The chart above was made from information in a very recent Rasmussen Poll (done on November 1st and 2nd of 1,000 likely nationwide voters, with a 3 point margin of error). The headline from Rasmussen when they released this poll was "36% Favor A Stop And Frisk Law Where They Live". I thought that was a rather misleading headline -- since it infers that a plurality of Americans would support such a law. But the truth is that most Americans don't support such a law (50%) or are not sure it's a very good idea (13%).Stop and Frisk laws allow the police to stop and frisk (search) anyone they think is "suspicious". The problem, of course, comes in deciding just what "suspicious" means. Does it mean the person has dark skin, or is dressed in a way an officer disapproves of, or looks to be of a different sexual orientation, or is a young person? New York City has such a law, and there it has been used to disproportionately search Blacks and Hispanics (even though a higher percentage of weapons and drugs have been found on the Whites that were searched) -- giving at least a perception that the law has been used in a racially-biased way.
Most of my working life was spent in various jobs in the law enforcement community. I have worked with some who thought they could pick out a criminal by just looking at them, and frankly, they were mostly wrong. If such a thing could be done, there wouldn't be any crime on our streets. But the sad fact is that the most successful criminals are those who don't look like the Hollywood proto-type of a criminal. They look like our friends and neighbors.
Stop and Frisk may sound like a good idea -- but it is an idea that simply won't work in this real world (where criminals don't cooperate by looking evil or acting suspicious). And it's an idea that can easily be abused by bigots. It makes me very happy to see that most Americans aren't comfortable with this kind of law, and don't want it in their community (as the poll shows).
