Although it has been widely disproved, he believed in the “broken windows” theory of policing, where stopping small infractions would prevent an escalation of crime. He believed his police commissioner, Ray Kelly, who told him that young black men would leave their guns at home if they thought they would be stopped.

This was misguided because a stop based on racial profiling instead of reasonable suspicion is unconstitutional. But this does not mean he hates black people. The most I can say is he had a pure heart but an empty head; the stop-and-frisk program was very poorly executed.

It is easy to write in general terms about the humiliation of being stopped and frisked. So consider two examples which reveal the impact on the victims and the futility of the policy.

In August 2008, a black man in his 30s stood in front of a chain-link fence near his house and talked to a friend on his cellphone. He held the phone in one hand and the mouthpiece on a cord in the other. Two white plainclothes officers approached him. One officer said it looked like he was smoking weed and shoved him against the fence. The man explained that he was talking on his phone, not smoking marijuana, and that he was a drug counselor. Without asking permission, the officers patted him down and reached into his pockets. No contraband was found.

In March 2010, a boy, 13, was stopped on his way home by two white officers in plain clothes who were responding to 911 calls about a group of rowdy men. They pulled up alongside the boy, pushed him down on the hood of the police car, handcuffed him and patted him down as he cried. The officers recovered only a cellphone and a few dollars. Yet they took him to the precinct and wrote a false report stating that he was in criminal possession of a weapon. The reason for the stop was listed as “fits description” and “furtive movements.”