NAACP Head Calls Out NYPD for 'Spine-Chilling' Defense of Stop-and-Frisk

Responding directly to a defense of New York City’s stop-and-frisk program by the NYPD’s Ray Kelly on Sunday’s Meet the Press, Ben Jelaous, president of the NAACP, said that comments made by the police commissioner, “should send chills down the spine of everyone in this country.”

In answering questions about why the city filed an appeal on Friday against a court ruling that found the police program “unconstitutional,” Kelly said that though he understands how some members of the community feel “humiliated and violated” by the practice, stop-and-frisk helps keeps murder and other violent crime rates down in the city. We need “balance,” Kelly told viewers and made a guarantee that “violence would go up” if the practice was halted.

According to Jealous’ interpretations of Kelly’s comments, however, what the commissioner means by “balance” is that “his officers have to violate the US Constitution in order to make us safer.”

“That’s what a federal judge just found,” continued Jealous. “In our country, it’s the federal judge, not the [police] chief, who gets to decide what the U.S. Constitution says. Now, the problem is that the fall in homicides happened prior to 2002, and the increase in stop and frisk happened after 2002. So there’s no relationship between these two. We are now at a point where you have more stop and frisks of young black men in New York City than there are young black men in New York City.”