- NYCLU won a lawsuit that forced the NYPD to release a database of their stop-and-frisk activity. The analysis of the data -- which showed a huge racial disparity in who was targeted -- was instrumental in winning a court order to reform the practice. In 2011, the NYPD committed 685K stop-and-frisks. In 2017, they did 10K. [0]
The ACLU of Northern California [1] filed records requests with 63 California police departments to uncover their financial deals with Geofeedia, a tech company that claimed to offer crime/protest detection using real-time feeds from Facebook/Instagram/Twitter's APIs. Geofeedia, which had recently raised $24M, had to vastly cut its operations after the tech companies shut off API access.
[0] https://www.nyclu.org/en/nyclu-campaign-0
[1] https://www.aclunc.org/blog/facebook-instagram-and-twitter-p...
Am I wrong to read this as "if we can't be racist about it we're just not going to do it as much"
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/nyregion/new-york-police-... for more information
The point of stop and frisk is essentially to hassle everyone in a perceived high crime area and grab people with warrants, etc.
My dad worked in NYC public housing in the 90s, and these aggressive policing measures were both effective and welcomed (to a point) by the community, as it pushed out people that were ruining their homes and lives.
Like all things bureaucracy, the metrics ended up mattering more than reality. Aggressive policing became systematic harassment and the police go out of their way to not see things. That’s why you can walk through Rockefeller Center and observe scam cartoon characters hustle tourists 6 feet away from police details. Good metrics are valued higher than the public.