re: #67 GeneJockey

I think there are two parts to the justification.

Part one is not racist - you can reduce the number of crimes if criminals know that there’s a significant probability that they’ll be stopped and searched, and possibly arrested if carrying a weapon illegally. So, a program of truly RANDOM stop-and-frisk would reduce the number of weapons wandering the streets, and thus reduce crime.

The second part - the implementation - is where the racism comes in. It’s not truly random, but heavily oversamples nonwhites.

And I’d also suggest that if it WERE truly random, so that everyone had an equal chance of being stopped, whites would suddenly find it is a hugely intrusive program that threatens their liberty, rather than seeing it as ‘common sense law enforcement.’

Oh, sort of like the TSA randomly doing extra searches on people in airport security lines — including 5-year-olds.