Anti-Stop-And-Frisk Activists Seek To Register Thousands Of Voters
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- Civil rights and community groups announced Monday that they aim to become an electoral force by registering thousands of voters concerned about the stop-and-frisk policing strategy.
From an open-mike night for high school seniors to a Brooklyn subway station to a shopping area in a heavily Asian-American community, the advocates said Monday they were setting out to energize people, especially young ones, who may see their frustrations with stop-and-frisk or the NYPD's surveillance programs as reasons to vote when they might not otherwise.
With a high-stakes election at stake this fall, "we need our next mayor to be sensitive to the issues that we're going through," Aaron Hinton, a member of an organization that advocates for people affected by HIV and drug policies, said at a news conference outside City Hall. Hinton said he has been stopped more than 30 times.
The voter drive signals how a long-simmering debate over stop and frisk is coalescing into a factor in city politics, particularly the campaign to elect a successor to three-term Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He has vehemently defended the practice as a legal and crucial crime-fighting tool.
The tactic -- police stopping, questioning and sometimes patting down people based on suspicions that may not meet the legal bar for arrest -- has the Supreme Court's approval. But the NYPD's heavy use of it has engendered complaints as the number of stops rocketed up in recent years, totaling almost 5 million in a decade.
Police and Bloomberg credit stop and frisk with deterring violence, netting hundreds of illegal guns and knives a year and making citizens safer in a city where rates of major crimes have dropped precipitously. Skeptics call the practice racially biased, noting that more than 80 percent of those stopped are black or Hispanic, and they say it intimidates innocent people and has little impact on crime. Less than 15 percent of the stops result in arrests or weapons confiscations.
The issue has gained a political spotlight in the last year, propelled by factors including an ongoing federal civil rights trial over stop and frisk and City Council proposals to set new rules for the encounters. Meanwhile, growing awareness of the NYPD's widespread spying on Muslims, as revealed in a series of stories by The Associated Press, has forged ties between Muslim-American advocates and the stop-and-frisk opponents.
In his weekly radio address on Sunday, Bloomberg railed against two pieces of proposed city legislation intended to curb stop-and-frisk.
One of them would create an inspector general to monitor the department,, while the other would let people sue police if they felt they were stopped-and-frisked because of bias based on race, sexual orientation or certain other factors.
Bloomberg characterized both pieces of legislation as "two dangerous bills that would undermine public safety."
The inspector general proposal, Bloomberg said, "would undermine the accountability that is so essential to the Police Department's success in driving down crime. It could also undermine our counterterrorism efforts by making the law enforcement agencies that we work with on intelligence gathering less willing to share information with us."
The second bill, Bloomberg said, "would preclude the NYPD from sharing key information, including gender, age and race, to identify suspects." Such a proposal would make life difficult not just for police, but for everyone, according to Bloomberg.
Bloomberg has also accused stop-and-frisk opponents of playing politics.
"The special interest groups who know nothing about policing, and some elected officials who have never had responsibility for some public safety strategies, are putting ideology and election year politics above public safety," he said last week.
Activists bristled at that Monday.
"Our special interest is security, safety and the dignity of our communities," retorted Linda Sarsour, the executive director of the Arab American Association of New York.
Her group is supporting Communities United for Police Reform, the coalition spearheading the voter registration drive. There's no budget specifically for the effort; the dozen nonprofit groups involved just plan to add it to their activities, organizers said.
The group says it won't endorse candidates. But leaders hope showing that many voters object to the NYPD's use of stop and frisk will prompt the contenders to pledge changes, or at least make their positions clear.
Mayoral candidates are split on the issue. Several Democrats have said the practice needs changing; one, City Comptroller John Liu, has called for abolishing it. Some Republicans, meanwhile, have embraced the NYPD's view.
Voters disapprove of stop and frisk by a margin of 51 to 43 percent but have positive views overall of the police department, according to a Quinnipiac University poll last month.
While stop and frisk may not be a make-or-break issue for many New Yorkers, "it might energize a significant bunch of voters," the poll's director, Maurice "Mickey" Carroll, said by phone Monday.
Check Out These Other Stories From CBSNewYork.com:
(TM and © Copyright 2013 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2013 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
