For weeks, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee had stood behind his proposed policy of allowing police to stop and frisk people in search of weapons. However, his office is announcing a new policing approach that does not include the controversial police powers.
Much of the outcry over the stop-and-frisk policy had to do with the potential for police abuse and racial profiling. That argument, according to City Hall staff, ended up persuading Lee to drop the policy. Instead, the city is going to depend upon crime tracking software, street-level intervention and deterrence, and targeted police enforcement.
Stop-and-frisk has been used in New York City, and the policy in San Francisco was going to be based upon that program. However, studies have shown that 80 percent of those stopped for police searches in the Big Apple were black or Latino, and barely 10 percent had been found to have weapons or drugs on them.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Mayor Ed Lee has dropped plans to bring New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy to San Francisco and instead will rely on targeted police enforcement, crime-tracking software and increased involvement by ministers to combat the gun violence that has plagued some of the city’s most crime-ridden neighborhoods.
Read the full article here.