A front-page story in today’s New York
Times highlights
the special humiliation inflicted on women who are detained and
patted down by police under the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program. Male
officers grope them, concentrating on “the waistband, armpit,
collar and groin areas,” and go through their purses, pulling out
personal items such as tampons, birth control pills, and lacy
underwear. “Yes, it’s intrusive,” Inspector Kim Y.
Royster tells the Times, “but wherever a weapon
can be concealed is where the officer is going to search.” Yet
these searches almost never yield weapons.

The stops supposedly are justified by a “reasonable suspicion”
of criminal activity, and the searches ostensibly are aiimed at
protecting officers from hidden weapons they “reasonably” suspect
may be present. Yet 46,784 stops of women last year yielded 3,993
arrests, suggesting that officers were wrong in suspecting criminal
activity more than nine times out of 10. The hit rate for weapons
was a lot worse: The Times reports that guns were
found in 59 out of about 16,000 searches, or 0.37 percent of the
time. (The numbers for men are similar.) How’s that for
reasonable?

A 22-year-old woman, Crystal Pope, tells the
Times she and two female friends were frisked last
year in Harlem Heights by two male officers who said they were on
the trail of a rapist:

“They tapped around the waistline of my jeans,” Ms. Pope said.
“They tapped the back pockets of my jeans, around my buttock. It
was kind of disrespectful and degrading. It was uncalled-for. It
made no sense. How are you going to stop three females when you are
supposedly looking for a male rapist?”

Another woman, 21-year-old Shari Archibald, says she was
standing on the stoop of her building in Morris Heights one
evening, retrieving her keys from her purse, when two male officers
approached her, patted her down, and dug around in her purse:

The encounter was made worse by the number of people out on the
street that night. “There were a lot of guys from the neighborhood
outside,” she said, “and here is this officer squeezing one of my
sanitary pads in front of everyone.”

One officer, she recalled, lifted up her long tank top and
lightly brushed his hand over the elastic waist of her spandex
leggings. They instructed her to pinch the shirt fabric between her
breasts and yank at her bra.

“They asked me to snap my bra, to pull and shake it a bit, to
see if anything fell out,” Ms. Archibald said.

“When officers conduct stops upon shaky or baseless legal
foundations,” the Times notes, “people of both sexes
often say they felt violated.” And “if a woman believes there is no
legal basis for the frisk, [civil rights lawyer Andrea] Ritchie
said, then she may feel that she is being groped simply for the
officer’s sexual gratification.” So when Inspector Royster insists
the stops are not random, she may be telling the truth. Would a
careful analysis find that shapely women are especially likely to
be stopped and frisked?

More on stop and frisk here.