From Bob Herbert's NYT column today:
"From 2004 through 2009, in a policy that has gotten completely out of control, New York City police officers stopped people on the street and checked them out nearly three million times, frisking and otherwise humiliating many of them."
"Police Department statistics show that 2,798,461 stops were made in that six-year period. In 2,467,150 of those instances, the people stopped had done nothing wrong. That’s 88.2 percent of all stops over six years. Black people were stopped during that period a staggering 1,444,559 times. Hispanics accounted for 843,817 of the stops and whites 287,218."
Yet another example of what this country has become. This behavior is as anti-American as is most of the provisions of the recently renewed so-called "Patriot Act". ...and we wonder why we're in the shape we're in.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/opinion/02herbert.html?hp