Stop and Frisk, Stop It

Alexander Kitsmarishvili

Since Mike Bloomberg is surging in the national polls and joining the talks amongst serious candidates for the democratic nominee I’ve been thinking a little bit about stop and frisk and the policing of black communities. I think that a lot of people don’t really understand what’s so wrong with stop and frisk and that makes people support it when they might not if they understood what was wrong with it. 

The tricky thing about stop and frisk is that the first line of thinking that leads to making stop and frisk an appealing policy almost seems like it makes sense. Basically, people in favor of stop and frisk say that it makes sense for police to target certain groups of people because those groups of people on average commit more crime. The issue with this is that the amount of crime committed by a group of people increases the more they are policed. 

In many cases, the communities that had high crime were already targeted more due to racial prejudices and then targeted even more because of the higher crime rates. Essentially, the more police there are in an area the more crime will be reported and therefore the crime rates will be higher.

Furthermore, stop and frisk doesn’t do anything to help the already tense relationship between minority communities and the police, instead, it only makes things worse and quite literally policies differently on the color of someone’s skin. 

This is my way of explaining to people that stop and frisk is a racist policy that is based on faulty logic and perpetuates a racist system that feeds into itself. 

This was inspired by Mike Bloomberg’s presidential run because he has been spending insane amounts of money to create a good image with the youth (he pays meme pages thousands for memes about him) and other ads targeted to other demographics. I think it’s important to talk about the truly horrible things he did in New York which, in my opinion, aren’t talked about.