There is just no question that Stop-Question-Frisk has saved countless lives. And we know that most of the lives saved, based on the statistics, have been black and Hispanic young men.
As recently as 1990, New York City averaged more than six murders a day. Today, we’ve driven that down to less than one murder a day. If murder rates over the last 11 years had been the same as the previous 11 years, more than 7,300 people who today are alive would be dead.
Stop-Question-Frisk has helped us prevent those and other crimes from occurring — which has not only saved lives, it has helped us to reduce incarceration rates by 30 percent, even as incarceration rates in the rest of the nation have gone up.
Throughout the trial that just concluded, the judge made it clear she wasn’t at all interested in the crime reductions here or how we achieved them. In fact, nowhere in her 195-page decision does she mention the historic cuts in crime or the number of lives that have been saved.
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