Upper East Side Police Post Letter Praising Stop-And-Frisk Arrest

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — The NYPD's 19th Precinct — which patrols the Upper East Side — shared a letter sent to them by parents of a once-troubled son that seemed to extol the virtues of the NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk policy, which was deemed unconstitutional in 2013.

The letter, reportedly sent to the precinct anonymously by "a mother and father," told the tale of a high-schooler on the wrong path five years ago. The son was kicked out of school, began abusing drugs and then began selling drugs, the letter said. The parents wrote that nothing helped their son until an arrest made him rethink his life.

The letter reads as if it could have come from a cop or a hardcore advocate for the old days, when police could "stop and frisk" without cause. The problem with that, of course, was the "without cause" part and findings that minorities were being disproportionately targeted.

But an NYPD spokesman confirmed the letter was sent by grateful parents.

"Then a 19th Precinct Officer stopped, frisked and arrested him. He spent a night in jail. Facing felony counts, he decided to go into rehab, to impress the judge," the letter reads.

"We believe that the key to turning out son's life around, the thing that saved his life, was the arrest."

Here is the letter in its entirety:

The letter was shared with the message "we may seem like the bad guys to some people, but it's letters like this that make our work worth it & truly life changing."

"Any time we can affect someone’s life in the positive that’s a good thing," an NYPD spokesman told Patch.

But the controversy surrounding stop-and-frisk was not so much that police are bad people, but whether they were enforcing a bad policy. Stop-and-frisk, which encourages officers to routinely stop and pat down civilians with minimal justification, was ruled unconstitutional in 2013 by a federal judge in Manhattan.

U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin found that the policy gave police carte blanche to racially discriminate against members of the public. She argued that it violated both the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unwarranted searches, and the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law.

Whether stop-and-frisk was ever successful in its goal to take guns and drugs off the streets has also come into question since the 2013 ruling. The occurrence of stop-and-frisk success stories such as the one shared by the 19th Precinct was extremely rare during the policy's heydey in New York.

In 2011 police made 685,724 stop-and-frisk stops and 88 percent of people stopped proved to be innocent, according to data compiled by the New York Civil Liberties Union. The next year 532,911 people were stopped and 89 percent were innocent. Since the 2013 ruling the number of stops has plummeted to 22,939 in 2015.

Photo by Patch