reasonable suspicion VS probable cause

[Don Quixote]

nypds stop and frisk under seige

The practice of stopping to question and sometimes search citizens has been a policing tool for decades, but it was first evaluated by the Supreme Court in 1968, in Terry v. Ohio.
In that case, the court came down on the side of "reasonable suspicion," a lower standard than the Fourth Amendment's probable cause. To stop someone, an officer must have a reasonable suspicion that a person has committed or is about to commit a crime; to search, a reasonable suspicion the person is armed.
Last month a federal judge granted class-action status to a lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York on behalf of four black men who said they were racially profiled by NYPD officers who stopped and frisked them without cause. In granting the status, the judge said NYPD performance standards that have driven stop rates up in recent years may have led to "thousands of unlawful stops."

http://news.yahoo.com/insight-under-siege-stop-frisk-polarizes-york-050442831.html

 

[Rune]

This is awesome news.

 

[anatta]

Police stops in New York City have climbed steadily to more than 685,000 last year from nearly 161,000 in 2003. Only 12 percent of those stopped were arrested or ticketed. More than 85 percent were black or Hispanic, while they make up 51 percent of the city's population.

A Reuters analysis of more than 3 million stops from 2006 through 2011 shows that by far the densest concentrations fell in areas of public housing, home to many of the city's poorest families and where 90 percent of residents are black or Hispanic. Although one would expect a heavy concentration of police stops in these densely populated areas, the stop rate is disproportionate: In 2011, police stopped people in these areas at a rate more than three times higher than elsewhere in the city, the analysis found.

The study also shows that more than half the searches happened not on the streets and paths around these buildings but inside them - in stairwells, lobbies and corridors

I doubt it's going to change, maybe in NY, but nationally you can pretty much kiss any part of the Bill of Rights away. You already have NO expectation of privacy in a car, you got NSA up the wazoo ( Patriot Act, etc.)
SCOTUS just reads them for shits and giggles, if they even bother to. Ties in nicely to the thread "Drones -R -U.S."