While crime has been going down, the number of people getting stopped has been going up. More than 575,000 stops were made last year  a record. But 504,594 of those stops were of people who had committed no crime, were issued no summonses and were carrying no weapons or illegal substances.

If the stops go up when crime goes down, it’s fair to wonder what might happen if there was no crime in the city. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly might decide that it is necessary to frisk everybody. The use of such stops has more than quintupled on their watch.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed the class-action suit, wants the Police Department barred from engaging in what the center describes as race-based and “suspicionless stops and frisks.”

Professor Fagan, in his report filed in connection with the suit, found that nearly 150,000 stops over the six-year period that he studied lacked any legal justification at all. An additional 544,252 stops lacked sufficiently detailed information from the officers involved to determine their legality.

I’ve no doubt that the professor’s findings are, in fact, conservative. But even his figures show the police to be violating the Constitution on a scandalously vast scale. The police use such specious justifications as “furtive movements” or an alleged “bulge” in someone’s pocket as the basis for stopping people. If you believe all those furtive-movement and bulging-pocket stories, I’ve got some antiques spanning the East River that you might be interested in.

It’s important to keep in mind that what we are talking about here, in the overwhelming number of cases, are innocent people, not criminals. No one wants to stop the police from going after the bad guys. But what keeps happening with this lousy policy is that the cops target skin color, not the likelihood that a crime might be in progress, or have taken place. As Professor Fagan found, “Blacks and Latinos are more likely to be stopped than whites, even in areas where there are low crime rates and where residential populations are racially heterogeneous or predominantly white.”

It doesn’t matter if innocent black or Hispanic kids are in a high-crime area or low, a minority area or white, they stand a good chance of being harassed by New York City cops.