DEMOCRATS OPPOSE STOP-AND-FRISK

Civil libertarians argue that the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics are illegal and unfairly target minorities. Statistics show that most such stops are conducted against citizens that are not armed and did not commit any crime. Nevertheless, for the police those stop-and-frisks are a valuable crime detection and prevention tool.

Although most people subjected to stop-and-frisks are minorities, those NYPD tactics do not target people because of their race. If the majority of citizens stopped happen to be black or Latino, it’s only because those stops are made in neighborhoods that have the highest rate of violent crimes in the city.

Newsmax reports that all the Democrats running for mayor of New York have vowed to end the stop-and-frisk’ tactics. They are also opposed to NYPD’s anti-terrorism surveillance program.

John Catsimatidis is a Republican candidate for mayor of New York who strongly supports both the stop-and-frisk tactics and the anti-terrorism surveillance program. Catsimatidis, a Greek immigrant, started out with a chain of small supermarkets. His company diversified into energy, aviation, and real estate holdings and is now worth about $3 billion and employs 8,000 people.

According to Newsmax, Catsimatidis states that “I am one of the only candidates that supports Ray Kelly to hopefully stay on as police commissioner or higher. I'm the only one that is pushing that. I believe that if we stop stop-and-frisk, that we are surrendering to the hoodlums in New York and we can go downhill very fast. All of the Democratic candidates could hurt New York.”

As for the anti-terrorism surveillance program, Catsimatidis says, “We have our own [anti] terrorist force watching out for those terrorists. We've got to keep our citizens safe and we have to make sure that people can walk around New York City and say ‘I feel good about it.' To me, that's one of the most important things the next mayor should stand for.”

I can't help but wonder why so many Democrats see every police tactic as being racist – as violating the rights of blacks and Latinos, and in the case of anti-terrorism, the rights of Muslims. The Democrats must be ignorant of the fact that most of the gun violence in New York is committed by blacks against blacks and by Latinos against Latinos. NYPD's stop-and-frisk tactics are designed to protect the very people that are complaining the most about those tactics.

Update 6-8-13: Professor Eli Silverman informs me that “Newsmax has some inaccurate information. Only one of the several Democratic candidates (John Liu) has campaigned to end stop and frisk. The others all want to really restore it to what it was designed for — an investigative tool, not a product of quotas.”

I appreciate Prof. Silverman's heads-up. While only one of the Democratic mayoral candidates is campaigning to stop stop-and-frisks, that does not change the fact that most Democrats oppose any police tactics that impact minorities more than whites.