My 2 cents, I pasted this from my blog:
Stop, Question and Frisk: A Brief Look
Imagine you’re walking home from a long day of work. You’re tired and you can’t wait to shower then relax by watching the season finale of breaking bad that you haven’t had time to watch. A block from your home, a black impala with no hubcaps aggressively U-turns and stops 3 feet away from you. While stunned, all you see the intimidating grille of a beat up unmarked vehicle and two tall men with guns and shields on their chest step out of the car. They approach you, identify themselves as officers and surround you. One looks in your pocket while the other one questions you about what you’re doing in your own neighborhood. You become aggravated because some guy you’ve never met, and who you otherwise would knock out if they weren’t cops is touching you in places that only your wife does. After searching you and realizing you weren’t who they were looking for, they apologize and walk away. You’re a hardworking man but you have been made to feel humiliated, violated and treated like a criminal by two people you’ve never met. And you feel like you were only stopped because of your skin color. Cause shit, why else would anyone stop a hard working guy who is on his way home from work. It’s a situation that’s all too common in NYC. But is it really what it seems?
I’ve been stopped and frisked before and I understand how aggravating it can be. But media representation of Stop Question and Frisk (SQF) makes it appear as if the police are stopping random people, and that’s simply not how it happens.
Generally, people are stopped because the officer heard a description over the radio of someone who just commited a crime, the officer then observes someone that matches the description. In the interest of finding the perpetrator of the crime and ensuring the officers safety, an SQF is conducted. Even if the person is not frisked, the officer has to fill out a form in order to document the stop.
In regards to the claims about black males being predominantly stopped for their furtive movements, any good cop can tell if someone is carrying a weapon or acting suspiciously. In busy precinct, you’re going to come across a lot of people who act in that manner. Let’s say that you are a police officer. You are working an area there have been lots of gunpoint cell phone robberies committed by black males who roam in groups of 2 late at night. It’s monday night at 0300 and you observe a two black males circling the same general area with no destination but they’re constantly looking around. One of them is engaging in furtive movements by constantly adjusting his waistband. When the two males notice you, they get nervous and they turn the other way. At that point, their actions give you reasonable suspicion to believe that they are about to commit a crime so you stop, question and frisk them. But you find nothing, it turns out that they were teenagers who high and didn’t want to get caught. This is the typical SQF example.
To the outside observer it seems like the stop isn’t predicated on the situation that I described. But that’s because all the civilian sees is the part of the SQF where the officer actually puts their hands on the person. People don’t see the events that led up to the stop. People don’t hear the radio transmission describing the perp and most people don’t know the crime trends in the neighborhood that justify the stops. It’s one of those things where unless the person is a police officer, or if the person is given an understanding of the dynamics of policework (like i’ve been blessed to learn in my time as an auxiliary) that people won’t totally grasp. To the naked eye SQF seems nefarious, but it’s not what it seems.
Mistakes happen a lot, and some officers are so new that they can’t tell the difference between furtive movements and regular movement. Some officers can’t properly articulate the justification for a stop. And according to the news, some commands have been reported to pressure officers to get a certain amount of stops in order to show the city that they are proactive in preventing crime. I believe that a review of command level SQF practices is reasonable. But this criticism that’s being presented is totally unwarranted.