NY police mostly target minorities in 200,000 stops in 3 months

The New York Police Department (NYPD) announced Friday that its officers stopped people on the city's streets nearly 204,000 times from January through March, up from some 183,000 during the same period in 2011.

The so-called Stop, Question and Frisk policy allows police officers to stop any individual based on what they perceive as 'reasonable suspicion,' which is less serious than that of 'probable cause,' required to justify an arrest.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg claims the random police stops has gotten guns off the streets and saved lives. Critics, however, insist that NYPD officers are unfairly targeting minorities.

In 2011, according to local press reports, the NYPD stopped nearly 700,000 people of whom a whopping 88 percent were considered innocent.

Backers of the policy say it is an effective tool in deterring crime, but critics argue that the practice targets mostly young African-Americans and Hispanics in poor neighborhoods, comparing the situation to a police state.

Dr. Delores Jones-Brown, a professor and the director of the Center on Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College in New York who has co-authored a 2010 study on NYPD's Stop and Frisk policy, insists that the key problem with the policy is that many of the people targeted "are innocent."

Her findings, detailed in a report titled, Stop, Question and Frisk policing practices in New York City: A primer, concluded that the number of the stops made by NYPD officers tripled between 2003 and 2009 and that most of those stopped were either black or Hispanic.

A separate report released by the New York Civil Liberties Union last Wednesday also indicates that of 56 percent of the stops which resulted in a search, only 1.9 percent resulted in the discovery of a weapon.

The study also underlined that while young black and Latino men account for only 4.7 percent of New York's population, they accounted for over 40 percent of all the stops made by the city's police officers.