The NY Times had an opinion piece on the NYPD's policy of 'stop, question, frisk'. This policy is clearly being applied racially: African-Americans constitute 25% of the city's inhabitants but made up 52% of the stops. Whites, despite making up 44% of the city's population, represented just 10% of the stops. In over 88% of the stops, the person stopped was doing nothing wrong.
Yet despite doing nothing wrong, they are being entered into a database. Is this a suggestion that they were doing something wrong, but just got away with it this time? Will the database be used to sweep in people who were known to be in a certain area at a certain time?
Clearly this policy oversteps the bounds of law, not to mention the clear racial profiling demonstrated. The main 'crime' the people stopped and searched seemed to have committed was to be born black in a country where the rule of law is too often unevenly applied.
