re: Could you ever support the Terry Stop?[W:143]
Terry Stop is the Stop and Frisk.
I'm coming from the place that we simply MUST clean up our inner cities and make them safer.
Is there any narrow enforcement that you could support?
For instance..no prosecution, just confiscation of all illegal weapons and drugs. Nothing else. No arrest? Using it only in statistically high crime areas?
The left keeps calling these stops profiling. But if we are "profiling" a high crime area, is that REALLY profiling by race?
thoughts?
Here in Toronto, perhaps the safest large city on the planet, we used to have a police practice called Carding, where police officers on patrol, either in cars or on foot, could legally stop a person or group of people and ask them some questions, request their ID, and just generally announce the police presence in the area. The police were required to fill out a form when conducting such carding that identified who they stopped and the nature of the conversation.
In effect, this was a form of profiling because such carding was generally only conducted in high crime areas and usually only late at night when many crimes in these areas were conducted by gangs or just kids out looking for trouble. As a result, activists in minority communities, who just happened to also be resident in high crime communities, bitched and moaned about this practice because they saw it as racial profiling and although statistics on race weren't maintained by the police, police readily admitted that the vast majority of carding was conducted in minority communities.
As a result, police in Toronto ceased to do carding this past year and the Provincial government - Liberal - passed legislation outlawing it throughout the Province starting tomorrow. Police now have to tell anyone they stop that they don't have to answer any questions from the police and can, in effect, just tell the police to bugger off.
Liberals will tell you it's just coincidence, but statistics show that murders are up in Toronto, murders with guns are up over 50%, and other crime is also up since carding stopped. Liberals, incredibly, are wondering "what has happened" and immediately look to ways to spend money on minorities because their "economic situation" must be the problem, ignoring completely that since carding stopped, criminals feel free to walk the streets packing guns and other weapons and loitering in preparation for a criminal act without police hassling them.
If I lived in a high crime neighbourhood, I'd plead for carding to get the scum off the streets or to at least give them something to worry about. As it is, now, criminals have free reign and it's only going to get worse.