Reed begins 10-day sentence at Solon jail

Cleveland Councilman Zack Reed would like the city to adopt a New York-style stop-and-frisk policy to fight crime -- but more effectively than New York's controversial practice. Phillip Morris suggests this is a bad idea. (John Kuntz / The Plain Dealer)

Just months after a federal court found the New York police department practice of stop-and-frisk unconstitutional, Cleveland Councilman Zack Reed announced last week that he wants to bring the tactic to Cleveland.

It’s a conversation starter. Reed is especially adroit at getting conversations started. Given that the most famous stop-and-frisk case in the nation’s history occurred in Cleveland in 1963, the discussion remains highly relevant for the city.

The Terry v. Ohio case, which catapulted attorney Louis Stokes to the nation's attention, is still taught in law schools across America. In short, the Terry decision outlines how the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures is not violated if a police officer has a reasonable suspicion that a person is involved in criminal activity and may be armed. The decision carefully mined the difference between racial profiling and good policing instincts. That's why it remains a landmark and precedent-setting decision.

The New York stop-and-frisk program, however, was highly racial, demeaning and deserved to have the plug pulled on it. Here are four reasons why a stop-and-frisk program should be no more than a discussion point for Reed and his contemporaries in the continued search for workable solutions to improved public safety in this town.

1) The tactic as used in New York City was all smoke and mirrors despite claims of supporters that it reduced crime. Crime is down everywhere, including places that did not engage in a pattern of sweeping profiling efforts.

To that point, nearly 83 percent of New York’s stop-and–frisk encounters between 2004-12 involved searches of African-Americans and Hispanics. Nearly 90 percent of the people stopped were immediately released after they were searched because there was no reason for a summons or an arrest.

In other words, 9 out of 10 minorities stopped under the practice had no justifiable reason to have been subjected to the privacy invasion. It was systematic racial catch and release.

2) Reed claims that the Cleveland program would be different than New York’s execution of the policy in that police here would “stop, question, and frisk.” That is largely a distinction without a difference.

In New York, police would often stop and question random pedestrians or motorists even as they commenced to perform a frisk. In other words, the stop and question part of the policy was only a prelude to the frisk. There’s no reason to believe that the practice, if green-lighted by Cleveland, would result in outcomes any different than those experienced in New York.

3) Reed claims that the program if adopted in Cleveland would target hotspots for crime and allow police to question and frisk people they deem suspicious in high-crime neighborhoods. That’s how the New York program started.

According to a study from 2010, the highest concentration of frisks occurred in an eight-block area of a Brooklyn neighborhood. It is also where the policy was most "misused" and where current Mayor Bill de Blasio deliberately went this past winter to announce that the city administration no longer supported the program.

4) Now here’s where this issue becomes far less than cut and dried. An untold number of men – especially older men - carry guns in this city under disability (meaning they have a felony in their background). They aren't engaged in violent mayhem or opportunist crime. Many of them are rehabilitated and upstanding. They carry for protection out of fear of victimization. I often hear from them.

It is these people, protecting themselves or their families, who will be rendered most vulnerable. It is the committed sociopaths and criminals among us who generally have a jump on the public, and sometimes the police, because they are premeditated in their violence. They potentially become more dangerous in the vacuum of stop-and-frisk.

That last reason is exactly why we need real efforts to rid the streets of illegal guns and the opportunistic criminals who use them. That effort must involve cracking down with greater precision on the gunrunners, straw purchasers, and those manufacturers who continue to flood our streets with cheap, readily available firearms.

Ultimately, urban communities must also accept greater responsibility for the role they play in their own victimization. A unanimous rejection of the no-snitch culture that allows so many criminals to run free will ultimately accomplish more than random and invasive search policies ever could.

Reed gets credits for his desperate focus on the violence that continues to bedevil Cleveland. But stop-and-frisk, or whatever Reed wants to call his proposal, is not the answer.