Professor Randolph Stone of the University of Chicago Law School responded in the Chicago Tribune to Chicago Treasurer Stephanie Neely's call for the city police to adopt a policy know as "stop-and-frisk". The ACLU has long opposed such policies. In 2003, we represented Olympic Gold Medalist Shani Davis in a lawsuit challenging repeated stop-and-frisk searches by Chicago police.
Professor Stone writes:
In New York City, for example, recent studies revealed that more than nine out of 10 people who were subjected to a stop-and-frisk search were young men of color — that is, simply being a young man of color on the streets of some neighborhoods in New York appears to make one "suspicious" enough to stop and pat down. In 2012, a federal district court judge found that many of those stops did not meet the constitutional standard for police to stop and detain someone. Yet another federal court judge this year stopped part of the policy after finding the standards for such stops to be too vague — including such undefinable definitions as someone engaged in "furtive" movements.
The biggest flaw with Neely's argument is her assertion that a stop-and-frisk policy would be novel or new in Chicago. Chicago has had a stop-and-frisk policy for decades — and that policy (in its many forms) has resulted in the arrest and detention of thousands of young men of color on dubious grounds.
