Stop And Frisk Is Gun Control?

Twisted Reasoning

Today (8/25/2013), I read this bizarre article on reason.com titled “Stop and Frisk: How the Right Learned to Love Gun Control” by A. Barton Hinkle published on 8/21/2013. The subtitle of the article reads “If any other program had a 98 percent failure rate, conservatives would hold it up as a shining example of everything that’s wrong with big government.” The author of this article is not an intern, but a senior editorial writer and a columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Here is a typical quote from this article (emphasis added):

“In fact, stop-and-frisk is not a tremendous success but a tremendous failure, because such stops turn up contraband only 2 percent of the time. In other words: 98 times out of 100 the officer’s suspicion is unjustified.”

Naïve And Faulty Analysis

In his naïve and faulty analysis, the author comes to the conclusion that since only a few gun owners are criminals as well as only a few black or Hispanic men are criminals, to apply Stop, Ask, And Frisk (SAF) must be greatly disproportional and unjustified.

Mr. Hinkle seems to approve of the Broken Window approach, but he does not realize that Stop, Ask, And Frisk is sort of an extension of this concept, because it is, e.g., also focused on crime ridden areas. SAF is also similar to the concept of beat cop who patrols an area by feet to prevent crimes from happening. A beat cop is familiar with the people in the neighborhood and vice versa.

To The Publisher Of Reason.Com

I think the editors of the Reason.com should more carefully review the material before it is published on their website. This article was a waste of my time.