Strawman. You're trying to distort the argument into a non-existant and absurd argument.
Anecdotes are worthless on their own when arguing broader statistics. At the end of the day, statistics are essentially data from mass amounts of anecdotes.
I imagine there are many New Yorkers who haven't been harassed by stop and frisk or didn't see it as problematic in any way. There is at least one New Yorker on NT who supports stop and frisk for example. Those are anecdotes. But broader statistics and data do not support those anecdotes. And as a result, the implementation of stop and frisk in NYC was ruled an unconstitutional violation of the 4th and 14th amendments.
Here and some statistics for example (Source: NYPD Annual reports)
https://www.nyclu.org/en/Stop-and-Frisk-data
And here are some additional statistics used in the Floyd vs. City Of New York lawsuit, which examined full records of 4.4 million stop and frisk searches over a period of 2004 to June 2012.
Source: University of Pennsylvania Law Review on Floyd vs. City Of New York.
As you can see,
in 83% of 4.4 million stops, the person stopped was black or hispanic. NYC population records from 2010 show that its resident population was 33% white, 29% hispanic and 23% black. Yet
whites only made up 10% of the 4.4 million stops. Now let's look at the NYPD's data on the results of those 4.4m stops.
Let's look at the rates of weapons being seized first, remember that blacks and hispanics account for 83% of all stops.
- Weapons were seized in
1% of stops of blacks
- Weapons were seized in
1.1% of stops of hispanics
- Weapons were seized in
1.4% of stops of whites
Here we see that the whites not only top the population charts but also the rates of weapons being seized by stops. Now let's move on to contraband excluding weapons.
- Contraband was seized in
1.8% of stops of blacks
- Contraband was seized in
1.7% of stops of hispanics
- Contraband was seized in
2.3% of stops of whites
Again we see here that the whites top the rates of stops resulting in seizing contraband.
As we can tell by these statistics, there is quite a pattern here. Not only were weapons and/or contraband found on blacks and hispanics at lower rates than whites, they were stopped at an enormously high rate compared to whites. A combined 83% of all stops were of black people and hispanics as opposed to a mere 10% stops of whites.
While there are surely many New Yorkers who did not have personal negative experiences with the NYC implementation of stop and frisk, anecdotes like that are mostly irrelevant given the trend shown by broader and larger statistics. And those statistics clearly show a trend of racial profiling and needless violation of civil liberties. By no means can targeting blacks and hispanics in 83% of stops be justified when stops of whites results in seizing both weapons and contraband at higher rates and they only make up 10% of all stops.
I picked this example because it is an easy one to explain how a tiny number of anecdotes to support a view are largely worthless when discussing a broader issue such as systemic racism.
