Imagine being stopped by police while walking down the street. You're asked to produce identification. You're asked questions about where you're going, where you live. You're told to stand against a wall or police car and you're frisked.
Unless there's a reason for the police to arrest you, you're released to go on your way.
It's what the NYPD has been doing for the past six years through a policy called stop-and-frisk. According to police statistics, nearly 2.8 million people have been subjected to it.
What's both interesting and scary is that the NYPD has documented every instance that stop-and-frisk was carried out. Therefore we know how many people were stopped, for what reason, and their race.
The last factor is most important. The statistics reveal that white people need not fear an embarrassing frisk on a New York sidewalk anytime soon.
Not only are most of the people stopped innocent, they are overwhelmingly either black or Hispanic.
Now it actually gets worse.
The NYPD is keeping all information about the stop on file in a database regardless of whether you were arrested or issued a summons. And they intend on keeping that information "for use in future investigations". So innocent people are being stopped, identified, and catalogued with the anticipation that sometime in the future they will be suspects.
The NYCLU has been raising objections to the stop-and-frisk policy and the data retention.
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, cuts to the heart of the issue. If middle class and affluent white people were being victimized in this way, the stop-and-frisk and data retention policies would be inexcusable. But since the victims are poor and minorities, it's quietly accepted.