This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, August 16th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The controversial stop and frisk policy of New York Mayor Michael

Bloomberg is on hold. Tim Lynch, director of the Cato Institute's project

on criminal justice, says the program's defenders don't have much evidence to

stand on.

Well, for many years, New York City has been very aggressive

as far as using these stop and frisk tactics, which basically means the officers can approach people on the street,

stop them, ask them questions, detain them for a few minutes, and if they suspect the person is armed or has contraband they

will frisk their clothing and a very controversial policy because it's directed primarily at minority males who have

been complaining that they're constantly being harassed by the police and the ordinary people who work on Wall Street in Manhattan are not affected by these policies and so they think that there's a double standard at work.

The mayor thinks this is primarily responsible for the dropping crime in the city, but other people are saying, look, this just violates our constitutional rights.

The policy itself is not biased or racist, but it seems like in implementation, it's almost inevitable that certain groups

would be targeted more than others.

The police will say that they're going where the crime is. So they go to the the precincts in the

city where crime rates are high and those happen to be minority

neighborhood. So that's their argument. But the judge pointed out in her

ruling that the Fourth Amendment applies to everybody and the police have to

have reasonable suspicion in order to search somebody, to detain somebody, and

frisk their clothing.

And what the judge was finding is that over and over again there's pressure on the police officers out on the street to conduct stop and frisk.

But when you look at the statistics that have come back, more than 90% of the frisks, for example, don't turn up a weapon.

...