Senator Eric Adams has testified under oath that the New York Police Commissioner told him that the department focused its “Stop and Frisk” program on youths of color because he (the Commissioner) wanted to instill fear in them that, “every time they left their homes they could be stopped by the police.”
According this AlterNet article:
Over the past decade, the NYPD has stopped upwards of 5 million people, nearly 90% of whom are Black or Latino.
When the Senator protested to the program, Commissioner Kelly and he reportedly had the following exchange:
“I told him that I believe it was illegal and that that was not what stop and frisk was supposed to be used for,” he testified, adding that Kelly responding by asking, “How else are we going to get rid of guns?”
The article also asserts:
Though stop-and-frisk is supposed to be used to uncover illegal guns, less than one percent of stops actually do.