The ABC Sunday show This Week (2/24/13) had not one but two roundtables this weekend. I know, I was excited too.
Right-winger George Will appeared on both of them, because… well, he knows a lot of stuff. The discussion turned to gun violence, and Will attempted to argue that the difference between Chicago’s gun violence and New York City’s is a matter of law enforcement:
DONNA BRAZILE: It’s not about — the Democrats support the Second Amendment right. It’s not Democrats, it’s about assault weapons rifles and these military-style weapons. And should we get them off the streets. And many Americans believe we should.
GEORGE WILL: Get them off the streets, precisely.
The president went to Chicago this week. Chicago has more gun homicides than New York, although New York has three times the population, what’s the difference? The difference is different police measures. And New York, with at lot of controversy, has stop and frisk. And it’s had a measurable effect on gun violence.
It’s not sexy. It’s not a federal program. It’s at the local level and it works.
Stop and frisk is definitely not sexy–and it might be not constitutional either. The practice of stopping people, mostly young men of color, and searching them without probable cause is a lot of things–racist on its face, for one.
But does it actually have anything to do with a reduction in gun violence? To think so, one would want to show that the stops wind up in weapons arrests. But the evidence is that they overwhelmingly do nothing of the sort.
As Ailsa Chang of New York public radio station WNYC reported (7/16/12), out of almost 700,000 stops in 2011, “about 770 guns were recovered”–a little more than one in every thousand stops. What’s more, most of those guns were not found in the areas of the city where most of the stops are being conducted:
We located all the “hot spots” where stop and frisks are concentrated in the city, and found that most guns were recovered on people outside those hot spots–meaning police aren’t finding guns where they’re looking the hardest.
This idea that Chicago should adopt a constitutionally dubious practice of stopping and searching hundreds of thousands of people of color who aren’t suspected of any criminal activity is a popular idea among conservatives, from the New York Post editorial page to Fox‘s Geraldo Rivera.
To be fair, Will’s not just wrong about stop and frisk. Moments later, he gave his Oscars picks:
WILL: The best picture, I think, for three reasons, would be Zero Dark Thirty. First, it’s a challenge to make a suspense movie when everyone knows the outcome, which they did.
Second, it’s a genuine contribution to public education about the hard choices that are–
(CROSSTALK)
WILL: — did start a useful debate.
But third, sufficient reason for voting for it is a rebukes to senators Levin, Feinstein and McCain, who have enough to do without being movie critics and falsely accusing that movie of taking a stand on torture it does not take.
It’s that kind of knowledge that ABC feels obligated to inflict upon its viewers every Sunday. Sometimes twice in the same Sunday.
Not that’s gun control that would bring a smile to the face of Joe Arpaio
And Bull Connor, albeit posthumously.
And it’s of some minor comfort that that perfidious piece of agitprop didn’t win Best Picture, and thus figuratively secured a spot next to Dear Misleader’s nefarious Nobel.
mr. hart
do you ever refer to anyone as a left winger? just curious.
dorian
As completely clueless as George Will seems to be, he knows what he’s doing. He’s mastered the art of moving the debate to the right, and has gained the favor of just enough people over his long career to be able to continue being wrong without seeing meaningful repercussion. Worse, every great once in a while he embraces a reasonable position (let’s say, his recent calling out of solitary confinement) and it dampens the blow for the next dozen awful things he’ll say.
@dorian holley –
Who exactly would you expect Hart to refer to as left-wing? Someone in the media? That’s a laugh.
For the record, though, he has (rightfully, I think) called governments in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia left-wing before.
George is little more than a better spoken Limbaugh or Beck; the main difference is he doesn’t spew spittle. Otherwise he has never let any facts every stop him from spewing the trash of the Fux Snooze Corpse.
Great article. I would also like to mention that the aim of reducing murders through Stop & Frisk is a failure since according the New York Times the number of stop and frisks was reduced last year and – surprise, suprise – the murder rate also reduced.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/nyregion/police-stops-are-down-in-new-york-so-is-murder.html?ref=nyregion&_r=0
Setting aside the merits of Stop-Question-Frisk, the WNYC gun study cited by Hart in this article is deeply flawed methodologically and should not be relied. For a far more careful analysis, see
http://flowingdata.com/2012/07/18/stop-and-frisk-hotspots-mapped/
No doubt, geocoding and crime analysis aren’t exactly the easiest things to make sense of–all the more reason, then, for FAIR and Hart to do a little more research before presenting one, non-peer-reviewed study as “fact” when the WNYC study actually holds little water among specialists. Certainly, FAIR owes its readers more careful journalism.
ERROR CORRECTION: I proved the wrong link for the careful critique of the WNYC study. The correct link is:
http://spatialityblog.com/2012/07/27/nyc-stop-frisk-cartographic-observations/
I’m not saying I’m pro-stop & frisk, but it is possible that gun-owners in high target areas know they might be deprived of their guns if they walk outside, and so accessorize accordingly. Either way, that would take guns off the street.
Normally I would agree with all this. However, a thought. What if stop and frisk keeps the bad guys from carrying guns in the first place? If the chances are that you’ll get caught carrying, you stop carrying. So perhaps the measure is not guns found, but reduced violent crime. Is stop and frisk a price we have to pay now to keep down the violence? Our town has seen many more murders in the past few years – to the point where it feels less and less safe to be here. Just asking.
I do not like the ” stop and frisk” in NYC ,n it may be considered gun violence….since the poliece have guns and are committing crimes of…. the profiling and rights abuse. In many cases the NYPD needs to be prosecuted. On the other hand…. these draconian measures may be having the effect of reducing shooting violence….
Stop and frisk is in no way legal anywhere in the U.S. which still has the constitutional burden of unreasonable search and seizure to contend with. If we are willing to do anything to stop violent crime, why not just put all the citizens in jail?….Oh yeah, jails are violent places too, sorry, that doesn’t work either. Maybe we should just try to have an educated population who would rather earn their money than steal it. You know, have a life that would not be worth losing. Just sayin’
This is a tough nut.Cops I know in Philly(bad lands) tell me that as much as 50% of these kids(sorry but yes most are black)are armed.Stop a car with four teens….. find four guns.Driver takes the fall usually cause no one else knows a thing.Does stop and frisk work?AB-SO-Lutely!Is it constitutional?I don’t think so, but I have not heard the legal arguments.There are some openings on the horizon.A wand cops would carry similar to what secret service has.If cops get a hit it may indicate probable cause.Also dogs that can easily smell gun powder residue(on the barrel of a hidden gun).That would pass the court test of probable cause.Also indicating that if you break a law(any law) you may be subject to stop and frisk.This would need to pass legislation, and mandates.That leads us to profiling.Every security agent profiles.You are an idiot if you don’t.Four o’clock in the morning I see a black youth with a hoodie and baggie pants sitting in a darkened doorway near a train stop where black on black crime is rampant …Im on alert.Same doorway ,same time of night, has an old white woman in
her nightgown sitting there im saying hello can I help you…are you Ok.Profiling?????Damn straight.Dad used to call it common sense.
The analysis is fairly shallow. If stop and frisk’s main effect is that individuals know that they ought not to carry weapons in public, then the appropriate measure of impact is not how many guns are eventually collected. Secondly, I agree with George Will that Zero Dark Thirty was vastly better than Argo, and precisely because Americans continue to disavow their culpability in our governments torture practices. that torture occurred is not a matter of historical debate, though revisionists today would like to wish it away.
What’s so crazy about it is that it’s not just an NYC-centric issue. Look at what’s happening with stop-and-search in London: voc.tv/138jHKd