Stop and Frisk Policy -
New York City Police Department
The tactic has come under fire from civil rights groups, as well as some city council members and minority community leaders, who point out that the overwhelming majority of the stops do not result in the discovery of any wrongdoing on the part of the person stopped.
The citys reliance on stop and frisk has come under intense scrutiny and legal challenges. Critics say that the police unfairly target black and Hispanic young men, who have made up 85 percent of those stopped. The police department has strongly defended the tactic as helping to bring down crime, saying it is an effective way of getting illegal guns off the streets.
A short documentary film on New Yorks stop-and-frisk policing focuses on Tyquan Brehon, a young man in Brooklyn who says he was stopped more than 60 times before age 18.Stop and Frisk - The New York Times
Out of more than 685,000 stops in 2011, about 770 guns were recovered. That means about one tenth of one percent of all stops result in the seizure of a gun.
But those guns are not showing up in the places where the police are devoting the most stop-and-frisk resources.
Map: NYPD Finds Most Guns Outside Stop-and-Frisk Hotspots - WNYC
