Elmer Smith: City's stop-and-frisk policy needs a once-over itself

YOU PROBABLY won't be stunned to learn that minorities are almost three times as likely as whites to be targeted for "stop and frisk" in Philadelphia.

It certainly didn't stun Mayor Nutter. He defended the stop-and-frisk policy last week in the wake of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union charging the city with unfairly and disproportionately targeting minorities.

He defended it even more vigorously when I talked with him yesterday - despite the fact that the city has not specifically monitored the practice since 2005, according to the suit.

The city keeps records on the number of people who are stopped in what it calls pedestrian investigations. But nobody at the Police Department could tell me how many of those stops included pat-downs or how many, if any, gun or drug confiscations to credit to the practice.

"I care a great deal about public safety and civil rights," the mayor said. "People have a right not to be shot, and everyone's rights must be respected.

"This is part of a larger crime-fighting strategy. We've put more officers on the street; we have taken away about 4,000 to 5,000 guns every year for the last three years. Homicides and [serious] crimes are down."

But, what, if anything, does stop-and-frisk have to do with that? If the practice is not being monitored, how can we be sure how fair or effective it has been?

In New York, racial profiling has been well-documented in stop-and-frisk, and the gun-seizure rate is a paltry 0.15 percent, according to a study by the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Let's assume that every so-called stop-and-frisk of a pedestrian in Philadelphia last year was prompted by a "reasonable suspicion" of "illegal activity," which was the standard the U.S. Supreme Court cited 40 years ago in the case of Terry v. Ohio.

But how does that square with the ACLU's findings that most of those who were arrested and charged after those pedestrian stops were white?

"We examined records from the years '03 to '05 to determine if race was taken into account" said David Rudovsky, whose law firm joined the ACLU in filing the suit.

"It turned out consistently for those years that whites who were stopped were more likely to be found with contraband than African-Americans or Latinos.

"In our view, that shows that there is a lower standard legally for stopping minorities."

Rudovsky was quick to point out that an imbalance in the number of minorities stopped and frisked does not prove racial profiling in these cases.

"That does not prove racial animus," he said. "That could be because more police are deployed in minority neighborhoods or [those with a] higher crime rate.

"But once the monitoring ended in 2005, we can no longer be certain that the department even monitors this or disciplines officers who get it wrong."

Rudovsky's firm filed a suit in 1996 that charged the city with civil-rights violations after an FBI sting found that police officers in the 39th District in Nicetown had falsified arrest warrants, planted drugs and stolen money from drug dealers, and made arrests leading to hundreds of fraudulent prosecutions.

After paying millions to people who were unlawfully imprisoned, the city agreed to appoint an independent integrity officer who would monitor stop-and-frisk to make sure there was no racial profiling.

But all that ended four years ago when integrity officer Ellen Green-Ceisler left and ran unsuccessfully for judge after several contentious run-ins with Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson and Mayor Street. The position has not been filled since.

"After that," Rudovsky said, "you didn't know if they were monitoring or disciplining officers.

"The mayor [Nutter] ran on a platform of increasing stop-and-frisk. I think what happened then is that the message went out to stop and frisk as often as possible and, if you do it wrong, nothing would happen to you."

He'll have a hard time proving that.

But, if the mayor is as concerned about protecting people's rights as he says he is, he won't wait for a court order to resume monitoring of stop-and-frisk.

Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith.