Imagine living in a place where little, maybe nothing, more than being there is deemed sufficient cause for police to “stop, question, frisk.”  Some horribly repressive third world country?  Try the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.

From the New York Times :

When night falls, police officers blanket some eight odd blocks of Brownsville, Brooklyn. Squad cars with flashing lights cruise along the main avenues: Livonia to Powell to Sutter to Rockaway. And again.

On the inner streets, dozens of officers, many fresh out of the police academy, walk in pairs or linger on corners. Others, deeper within the urban grid, navigate a maze of public housing complexes, patrolling the stairwells and hallways.

This small army of officers, night after night, spends much of its energy pursuing the controversial Police Department tactic known as “Stop, Question, Frisk,” and it does so at a rate unmatched anywhere else in the city.

Since 2006, cops have made 52,000 stops in this eight block area, where about 14,000 people reside.  The putative purpose is to take guns off the street.  Thus far, they’ve come up with 25 guns.

The police use the typical claims for rounding up the usual suspects.  The pettiest of petty offenses.  The threat of a person entering a project because he doesn’t have a key. Or the perpetual favorite of cops.

Far more — nearly 26,000 times — the police listed either “furtive movement,” a catch-all category that critics say can mean anything, or “other” as the only reason for the stop. Many of the stops, the data show, were driven by the police’s ability to enforce seemingly minor violations of rules governing who can come and go in the city’s public housing.

That this is happening in America, in New York, in Brooklyn, is utterly amazing and outrageous.  The people who live in Brownsville (would you be shocked to learn that most are people of color?) suffer the indignity of being stopped and challenged at will.  In one instance, 20 officers surrounded a man who refused to let the police smell the contents of his orange juice container. 

It’s not that crime isn’t a problem, or that residents don’t appreciate having the police around.  It’s that there is no limit to what the police can do, and to whom they can do it.  This is tantamount to an eight block area where the Constitution is suspended, a war zone where anyone is fair game for a stop and frisk at will.  That “furtive gesture,” the most meaningless and abused excuse in the police lexicon, was used to justify almost half the stops renders the notion that anyone is free to be left alone a joke.

Despite the high crime rate, there is nothing to show that the stop and frisk tactics serve to reduce crime.  Indeed, it may well exacerbate the alienation of residents.

Law enforcement experts say that it is very hard, perhaps even impossible, to draw direct connections between the stop-and-frisk tactic and significant long-term crime reduction.

Certainly, some say that the New York Police Department has so far failed to convincingly link the explosion in the numbers of stops with crime suppression.

And some, from academics to the residents of these streets in Brooklyn, believe the stops could have a corrosive effect, alienating young and old alike in a community that has long had a tenuous relationship with the police.

Then again, so what if the football players at Thomas Jefferson High School are told to walk home wearing their helmets to give them a fighting chance against getting stopped by the cops for being black.  As long as this is happening in Brownsville, and not where we live, what’s the big deal?

Say, was that a furtive gesture?