Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Heather McDonald of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal says the national trend of declining crime “could hang in the balance” if a judge rules against the NYPD’s stop and frisk policy. A U.S. District Court judge is expected to rule this summer on a racial profiling lawsuit “that could spell an end to a police practice that helped the city achieve an astonishing drop in violent crime.”
“A decision against the NYPD would almost certainly inspire similar suits by social-justice organizations against police departments elsewhere,” McDonald writes. “And the primary victims of such a reversal would be the inner-city minorities whose safety seems not to figure into attempts to undermine successful police tactics…But the city’s policing, whose key elements include the rigorous analysis of crime data and commander accountability for public safety, also has been dogged by misconceptions, including the notion that New York policing is racist.”