Bob Herbert explains that NY governor David Paterson is being pressured by NYC officials including Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to veto a law that would ban the NYC police from maintaining a database of the personal data of those stopped by police for questioning for any or no reason whatsoever. Herbert says it’s an easy call — don’t do it Dave! — but the data he uses to back up his argument is downright damning:

Allowing the police to continue accumulating these permanent files on the innocent, an abomination in and of itself, would also encourage the cops to continue their Jim Crow stop-and-frisk policy, which has led to the systematic harassment and humiliation of young black and Latino residents who have done absolutely nothing wrong. This racist policy needs to stop — and stop now. As Al Baker reported in The Times two months ago, black and Latino New Yorkers were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped by the police in 2009. But once stopped, they were no more likely than whites to actually be arrested. An overwhelming majority of the people stopped, questioned and searched by the police are innocent of any wrongdoing and are sent on their way after the encounter. This illegal and inhumane policy has gotten completely out of control. From 2004 through 2009, police officers stopped people on the street and checked them out nearly three million times, an astounding figure. Nearly 90 percent were completely innocent, minding their own business.

Here’s Baker’s story detailing the data.

Recently I quoted Douglas A. Blackmon, author the Pulitzer prize winning book Slavery by Another Name – The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Blackmon documented how the legal system in the South was systematically used to coerce tens of thousands of Black men into brutal forced labor (what Blackmon calls “neoslavery”). I quoted him to illustrate why blacks in the South might not trust the legal system.

Blacks in the South?

Herbert’s characterization of a “Jim Crow stop-and-frisk policy” is dead-on, but he’s not talking about the South:

That most New Yorkers do not seem to care about the way young black and Latino New Yorkers are treated by the police does not make that treatment any less noxious or vile. Stopping and searching people without good reason is unconstitutional.

Apparently the constitution-carrying originalists are unconcerned about this clear violation. The legislation allows the police department to keep the data it has already compiled but would stop them from adding informationthat would identify people who have done nothing wrong. It would not end the department’s stop-and-frisk policy. It’s a paltry, but necessary, first step to righting a horrible wrong.