We can only wonder how many crimes have really been avoided or criminals arrested by this law in New York, as this information is carefully crafted by Mayor Bloomberg's office, but one thing we can be sure: It is indirectly in violation of our 2nd Amendment rights as it seems to be a sly way of checking for firearms, too.
In the 70s America's great cities were crumbling, especially New York City which was suffering from massive crime and ghettoization.
Ronald Reagan promised to "get tough on crime" and to clean up our great cities. His war on drugs turned out to be one of the principal expressions of this promise.
The easiest way to put more criminals in jail is to get rid of all of the pesky civil rights that sly lawyers use to "work the system".
Another key component of "getting tough on crime" and the "war on drugs" was to boost both federal and state surveillance over the population. Again, the easiest way to put criminals in jail is to have more unobstructed access to the population. This is why government has always sought to weaken the warrant procedure so that the prosecutorial arm of the state doesn't have to have as much evidence in place before it moves against a citizen.
The Bush Patriot Act is the clearest expression of government's desire to put citizens in jail without needing traditional oversight protocols, which protects free people, but also make it harder for the state to take action against threats.
Stop and Frisk, which was tried in Arizona, is the next step on the road to giving Government total power to detain and jail the citizenry. At some point we are going to end up with a government which is so powerful that, like in the old Soviet Union, it can detain whoever it wants, and put whoever it wants in jail.
When you hear the logic and the goals of the Stop and Frisk policy, it sounds fine. In fact, I quite like it. However, here is what Republicans never consider. Sometimes when you give the state expanded power to intervene in the lives of the citizenry, that power gets abused. This is why Libertarians never want to give the state more power. Because they understand the laws of unintended consequences.
For example. If Bush gives government expanded powers to listen to everybody's phone calls, what if the next administration uses that power to go after gun owners?
This is precisely why everybody worried when Ronald Reagan gave big government massive new powers under the war on drugs. Sometimes giving government more power is the greatest evil if all. Republicans have never understood this. That's why they never questioned Reagan's war on drugs or his massive increase in Government's concentrated law enforcement powers.
In the old Soviet Union they could stop anybody on the streets, and they could put anybody in jail. They justified it by saying they were protecting people.
