Power 105.1 host DJ Envy found himself in the social media hot seat on Tuesday morning, September 27, after he appeared to legitimize the effectiveness of the NYPD "Stop and Frisk" policy that was ruled unconstitutional in 2013. The Breakfast Club crew was covering Monday's presidential debate during their Front Page News segment when Charlamagne Tha God contended with a soundbite in which Trump posed that he'd re-implement the tactic to take guns away from "bad people that shouldn't have them." Envy then chimed in, setting off a back and forth that concluded with Charlamagne and Angela Yee questioning whether he was dealing in facts.
“Well, it got a lot of guns off the streets. The way that the NYPD was doing it was unconstitutional. They didn’t do it the way that it was supposed to be done, that’s why they pulled it from New York,” Envy said. This prompted his counterpart to present statistics published by the New York State Attorney General which cited only a 3% conviction rate and a meager 0.1% rate of conviction for violent crimes having come of the 2.4 million stops recorded between 2009 and 2012. Envy would reiterate his point that albeit it was not instituted correctly, he believes it was effective, stating, "even if you could say it’s one percent or .1 percent, they got tons of guns off the street, which is the most important thing.”
Within hours of the brief dispute, the Twittersphere was reacting, with many siding against DJ Envy's position. One listener who expressed criticism of the host's remarks was rapper Joe Budden, who tweeted, “DJ Envy supports Stop & Frisk… as a minority… with minority children… in our current state…. interesting.”
Envy's assertion that the Stop and Frisk policy did not target "areas where there was a lot of crime" is inaccurate. The statistics from the Attorney General report cited by Charlamagne, expose the numbers amassed under the tenure of former Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, who introduced an initiative that assigned rookie cops to patrol high crime areas. Operation Impact, as it was called, was heavily criticized for placing the onus of attacking crime in areas comprised primarily of poor people of color, on officers who were less experienced. It was with Operation Impact that Stop and Frisk worked hand-in-hand in a manner that saw cases of racial profiling climb to alarming rates.
Source: theboombox.com
