with a rule that can be both uniformly applied and generally understood.  But this also assumes that the courts really care to come up with such a rule, since it is always in their power to reject such meaningless phrases if they so decide. They don’t.

And then there’s the 90% problem.  Courts never deal with the 90% who aren’t arrested, the people who gave a cop a dirty look, or maybe no look at all, and were stopped and frisked anyway.  If nothing was found, and the cop was in a sufficiently good mood that he elected not to arrest for such offenses as obstruction of governmental administration, the stop simply disappears as if it never happened.  Sure, it’s included in the statistics, but there’s no person complaining to a court about being forced to succumb to police will for no good reason.  Or for being the type or color of person that cops just tend to stop.

There’s no club for them to join.  There’s no lawsuit to be had, to gain vast riches from the police having baselessly seized them for nothing.  Their stories are never told.  Judges, filled with the importance of getting criminals off the streets, embolden the police use of these tactics by nodding and winking at the silliest of explanations for street stops.  The same excuses appear over and over, even using the same unusual words like “furtive”, and judges always believe that it must be true.  Why would cops just stop an innocent citizen walking down the street if he didn’t have a good reason to do so?  That would never happen.  Never.

It’s an epidemic.  Yet no one is trying to find a cure, or even a vaccine. 

From the police perspective, there is nothing wrong with these numbers. You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, which is fine unless you either happen to be one of those eggs or care about how many eggs are broken for nothing.  By that theory, of course, our police would be remarkably effective if they could just stop and frisk anyone they want to at will, without even the pretense of having to mouth the words of “reasonable suspicion.” Better still, who knows what they would find if they could just search whenever they felt the need.  Imagine how safe we would be, from everybody except the cops.

H/T Rick “Write What I Want You To Write, Dammit” Horowitz