New York City's "stop-and-frisk" policy, which Mayor Bill de Blasio ended when he took office, was a successful tool for reducing crime, former Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik said Monday, and now that it's gone he believes violent crime will continue to rise as a result.
"You can't take away the programs that were successful, and that's what this mayor has done, consistently," Kerik said on the
Fox News' "Fox and Friends" show. "From staff's perspective, it's a great tool. It's something they needed to go out and look for guns. It's something they needed to reduce crime."
Four people were shot and killed in the city in a five-hour period this weekend, reports
The New York Post, and their family members were also calling for stop-and-frisk to be restored.
"Somebody has to put their foot down," Stacey Calhoun, the uncle of one of the victims, Jahhad Marshall, 23, told The Post. "A lot of people would agree with stop-and-frisk if it's for the safety among us. They used to fight with their hands. It seems like all these kids have guns these days."
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Kerik said Monday he does not believe stop-and-frisk will return under de Blasio's administration, as he campaigned on the issue, but he believes the rise in violence started when the procedure was removed.
"You're going to see a rise in shootings," said Kerik. "If you see a rise in shootings you'll see a rise in homicide."
Homicide statistics from 1994 to the present, he said, show an 83 percent reduction in homicides.
"The biggest benefactors were the minority communities, which are now suffering and seeing an increase in homicide, an increase in shootings," said Kerik.
And even though it has been reported that many of the complaints about stop-and-frisk came from the minority community, Kerik said he's not sure if it was "them or outside instigators."
The bottom line, though, said Kerik, is that "nobody can question the success that New York City had —the biggest reductions in crime, violent crime, and homicide, in the entire country."
Over the weekend, an opinion piece in
The Wall Street Journal discussed "the Ferguson effect," which police officers say has hindered them. The article maintained that many in law enforcement are finding that rules and scrutiny are keeping them from doing their jobs and stopping violent crime.
Former New York Gov. George Pataki, who is seeking the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, told CNN's "New Day" that he thinks that part of the rise in significant crime is "the demonization of the police."
Instead of seeing police officers as people who are there to protect the public, "they've been called occupiers, they have been called people who are out to hurt the community," Pataki said. "So when you demonize the police and create this distance between a community and the police, it is extremely dangerous."
In addition, taking away the NYPD's ability to engage in stop-and-frisk could return New York to a dangerous place to be, he said.
"We were the most dangerous state in America when I took office," said Pataki. "We were very safe when I left. But now they've undone these policies. And they were aimed at stopping criminals before they had the chance to pull the trigger or hold up that shopkeeper. Now they don't have that authority."
He admitted that while the stop-and-frisk strategy, like another controversial policy known as "broken windows," helped stem crimes by stopping minor incidents before they escalated into major ones, it may have "gone beyond what it should have" at times.
"You're always looking to improve and tweak programs," the former governor said. "But what happens here is we went from where we had very safe streets, the safest large city in the world, to where we completely undid a program that was working.
"Aggressive policing works. It has to be balanced against our liberty."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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