The Role Of Police Involvement In The Criminal Justice System

As police officer you can stop someone and pat them down this is called a stop and frisk or a terry stop. But you can’t just stop and frisk anyone you want, you have to have reasonable suspicion of involvement in criminal activity. The reason this comes up as a police issue is for two reasons:

The first reason that it can violate your fourth amendment right. In 2013 Judge Shira A. Scheindlin, ruled that New York City police officers have for years been stopping innocent people in the street without any objective reason to suspect them of wrongdoing. Officers often frisked these people, usually young minority men, for weapons or searched their pockets for contraband, like drugs, before letting them go. This is an issue because police officers

can just stop and search you they have to have reasonable suspicion to search you.

This brings me to my second issue with racial profiling with stop and frisks. A lot of unreasonable search and seizures happen because police see a suspicious African-American or Hispanic. The main issue with racial profiling with stop and frisks is that police departments like the one in New York adopted a strategy that encourages police officers to stop and question/frisk mainly minority citizens first and to come up with reasons for having done so later. This has resulted in people in some neighborhoods being stopped without reason a great deal of times in a year.

But there is an upside to all this in cases like Floyd v. The City of New York and Terry v. Ohio it has helped shaped the police for the better. Terry v. Ohio helped lay the ground work with defining what a reasonable search, With Floyd v. The City of New York it stated that stopping someone on the basis of race and/or national origin goes against the fourth amendment. With this new information gained police can come up with new can come up with new strategies that can benefit the community and keep it safer.

My option on this issue is that stopping someone only on race and violating the constitution is wrong. But we can take mistakes of the past and use it to make a better future. A lot of minorities feel hurt by the police that the police only cause harm and are bad people. Things can only get better if the police change some of their policing tactics to be more ethical and to work with the community side by side to help stop crime.