NY police commissioner defends their stop-and-frisk policy and claims African-Americans are actually “understopped.

New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly is in hot water after attempting to defend the city’s stop-and-frisk policy by claiming that African-Americans are actually “understopped.”

In an interview with ABC’s Nightline, Kelly defended the NYPD’s use of the tactic, rejecting the notion that stop-and-frisk is directed disproportionately at New York’s African-American and Latino population.

“The stark reality is that crime happens in communities of color,” Kelly told “Nightline” co-anchor Bill Weir on Wednesday. “About 70 percent to 75 percent of the people described as committing violent crimes -- assault, robbery, shootings, grand larceny -- are described as being African-American. “

“The percentage of people who are stopped is 53 percent African-American,” he added. “So really, African-Americans are being understopped in relation to the percentage of people being described as being the perpetrators of violent crime.”

While Kelly remains steadfast in his beliefs, an analysis of official police data casts further suspicion on the city's stop-and-frisk policy. According to a study by the ACLU, 86 percent of stops were of African-Americans or Latinos, while 88 percent of these stops did not lead to an arrest, Salon reports.

“The number of innocent people stopped alone serves as ample riposte to Kelly’s suggestion that any demographic is 'understopped,'" notes Salon’s Natasha Lennard.
http://www.ibtimes.com/african-americans-understopped-nypd-commissioner-ray-kelly-defends-stop-frisk-policy-1235169#

New York republican Peter King thinks police should spy on Muslim's:

New York’s Peter King, a Republican and outspoken advocate for surveillance in the Muslim community, said that law enforcement may not have followed up on leads on Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev out of a fear of seeming “anti-Muslim or anti-Islam.”

“What the NYPD is doing in New York with a thousand police officers focusing on this issue, knowing where the threat is coming from,” King said. “The threat is coming from the Muslim community. In previous times, when certain elements in a community are the ones responsible for crime, the police focused on it.”

But Rep. Keith Ellison, the Democrat from Michigan who is also the first Muslim elected to congress, said that targeting specific groups was an ineffective way to combat terrorism.

“If Tamerlan Tsarnaev is evidencing dangerous behavior, by all means, go after him,” Ellison said.

“But once you start saying, ‘we’re going to dragnet or surveil a community,’ you go after people who don’t have anything to do with it.”
http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/04/28/should-law-enforcement-monitor-muslim-communities/