The Fourth Amendment as provided by of the United States’ constitution provides that the US citizens’ rights to be secure in their persons, papers, houses, and also protests against unreasonable seizures and searches should be upheld. It further states that warrants are not to be issued unless when there is probable cause, and the warrant issued in such a case should be supported by an affirmation or oath where it shall describe the specific place that needs to be searched as well as the specific people and things that should be seized. The ultimate goal of the Fourth Amendment was to protect and citizens’ right to both freedom and privacy from frequent and unreasonable intrusions that may be made by the government. All the same, the Fourth Amendment provision has not guaranteed the people protection from all forms of seizures and searches, but only the ones that are perpetrated by the government and that the law finds unreasonable. The provisions have raised concerns and heated debates about legality and constitutionality with respect to a stop-and-frisk tactic that the law enforcers have been applying across New York.
Search and Seizures under Fourth Amendment
The court is mandated to determining what exactly constitutes a seizure or a search under the provisions of the Fourth Amendment. In the event that the conduct that has been challenged does not satisfy the definition of the Fourth Amendment, then the person in question may not enjoy the protection of the Amendment. As stipulated by the Amendment, a search should occur when a servant or agent of the state or a governmental employee abuses the reasonable expectation of privacy of citizens. The strip and also the visual body cavity search such as genital and anal inspections, however, constitute a reasonable search under the Amendment only if they are conducted in what is found to be a reasonable manner and also if it is supported by a probable cause (Ridgeway et al., 2005). Under the Fourth Amendment, a dog-sniff inspection is invalid especially if it violates the reasonable expectancy of privacy to an individual.
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The seizure of an individual as per the Amendment interpretation shall occur when the conduct of police officers would engage a reasonable individual considering the circumstances that surround the encounter, that individual is not yet free to simply ignore the police officer’s presence and walk away at will. Two basic elements have to be present to constitute a reasonable seizure as provided by the Fourth Amendment. The first element is that there has to be the show of authority by the said police officer. This involves factors such as the possession of weapons or handcuffs, physical contact and the use of forceful language. Second, the individual being subjected to seizure must submit to the authority. If a person ignores the request of a police officer and proceeds to move away, they have not been seized for the purpose of the Fourth Amendment (Clancy, 2014). While an arrest warrant is normally preferred, it is not necessarily required to make what is termed as a lawful arrest as provided by the Fourth Amendment. A warrantless arrest is at times justified if an urgent need and probable cause are made present before the arrest. Probable cause is present if a law enforcement officer obtains a reasonable belief particularly in the guilt of a victim following the information and facts they got about them before making the arrest. An arrest with no warrant may, therefore, be considered legitimate in certain events such as when an officer had a probable belief that the suspect either perpetrated an offence or appeared to be a threat to the security of the general public (Gonzales, 2008). Additionally, a law enforcement officer may also arrest a suspected person to prevent them from escaping or to preserve the evidence that they may have. However, a warrantless arrest could be invalidated if a police officer does not demonstrate exigent circumstances. The power to conduct warrantless arrests is limited by the statuses that are subject to the due process as guaranteed by the US constitution. As a result, if a suspect is arrested by a police officer without a warrant, they are entitled to prompt a judicial determination which should be within the first 48 hours. More investigatory stops exist that are found not justify arrests, but they still fall under the protection of the Fourth Amendment. For an instant, a law enforcer may perform a traffic or a terry stop. The stops present the officers with much less controlling power and dominion and therefore have less of the intrusion of individual liberty of the person stopped. An investigatory stop is required to be temporary questioning for some few and limited purposes in addition to being conducted necessarily to fulfil the intended purpose (Hubbart, 2005). A police officer’s suspicion is termed as adequate in justifying both stops and even detentions. To tell if a police officer has fully satisfied the standards required to carry out seizures, the court, in this case, considers the totality of the relevant circumstances examining if the officer in question had a reasonable belief and particularized belief to suspect the crime in question. A probable gain during both stops and detention may effectuate warrantless arrests. Property seizures under the Fourth Amendment occur in the event there is reasonable tampering with a person’s ownership interests in whatever property has been seized. In other circumstances, a warrantless seizure of property or objects in a plain view fail to constitute a seizure within the provision of the Fourth Amendment (Gonzales, 2008). Officers, when they are conducting search warrants, could be in a position to seize items that is in plain view even when it has not been specified in the warrant for seizure.
Search and seizures are illegal and unreasonable if they are conducted without a warrant and have only a few exceptions. For a police officer to obtain an arrest or a search warrant, they have to demonstrate the probable cause that the said seizure, arrest or search is fully justified. The court-authority, normally the magistrate, considers circumstances’ totalities to determine whether it is reasonable to provide the officer with a warrant. A warrant’ elements may get excused in other special circumstances if the police officer has the probable cause and receiving the warrant turns out impractical in some situations. Other appropriately stated exceptions warrant the requirement such as in consensual searches, particular investigatory stop and search incidences that lead to valid arrests as well as seizures of items that are said to be in plain view. National security cases have no general exceptions to the warrant requirements as provide by the Fourth Amendment. A warrantless search is not permitted in the exclusive domestic security cases. In some foreign cases concerning security, the court opinions may differ in where it is lawful to accept a foreign security’s exception generally to the warrant requirements and in case it is accepted, whether that exception needs to extend to both electronic surveillance and physical searches.
The Constitutionality of Stop-and-Frisk in New York City
The Fourth Amendment requirements and rights provided to individuals have been highly violated in the City of New York through the stop-and-frisk policy. While it was initially intended to target crimes with the aim of reducing crime across the city, allegations have been made claiming that the police officers have abused it and misused it to target minority citizens and not the actual crimes. It is accused of perpetrating seemingly justified racial profiling by the police officers (White and Fradella, 2016). The stop-and-frisk tactic is a crime prevention strategy that gives law enforcers the permission to stop people on the basis of alleged reasonable suspicion of a crime related activity and also frisk on the basis of reasonable suspicion that an individual could be armed and dangerous. This tactic has all along been a contentious practice by law officers since it was approved by the US Supreme Court in the year 1968. There has however been disagreement almost resulting in conflicts concerning the constitutionality of the tactic. In a case of Floyd v. New York City, the District Court, New York Southern District ruled that the stop-and-frisk practices carried out by police officers were unconstitutional and violated not only the Fourth but also the Fourteenth Amendment (Bump, 2016). In another case, Terry v. Ohio, the Court ruled that the police officers could seize a person on the basis of a reasonable suspicion that the person was involved in what the police found to be a serious criminal practice and also provided that if there are additional reasonable suspicions that the same person who was stopped was armed and dangerous the police officer cold frisk them for the sake of their protection. The seemingly divided opinions by people including law enforcers could be the main reason as to why the constitutionality of this tactic is yet to be fully understood. Over the past 4 decades, the power of police officers to stop and frisk individuals at random has been widely expanded and currently encompasses any suspected criminal activity irrespective of how trivial it might be and even under circumstances where the said conduct may be completely consistent with innocence Ehrenfreund, Stop-and –frisk doctrine is primarily developed as the function of an exclusionary rule, meaning that the various cases that courts have adjudicated the issue are the ones that had the evidence of crime-related conduct uncovered right at the investigative detention.
The practice of stopping and frisking is largely accredited to Raymond Kelly during his second term as the police commissioner of New York that began back in the year 2002. Immediately the policy was developed, the number of police stops that were recorded by the New York Police Department that year rose sharply to 161,000 from 97,000 and almost multiplied by two the following one. This was as per the data that had been provided to the Civil Liberties Union of New York. When the policy’s implementation process began, the violent crime rate in New York was already declining. In the year 1990, New York City recorded almost 31 homicides in every population of 100,000 people. This was higher than the common rates for American cities even in a year that was characterized violence. Ten years later, the rate fell by 75% to only 8.4 homicides in every 100,000 people (White and Fradella, 2016). As police officers were leaving the stop-and-frisk practice and as Kelly’s tenure was nearing the end, the rate of homicide was declining. This indicates that even as stop-and-frisk practices were introduced, they were not the real reason that crime in New York was gradually declining. However, it continued.
The String debate on the legality and wisdom if the stop-and-frisk procedures in New York City reached its peak in the Floyd v. City of New York case. As per the statistics that were presented, from January 2004 to June 2012, the Police Department of New York had made pedestrian stops amounting to 4.4 million. Among this population, 80% of the individuals that had been stopped were either Latinos or the African Americans, and that over half the 4.4 million people that were stopped were further subjected to frisking. The Floyd court found out various facts that are said to have informed its decision. According to the factual statistics, the total number of stops had risen from 314,000 in the year 2004 to more than double in 2011 amounting to 686,000. The figures for 2011 represented approximately 8.3% of the entire population of New York City which is estimated to be around 8.24 million. Among the total stops made by police during this period, the court discovered that 52% of them were then subjected to protective risks for weapons (Goldstein, 2013). However, a weapon would only be found in a mere 1.5% of all the frisks (Bump, 2016). Further, 8% of the total number of stops made were then followed by a search into the individual’s clothing on the claims that the police officer stopping them could feel an object as they frisked that they would suspect to be a weapon or any other contraband. In 9% of the searches, the object that the polis felt was a weapon while in 91% of the incidences, the object was never a weapon. The object was also not contraband in 86% of the searches. Among the total population of the stops, 8% them resulted in arrest while 6% resulted in summon and the rest led to further law enforcement activities. 83% of the stopped people were either black or Hispanic, and only a 10% of them were white. This is despite the fact that the population of whites was larger than other races accounting for 33% while Hispanics represented 29% and blacks 23% in 2010 (White and Fradella, 2016). The police officers would use force in 23% of all stops made to the blacks, in 24% of Hispanic stops and only 17% of the stops made to whites. Surprisingly, only 1% of the blacks stopped had weapons seized and 1.1% of the Hispanic stops while most of the weapons were sized among the whites at 1.4% of all white stops. Apart from weapons, contraband was equally seized in 2.3% of all white stops, 1.8% of all black stops and 1.7% of all the Hispanic stops. By the year 2009, the police officers could not state the particular type of suspected crime in 36% of all the stops made. These statistics further raised concerned about a possible advantage of the stop-and-frisk practice that the police officers could be taking to exercise racial profiling in New York (Ehrenfreund, 2016). This is after the statistics revealed that in all the stops, most of the forced stops and frisked percentages represented blacks and Hispanics while most of the weapons seized were actually in the custody of the whites who could be stopped less, frisked less and seized less.
The stop-and-frisk data presented during this case provides a solid basis on which it can determine whether the prevalent racial disparities in the practices could be the main reason for racial profiling. The claims of racial bias are however impossible to prove in the event of a motion to suppress. As per the reflection of the Floyd opinion, sophisticated regression and benchmark analysis would be more effective in measuring the discriminatory patterns in stop-and-frisk practices. For instance, the statistics found out that the whites who were subjected to stop and further frisk were at higher chances of carrying weapons than the blacks and the Hispanics who were at higher chances of being stopped, frisked and seized than the whites. The statistics are probative of one fact, the police officers’ threshold of stopping minority groups is much lower than that of stopping the whites. Under the Fourth Amendment, law enforcers are legally allowed to stop and even detain individuals if they demonstrated reasonable suspicions that the said individual is committing, has already committed or is intending to perpetrate crime (Goldstein, 2013). The police department has however adopted a strategy over the years which encourages officers to stop and question especially the minority citizens coming up with crafted reasons for having stopped and even frisked them later.
The Fourth Amendment has affected New York City’s Stop-and-Frisk tactic in what could be termed as a negative way. This is because the provision has been abused to some extent and instead of the police officers targeting crime suspects, they target minority groups without suspecting them of any crime and subjecting them to the frisks, seizures and searches. When the stops are made without reasonable suspicion as provided by the Fourth Amendment, they amount to unconstitutional practices. The tactic has been abused to demean and humiliate the law abiding citizens. To justify the high prevalence of blacks and Hispanics irrespective of them having accounted for just about half of the population, New York City has consistently claimed that the disparity is not unconstitutional but it is justified because it is the minority citizens that commit most of the crimes (Bump, 2016). Such allegations were however strongly rejected by Judge Scheindlin pointing out that the stopped population turned out overwhelmingly innocent as opposed to criminal (Goldstein, 2013). She further explained that there was no basis for the court to assume that an innocent population shared similar characteristics with a criminal suspect population simply because they were in the same area. The Fourth Amendment, while its initial goal was to protect the citizens from unfair intrusion by the government through police officers stops, seizures and searches, has resulted in social injustices through the stop-and-frisk tactic (Bump, 2016). The law enforcers have been abusing the provisions of the Amendment to target, racially profile and victimize the minority groups across the City of New York majority of the victims being the blacks and the Hispanics.
The Fourth Amendment based on the events that have been unfolding in New York City through the stop-and-frisk tactic has turned the city as a centre for racial profiling and social injustices perpetrated by the law enforcers. The provision has caused the city more of what it initially aimed at protecting them from. Unfortunately, when an individual’s rights as provided by the amendment are violated, there is not much they can do about it. To claim violation in a court of law, the victim has to demonstrate viable indications about when they were violated (Bump, 2016). One is also required to present as many factual details as possible in their account which include both the date and time when the alleged search happened, the names as well as the job titles of the officers involved, the exact location where the violation occurred and if there were any eyewitnesses to the defilement. If the complainant has the necessary and adequate information to prove that their rights were violated, the possessions or property seized during the search gets acquitted right on trial. However, the citizens are also required to fully learn about and understand their rights to enable them to seek justice the moment they are violated. For instance, being apprehended by the law enforcers just as one walks down the street in a routine traffic stop, being searched without a warrant or being arrested without a reasonable cause (Gonzales, 2008). The citizens should also be aware of when the law enforcers are allowed to search and even arrest them without warrant such as at the borders. An understanding of individual rights will enable them to fight for justice when there is a need. However, this may not always work to the advantage of the victims or citizens since the law enforcers are also known for giving false information to victimize their target victims and justify their deeds.
In the landmark case, Floyd v. The city of New York that would see judges reject the stop-and-frisk policy, judges noted key issues that were enough proof of police misconduct and abuse of the Fourth Amendment. Other than the police officers not honouring the mandate of their duties, judge, Scheindlin also revealed the city’s highest officials had not shown interest to them all the evidence that was provided showing that officers conducted their stops in racially discriminatory ways (Goldstein, 2013). Having identified the shortcomings that the policy had and the challenges it was presenting to the citizens and more so the minority citizens, Judge Scheindlin suggested that there were several remedies required such as a pilot program whereby officers in a minimum five precincts across New York would wear cameras on their bodies in order to record all the street encounters they would have with the citizens (Goldsten, 2013). Additionally, the judge ordered that for an effective joint remedial process, it was necessary for the community to hold several public meetings with the police department leadership and see to it that the public would have an opportunity to participate in the development of reforms to the policy.
While the Floyd Court with all the evidence and statistical facts proved the illegality and unconstitutionality of the stop-and-frisk policy in New York, different individuals have had varying opinions about the same issue. President Trump during his presidential campaigns declared his full support for the policy during the first presidential debate. He applauded the stop-and-frisk policy for having reduced murder cases from 2,200 to 500 murders. According to Donald Trump’s observations, the impact that the stop-and-frisk policy has had on the City of New York is “tremendous beyond belief” (Ehrenfreund, 2016). In response to Trump’s allegations, the notable drop in crime particularly in murder in the New York City was not necessarily because of the policy but correlated to the nationwide general drop experienced in murder and crime, more so in the large cities. The actual cause has not been pinpointed, but associated theories include a significant decline in alcohol consumption and lead poisoning (Bump, 2016). Trump was of the opinion that with the progress made by the stop-and-frisk policy is reducing crime across New York City, which he described as having worked incredibly well.
Based on the provisions of the Fourth Amendment, the general practice carried out by police officers of stopping and frisking citizens is not unconstitutional. This, when done effectively, can help curb crime but only if it was implemented as a much broader and well-articulated strategy that will target the real criminals and not a marginalized company. There are various reasons as to why the stop-and-frisk tactic has been ineffective and has contributed extremely little towards reducing crime in New York. The civilians were regularly stopped mostly on vague justifications and inconsequential pretexts such as when an individual would be moving furtively. This only resulted in the police officers wasting significant amounts of time with citizens who were not criminals. Positive control and reductions in general crime if the stops would be based strictly on the probable-cause standards. Stop-and-frisk practices further risk making the young people afraid of sharing critical information with the law enforcement officers. The young adults and children have been found to be the main focus of the police stops. This, in turn, makes them frightened, and they are alienated in such a way that they may never cooperate with law enforcers even in the future (Bump, 2016). While the policy can be termed as a legitimate and legal strategy, it has to ensure that the stops are aimed at serving the real purpose to maximize their effectiveness.
Conclusion
Following its initially intended purpose, the stop-and-frisk policy was an effective way of reducing crime in New York. However, the policy has been used to violate the provisions of the Fourth Amendment against citizens’ unreasonable searches and seizures. The police officers hiding behind the policy and the Amendment have been violating individual’s rights by subjecting them to forceful unreasonable stops and frisks all the time. The Floy v. city of New York has factually provided that most of the stops, frisks and arrests conducted by some police offices are racially driven and not criminally driven. This means that most of the individuals who are stopped, frisked and at times arrested are not necessarily the ones that deserve to be suspected but those who belong to certain races. The main victims of stop-and-frisk have been the blacks and Hispanics with most of the stopped people being black and Hispanics while they represent only a smaller percentage of the population. The case ruled that there was enough evidence to prove that the stops made along New York City are racially motivated and only target two main races, blacks and Hispanics. This has raised concerns about its wisdom and legality among some people who are for the opinion that it should spread across other states while some believe it should be reformed and remedied and others think it should be abolished.
References
Bump, P. (2016, September 26). The facts about stop-and-frisk in New York City. Retrieved December 04, 2017, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/21/it-looks-like-rudy-giuliani-convinced-donald-trump-that-stop-and-frisk-actually-works/?utm_term=.8c4ed5691f83
Clancy, T. K. (2014). The Fourth Amendment: Its history and interpretation .
Ehrenfreund, M. (2016, September 22). Donald Trump claims New York’s stop-and-frisk policy reduced crime. The data disagree. Retrieved December 04, 2017, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/09/22/donald-trump-claims-new-yorks-stop-and-frisk-policy-reduced-crime-the-data-disagree/?utm_term=.ee68a67716a5
Goldstein, J. (2013, August 12). Judge Rejects New York's Stop-and-Frisk Policy. Retrieved December 04, 2017, from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-practice-violated-rights-judge-rules.html
Gonzales, D. (2008). A look at the Fourth Amendment: Against unreasonable searches and seizures. Berkeley Heights, NJ: MyReportLinks.com Books.
Hubbart, P. A. (2005). Making sense of search and seizure law: A Fourth Amendment handbook. Durham, N.C: Carolina Academic Press.
Ridgeway, G., Rand Safety and Justice (Program), & New York City Police Foundation. (2007). Analysis of racial disparities in the New York Police Department's stop, question, and frisk practices. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Safety and Justice.
White, M. D., & Fradella, H. F. (2016). Stop and frisk: the use and abuse of a controversial policing tactic.
