CNN Legal Analyst Rips Mall"s Hoodie Ban: "Akin...to Stop and Frisk"; "Racial Profiling"

Sunny Hostin blasted an Indiana mall’s ban of people wearing raised hoodies on Thursday’s New Day: “This is…akin, in my view…to ‘stop and frisk’ – to the pretext of ‘stop and frisk’ – and I think many courts have found that this type of behavior is unacceptable, and downright unconstitutional.”

The CNN legal analyst also contended that “‘hoodie’ is code for ‘thug’ in many places,” and later claimed that “to identify just hoodies in my view…it’s very, very clear what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about racial profiling. It’s code for racial profiling.” [video below the jump]

Anchor Chris Cuomo took on the role of Hostin’s sparring partner during the segment. Cuomo first noted, in defense of the commercial complex, that “the mall says, we’ve had it in place since 2004, so don’t hit me with the Trayvon Martin stick…[and] had it in place because the local police like it, and they like it because they feel it makes it easier to fight crime because it allows people to not conceal themselves. Wear your hoodie – just don’t have it concealing your face, so I can identify you in case anything happens.”

Hostin wasted little time before using her “‘hoodie’ is code for ‘thug,” and continued with her “stop and frisk” claim:

SUNNY HOSTIN: I think the bottom line is, we know what this is about. This is about the pretext for being able to stop young African-American males. ‘Hoodie’ is code for ‘thug’ in many – in many places, and I think businesses shouldn’t be in the business of telling people what to wear. The 14th Amendment protects us from this. And this is, sort of, akin, in my view, Chris, to ‘stop and frisk’ – to the pretext of ‘stop and frisk’ – and I think many courts have found that this type of behavior is unacceptable, and downright unconstitutional.

Remember the saggy pants ban…that a lot of places tried to enforce, and that again was code for black men – please don’t wear this. And so, I suspect that this will be found unconstitutional because, quite frankly, it is. And when do we get to a place in our society where we stop doing this kind of thing; where we stop targeting young black men? So, that there’s a pretext for it being allowed to stop them to escort them out of a mall simply by what they’re wearing.

The CNN anchor followed up by trying to cast doubt on the legal analyst’s racial bias assertions:

CHRIS CUOMO: The other side is, why do you assume that only blacks wear hoodies? That is not true. That is not provable. So, you are making a cultural distinction yourself. Also, the local police like it, which means they see a cross-section between crimes they investigate and – you know, the kind of concealing of one’s identity using a hoodie. And you don’t want to own part of the problem in the first place, which is if there are a lot of black kids, by your own designation, who wind up wearing hoodies and getting in trouble, why don’t you deal with the fact you have a disproportionate number of black kids, wearing hoodies, getting in trouble and fix that? Don’t fix me for having to deal with them?

In reply, Hostin stood by her likening of the ban to “stop and frisk,” which led to a back-and-forth between her and Cuomo:

HOSTIN: …I think, actually, that argument is suspect because we know that – you know, a lot of young black men in ‘stop and frisk’ programs are targeted for offenses that white kids aren’t targeted for-

CUOMO: This is not stop and frisk-

HOSTIN: But it is-

CUOMO: It’s just don’t pull up the hood-
                                           
HOSTIN: But it is – it’s ‘stop and frisk.’ Why are hoodies inherently unsafe? Why are-

CUOMO: Not a hoodie – covering your face.

HOSTIN: Well then, why aren’t caps – in this instance, why aren’t they outlawed-

CUOMO: Because it doesn’t cover your face-

HOSTIN: Of course, they do; of course, they do.

CUOMO: No, it isn’t. It’s on top of your head. This is something you pull over that masks your identity.

The CNN legal analyst used her “racial profiling” labeling of the mall’s policy near the end of the segment:

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HOSTIN: Look, I think the bottom line is, if you’re going to outlaw hoodies in this mall, then you should outlaw baseball caps – any kind of head gear – ski masks, and just anything. And so, to identify just hoodies in my view, is – it’s very, very clear what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about racial profiling. It’s code for racial profiling. And I think when you look at the sign –  and the sign says, ‘for the safety and well-being of everyone, please lower your hoodie.’ Are hoodies – do they make you unwell? Do they – are they inherently unsafe? And, of course, they are not.

This isn’t the first time that Hostin has made an eyebrow-raising argument on CNN. Back in September 2011, she asserted that the sex abuse cases involving Catholic priest could be considered war crimes, and could plausibly be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court, after the Survivors Networks of those Abused by Priests group filed a complaint with the global body: “I don’t think it’s a frivolous lawsuit by any stretch of the imagination or a frivolous complaint.”

NewsBusters – Exposing Liberal Media Bias

CNN Legal Analyst Rips Mall"s Hoodie Ban: "Akin...to Stop and Frisk"; "Racial Profiling"

[271] Voting Day Blues, TSA Shooting Aftermath, Stopping Stop and Frisk & Million Mask March

[271] Voting Day Blues, TSA Shooting Aftermath, Stopping Stop and Frisk & Million Mask March

How to Stop Violent Crime Without Stop and Frisk

Allistair/Flickr

Stop and Frisk’s potential for “harassment, abuse and systemic discrimination” makes Ross Douthat sympathetic to its critics. “In a city as safe as New York has become, there should be room to weigh the costs and benefits of different policing tactics,” he writes, “and at the very least the Bloomberg administration needs to do more to answer the skeptics who question the link between this specific policy and the city’s overall success combating crime.” But he isn’t yet convinced that it ought to be abandoned. “New York’s relatively low incarceration rate does make a powerful case for the Bloomberg approach, since the social costs of stop-and-frisk are much lower than the costs of mass incarceration,” he continues. And “it’s also important for would-be reformers to have a clear sense of what that success (in New York and nationally) has meant for the average citizen’s odds of being victimized. Thanks to two decades of falling crime rates,” the chance a city dweller will be the victim of robbery, rape or assault has been halved, he estimates.

As a would-be reformer who wants Stop and Frisk to end, I’d like to emphasize that I am also fully cognizant of how salutary the nationwide drop in violent crime has been (though the very fact that it is a nationwide drop suggests Stop and Frisk isn’t its source). In fact, I think violent crime is so terrible that, even with the drop, I favor taking additional aggressive steps to reduce it even more. I just don’t happen to think massive 4th Amendment violations and racial profiling are appropriate options, regardless of efficacy, any more than it would be an appropriate option to increase the ease of convicting criminals by lowering the burden of proof or tracking all city dwellers with ankle bracelets. If we’re going to incur costs to fight crime, they shouldn’t come at the expense of core liberties, and they shouldn’t be born almost entirely by ethnic minority groups.

Thankfully, there are other promising options that could reduce crime while spreading the costs more equitably and without violating the Constitution. Here are some ideas:

• Hiring additional police, assigning experienced officers to high crime areas, and actual community policing are all more expensive than using a smaller force to indiscriminately throw black and brown people against walls and search them with “reasonable suspicion” so dubious that more than 80 percent turn out to be innocent. I’d say the additional cost is worth bearing.
  

• There’s strong evidence that speedy punishment for the guilty has a significant deterrent effect. So spending more on courts, prosecutors and public defenders might show dividends, and more quickly and reliably punishing parole and probation violations would almost certainly be useful. 

• Infrastructure improvements as varied as better lit streets and air-conditioned community centers open late in dangerous neighborhoods during the summer seem like they’re worth trying.

• Kevin Drum makes a very compelling case that we’re crazy to not be spending more on lead abatement.
  

• Increased rewards for tips about illegal guns and helping police to apprehend murderers and rapists (especially where there is physical evidence) could also help police to catch criminals. 

• “Developed by the criminologist David M. Kennedy, focused deterrence is in many ways the opposite of stopping and frisking large sections of the population. Beginning with the recognition that a small cohort of young men are responsible for most of the violent crime in minority neighborhoods, it targets the worst culprits for intensive investigation and criminal prosecution. Focused deterrence also builds up community trust in the police, who are now going after the real bad guys instead of harassing innocent bystanders in an effort to score easy arrests. This strategy was responsible for the dramatic decline in Boston’s homicide rate during the 1990s. In 2004, Mr. Kennedy and his colleagues successfully adapted it to combat violent open-air drug markets in the West End neighborhood of High Point, N.C.”
  

I’m open to being persuaded that alternatives to any of these suggestions would be a better use of resources, so long as they don’t rely on indiscriminately harassing orders of magnitude more innocent people than guilty people. Stops of innocents by police should be rare misunderstandings, not a daily reality for blacks and Hispanics in certain neighborhoods of major cities. 

There is one more big change I’d like to see tested. Given my druthers, I’d reorient the criminal justice system so that violent crime costs more, in relative and absolute terms, than it does today. I’m appalled by the percentage of citizens who are incarcerated, and very much favor reforms, including better conditions in juvenile lockup, a push to stop all prison rape, and the end of insanely long sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. There are all sorts of sentences I’d commute. Continuing to incarcerate non-violent offenders in service of a hopeless war on drugs is foolish.

But I retain one law-and-order impulse: if you break into someone’s house with a weapon, or drag a woman into the bushes and rape her, or hold someone up at knife point, or clock someone with a tire iron, or beat them up and steal their wallet, you are someone who ought to be locked up for a long time. There are lots of non-violent crimes that should be punished. Still, what I want to do is draw a bright line around violent crimes and say, “This, especially, will not be tolerated.” 

“The initiation of force will not stand.”

That means shifting massive resources away from drugs and toward violent crime. (The DEA employs 11,000 people. How far do you think the murder rate would fall next year if starting today they were rechristened the Homicide Prevention and Investigation Task Force? Would we come out ahead in lives?)

It means looking at our prison system, and deciding, okay, there are ways to punish people that don’t involve paying their room and board while they socialize with a network of other criminals — let’s take advantage of technology, rehabilitate folks whose transgressions aren’t dangerous, and save the expensive cages for those who perpetrated or attempt to perpetrate violent crimes, even after they’ve been shown that every incentive — from the chance of getting caught to the speed of trial to the length of incarceration — makes violence an extremely foolish choice.

America will always have criminals, and resources should always be directed toward fighting even nonviolent crimes. But it would be nice if criminals or would be criminals had it in the back of their heads that, whatever mischief they perpetrate, any hint of violence just isn’t worth committing. What if they were incentivized to avoid it at all costs? There would still be violent crime.

There will always be violent crime.

But might there be much less of it?

Master Feed : The Atlantic

How to Stop Violent Crime Without Stop and Frisk

[222] NSA Set to Grow Aggressively, NYPD"s Stop & Frisk: Unconstitutional, but Will Continue

[222] NSA Set to Grow Aggressively, NYPD"s Stop & Frisk: Unconstitutional, but Will Continue

As Judge Weighs Legality of NYPD"s Stop and Frisk, Justice Dept. Calls for Court-Appointed Monitor

The Obama administration is backing calls for a court-appointed monitor to oversee New York City’s controversial Stop & Frisk policing program. In a brief filed Wednesday night, the Justice Department endorsed the appointment of a monitor in the event “Stop & Frisk” is deemed to be unlawful. A New York judge is set to decide on a lawsuit that says “Stop and Frisk” is unconstitutional and unfairly targets people of color. Nearly 90 percent of people stopped by police in 2011 were black and Latino, and nine out of 10 were neither arrested nor ticketed. We speak with Sunita Patel, staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights and co-counsel on the Stop & Frisk federal class action lawsuit.

Please check back later for full transcript.

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As Judge Weighs Legality of NYPD"s Stop and Frisk, Justice Dept. Calls for Court-Appointed Monitor