{"id":179498,"date":"2018-01-21T20:09:00","date_gmt":"2018-01-22T01:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/01\/21\/not-a-surprise-16\/"},"modified":"2018-01-21T20:09:00","modified_gmt":"2018-01-22T01:09:00","slug":"not-a-surprise-16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/01\/21\/not-a-surprise-16\/","title":{"rendered":"Not a Surprise"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We know that correlation does not imply causation, but lack of correlation <b>does<\/b> imply a lack of causation, and it appears that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.propublica.org\/article\/in-new-york-crime-falls-along-with-police-stops\">stop and frisk falls firmly into the latter category<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">If you grew up in New York City in the 1970s, the number can be hard to get your head around: 291. If you were a reporter in New York City in the early 1990s, the number can almost make your head explode: 291 murders in 2017, the lowest total since the 1950s.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">But the number is perhaps most striking when set not against the numbers of murders in other years, but against this figure: the roughly 10,000 police stops conducted in 2017.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The longstanding rationale for the New York Police Department\u2019s widespread use of what came to be known as stop-and-frisk \u2014 encounters between officers and people they suspected of suspicious behavior \u2014 had been that it was an essential crime-fighting tool. Such stops got guns off the street, the theory went, and low-level enforcement helped sweep up criminals destined to commit more serious crimes.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Ultimately, a federal judge, Shira Scheindlin, found the NYPD\u2019s enforcement of stop-and-frisk racially unfair and unconstitutional. A new mayor, Bill de Blasio, and the judge\u2019s orders for reform, prompted a radical scaling back of stop-and-frisk. Critics predicted a disastrous return to, depending on one\u2019s age and experience, the 1970s or the 1990s.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The disaster never happened. Instead, what many scholars and police officials thought nearly unthinkable \u2014 further reductions in crime after two decades of plummeting numbers \u2014 did.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Holding murders under 300 was just the headline of 2017 statistics that saw considerable reductions in almost every category of major crime.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Stop and frisk was never a tactic to reduce crime, though the naive might have believed that, it was a way to keep people of color down.&nbsp; (With a bit of law-enforcement theater thrown in.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We know that correlation does not imply causation, but lack of correlation does imply a lack of causation, and it appears that stop and frisk falls firmly into the latter category: If you grew up in New York City in the 1970s, the number can be hard to get your head around: 291. If you &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[407,526,494],"class_list":["post-179498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-justice","tag-law-enforcement-misconduct","tag-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179498"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}