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Stop, Question, and Frisk: The Police Tool That Reduced Crime by 50%, Then Disappeared

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  If a city shows annually 1,000 violent crimes and subsequently crime drops to 500, that would mean there have been 500 less assaults and the local residents' risk is assumed to have been reduced by half. That kind of swing is at the heart of what Dr Richard A Vargus calls the Great American Crime Decline. Describing how the Broken Windows Theory and the use of stop, question, and frisk were the catalysts in reducing crime. He argues that this police tool helped drive that 50 percent slide in violent crime in major cities like New York. Then political pressure and racial controversy reversed two decades of crime reduction. Here is the thing. You cannot talk honestly about crime reduction in the 1990s and 2000s without talking about stop, question, and frisk.     What Stop, Question, and Frisk Really Was In simple terms, stop, question, and frisk, often shortened to SQF, was the Supreme Court decision of Terry v. Ohio, and New York State Penal Law, section 140....
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Law and Order or Overreach: Inside Dr. Vargus's Policing Vision

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Dr. Richard A. Vargus's novel, Timeto Return Law and Order to the American People , is not simply a policy analysis; it is a heated argument in favor of aggressive policing and a harsh criticism of the political powers that, according to the author, have thwarted America's greatest crime reduction achievement, the 1990s. Vargus, once an insider in law enforcement, takes the history of Stop, Question, and Frisk (SQF) in New York City as the main case study to dissect the dangerous issue that is often intertwined with black and white actions of good crime prevention and civil right infringement. The Anatomy of a Crime Miracle In the first chapter, the author praises the decade-long crime decline in America, from the 1990s to the 2010s, as a miracle. For twenty years, NYC that once was the epicenter of crime and drugs eventually turned into the safest metropolitan area in the whole country. He directly links this turnaround to the enforcement methods used during the time of Ma...
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