San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee is considering implementing a stop-and-frisk policy to deter crime. That trial balloon must be popped immediately. The city does not need its police officers stopping people, demanding identification, and frisking them. New York City has implemented such a program and from what we've read recently, it is a policy that largely targets minorities (and men), with no discernable benefit and not worth its negative impact.
Lee made his plan public at an editorial board meeting with the San Francisco Chronicle, which ran a front-page article last week. During the meeting, Lee mentioned that one of his concerns is getting guns off the street; and while we appreciate that important goal, stopping people and searching them – without a warrant – is not the way to accomplish it.
The paper noted that Lee's statements were a "surprising move," and we agree. Indeed, the mayor has described himself as "a progressive before progressive was a political faction in this town." He is a former civil rights lawyer who was the managing attorney at the Asian Law Caucus, where he was an advocate for affordable housing and immigrant and tenant rights. The idea that Lee would advocate a stop-and-frisk policy is uncharacteristic, given his background and work in the community.
If such a plan were implemented in San Francisco, two of the districts most likely to be targeted would be the Bayview-Hunters Point and the Tenderloin – both areas with high crime rates. Minorities, including the LGBT community, would also be stopped and frisked more often. Civil rights groups have roundly denounced stop-and-frisk programs as racist and that they disproportionately affect Latino and African American residents. We would add transgender people to that list, as they too would be stopped in greater proportion, especially if their gender presentation doesn't match their identification. There was a time not long ago when gays were victimized by such laws. Police routinely raided gay bars here and other cities had laws allowing the cops to stop groups of gay men for "making too much noise" after the bars closed, recalled longtime activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca. He was stopped under one such law back in the 1970s when he lived in Philadelphia, he recalled.
In fact, the Philadelphia Police Department is under court monitoring for its stop-and-firsk program, the result of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and others who alleged that officers used racial profiling, the Chronicle noted.
Lee told the Chronicle that he wants to explore a stop-and-frisk policy by having a "good conversation" about it with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
New Yorkers, who were ensnared under the policy, talked about their experiences with reporters from the New York Times in a powerful article last week. Times reporters talked to 100 people who said they had been stopped by New York police in neighborhoods where the practice is most common. "Most of the time, the officers swoop in, hornetlike, with a command to stop: 'Yo! You, come here. Get against the wall,'" the Times' story begins. Last year, police made 686,000 stops under the program, 84 percent of them black or Latino. The vast majority of those stops, 88 percent, led to neither an arrest nor a summons, leaving us to wonder just why such a policy is in place. And although police are not supposed to stop people based on their skin color, many of those interviewed by the paper believed that is exactly why they were stopped. It didn't matter whether the officers were rude or polite, those questioned told the paper that they felt intimidated, humiliated, and intruded upon.
It's telling that when Supervisor Malia Cohen, who has supported Lee and who represents the Bayview, heard about the mayor's interest in a stop-and-frisk program, her initial comment, according to the Chronicle , was, "Wow. That's shocking and alarming."
Cohen is right. Civil liberties are under assault in this country. In Arizona, the U.S. Supreme Court just upheld the most controversial part of that state's harsh immigration law, and now the authorities can require that people show proof of immigration status during law enforcement stops. This "show your papers" law unfairly targets Latinos because they are commonly stereotyped as illegal immigrants.
Mayor Lee needs to announce unequivocally that he is not pursuing this policy. On the Fourth of July, pause and think about the rights citizens have in this country and our national legacy of protecting basic liberties. San Francisco does not need a policy giving police the authority to stop and frisk people. We must find other, more effective ways to reduce gun violence without turning police against the public.