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NYC Shooting Spike Reignites Stop & Frisk Debate
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Gothamist Staff
Published Jun 3, 2015
Modified Jun 4, 2015
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By
Gothamist Staff
Published Jun 3, 2015
Modified Jun 4, 2015
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Media reports this week citing a rise in shootings citywide have reignited debate about the NYPD’s controversial Stop-Question-Frisk program, and fueled calls for a return to the days of the previous mayoral administration, which in one year (2011) saw roughly 680,000 New Yorkers stopped by the NYPD, the overwhelming majority of them minorities.
But Professor Delores Jones-Brown, who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the Department of Law and Political Science, predicts “racial and ethnic minorities will not allow the administration to return to the state where they are not free to walk the streets without police interference.”
“I think it's impossible for the de Blasio administration to do that, although there is a lot of pressure on the administration to resume strategies that we should now not accept.”
Jones-Brown believes some in New York City “want to go back to the overly simplistic strategies of policing such as Stop and Frisk or broken windows, even though a federal ruling said those strategies unfairly target ethnic and racial minorities.”
The NYPD held a press conference on Monday to announce that shootings have risen for two straight years, a trend not seen since the end of the 1990s. Homicides by gunfire, seen as a key measure of preventable violence, are up steeply this year. Of the 135 killings through May, 98 involved a gun, up from 69 such killings at this point in 2013 and in 2014.
The NYPD’s CompStat (Complaint Statistics) website reports that through May of this year there were 403 shooting incidents, up from the previous year’s total of 375, an increase of 7.5 percent and 16.8 percent over a two-year period, or 69 victims. Overall crime in NYC is down, according to the NYPD's stats.
Taken together, the NY Times reports that “the trends raise concern heading into the summer months,” but Professor Jones-Brown said that such concern is inflated, even alarmist.
Jones-Brown said she's "definitely skeptical" about the NYPD’s numbers—and not for the first time in her career.
Commissioner Bill Bratton was appointed by Mayor de Blasio in December 2013, and over the following year the media reported a similar rise in shootings. But when academics like herself crunched the numbers, she says they didn’t add up. The reason for this week’s announcement may have more to do with city politics that actual fact.
“We are in such politically charged times I think it is possible that they are engaged in statistical manipulation of the numbers,” Jones-Brown said. She suspects Commissioner Bratton’s recent call for 1,000 more cops on the streets may be playing a role.
“There may be some inflation or manipulation of the data to make it appear to be a crisis when there is not.” A slight increase can produce a big percentage, creating the illusion of a crisis.
Jones-Brown also doubts claims by the NYPD that police stops are down significantly. She wonders if the police are just not reporting them. “It’s very difficult to trust the reporting of crime statistics when there are so many political careers at stake.”
She said she has spoken with NYPD officers who claimed that during Commissioner Ray Kelly's tenure, cops would report a shooting as a property crime just to give the impression that gun crime was down.
But Heather MacDonald, the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of the conservative City Journal, said the NYPD has a “rigorous auditing system” and called Jones-Brown’s claim “preposterous.”
Jones-Brown argues that since decision-makers in newsrooms are typically white and affluent they may not be neutral on the issue of aggressive policing, and because of their social background may not so easily sympathize with the plight of working-class minorities on the receiving end of get-tough policing policies.
In describing this week’s claims as “alarmist,” Jones-Brown said things are typically more complex than reported in the media.
But to MacDonald, an avid advocate of aggressive policing, what we are seeing in the media is “anti-police propaganda,” she said, arguing that newsroom editors are “not creating this. The NYPD is extremely concerned about the rise in shootings."
More than half of all police stops do not involve body searches, MacDonald said, insisting there is a correlation between the Stop, Question and Frisk and a reduction in shootings. Police stops are down 95 percent from their high of more than 650,000 in 2011.
While Jones-Brown said that minority communities don’t need more ill-trained cops, MacDonald believes those very communities are the actual victims when the practice of Stop and Frisk declines. “Their lives are going to be lost,” she said. “Black lives matter as much as the handful of people shot by the police.”
According to MacDonald, this week’s news places the de Blasio administration in a “dilemma," between his political base, which she said “tends to focus exclusively on the claim that the police is the greatest threat to the black community,” and the public's demand for a safer city, which may hurt him at election time.
Mark Winston Griffith, executive director of the Brooklyn Movement Center, a community-organizing group based in central Brooklyn, claims correlating more aggressive policing with a reduction in gun crime is largely unproven and typically based on too small a statistical sample.
The numbers published this week are just a “snapshot," according to Griffith, who said the truth about gun crime involves many factors other than policing, such as employment opportunities and poverty.
“The trends are not so easy to summarize and simplify and create a direct correlation between one cause or factor and an uptick in crime. It’s absurd but the debate is being driven by the political conversation being had in the city,” he said.
"There is a whole contingent of people out there who have a direct interest in increasing the number of police and creating a narrative that supports that."
Gerard Flynn is an investigative reporter living in New York.
Tagged
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shootings
stop and frisk
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