Mayor: Shooting Spike Unrelated to Reduction In Stop-and-Frisks

While critics charged that a late-June weekend in which 21 people were shot, four fatally, showed the negative impact of reduced stop-and-frisks by cops during his administration, Mayor de Blasio July 2 insisted there was no correlation between the two and said the moving of 1,200 cops into high-crime areas—half from a new class of rookie officers that graduated Police Academy training two days earlier—should remedy the problem.

Stop-and-frisks had declined steadily during the final two years of the Bloomberg administration amid a growing outcry in minority communities and the pressure of a Federal lawsuit. Last August, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that the NYPD program frequently violated the U.S. Constitution’s provision against unreasonable searches by stopping minority residents without reasonable suspicion that they had committed a crime or were in the process of doing so.