Persuasive Essay On Stop Question And Frisk

Stop question and frisk is defined as the practice "in which police officer who is suspicious of an individual detains the person and runs his hands lightly over the suspect 's outer garments to determinate if the person is carrying a concealed weapon" (Free Dictionary). Police officers are only allowed to search for weapons while patting down the individual, if the officer does not feel any weapon, the search has to stop and the police are not allowed to search into the individual 's pocket. Stop question and frisk is based on the court ruling of Terry v. Ohio, in this case the supreme court held that when a police officer stops a suspects and frisk him without probable cause the fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures is not violated, if the police officer has reasonable suspicious that the person he stop has done, is doing or is about to commit a crime

Stop question and frisk has created a lot of controversy because of the misuse police officer are giving it. Evidence provided by the Huffington Post and the New York Times suggest that many of these stops can be attributed to racial. in a 2011 Statistic given by the Center for Constitutional Rights, show that black and Latinos are disproportionately stopped, black make the 51% of the people being stop and frisk and Latinos/Hispanic make the 33%. But, this not enough to say that stop question and frisk is not a useful tactic and that is not a good tool for officer and community safety. Journalists have mentioned about an increase in murder in New York City, and one of the reasons to this is that the city has settled the practice of stop question and frisk because "the department 's stop and frisk tactics were unconstitutional" said the judge Shira A. Scheindlin of Federal District Court. Thanks to proactive police, which in part is the practice of stop and frisk, murders rate went down practically 80 percent and major felonies close to 75 percent from the early 1990 's to 2013