For the majority of the 70 years he’s been alive, Michael Bloomberg’s primary goal has been to make a return for his shareholders by any means possible. While profit has no ceiling, fighting crime does have its constitutional limits. Despite simple guidelines on stop and frisk policies outlined by federal courts, Bloomberg has defiantly chosen to employ illegal tactics.

Unreasonable Search & Seizure

When it comes to simply taking a stroll down the street, everyone in America has the constitutional right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. In other words, if you are minding your own business, the police cannot stop you, harass you, or go through your stuff.

But say you have been caught red-handed or the cops have observed you staking out a home. You can obviously be stopped and questioned by the police. But to take it one step further and frisk you, you need to appear dangerous and likely armed.

In legalese, in order for an individual to be stopped and frisked, the police must have:

-Reasonable suspicion that a crime has or is about to take place; and
-Reasonable suspicion that the suspect is armed and dangerous.

The issue at hand is obvious: what is the definition of “reasonable suspicion?”

According to Terry v. Ohio (1968), “reasonable suspicion” is the police officer’s ability to present “specific and articulable facts” with “rational inferences.” Since police officers usually need a warrant to search people, the stop and frisk procedure is reserved for rare situations when police are faced with an immediate, objectively dangerous situation.

But when nearly 9 out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been completely innocent according to the NYPD’s own reports, it’s clear that the police encounters are not rare and that the situations are not objectively dangerous.

In regards to the accusations of racial profiling under this policy of organized vigilante justice, the numbers speak for themselves. Out of the 685,724 New Yorkers that were stopped in 2011:

350,743 were black (53 percent)
223,740 were Latino (34 percent)
61,805 were white (9 percent)

With such disparities based on race, these events can only be explained as systematic profiling and harassment.