In 2013, Brown University, where I am a professor of economics, invited New York City’s then-Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to give a lecture.
Kelly had presided over a massive expansion of stop-and-frisk police tactics during his tenure, along with a host of other surveillance measures.
At the time, I was a vociferous critic of America’s criminal-justice system and I was skeptical of stop-and-frisk. Under Kelly’s leadership, black New Yorkers were being stopped on the street and searched under the thinnest of pretexts.
I had actually been detained by the NYPD in Harlem in 2010 while working as a visiting professor at Columbia, for the pretextual offense of “riding a bicycle on the sidewalk.”
Regardless of my feelings about his policies, I wanted to hear what Kelly had to say.
He was an extremely powerful figure at the forefront of a controversial development in policing and I wanted to hear his justification for these tactics.
There was plenty I wanted to say back to him, too. And I had a prime spot near the front of the stage to ask questions during the Q&A.
Continue reading the entire piece at the New York Post
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Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. This piece is based on his new book available now.
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