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New NYPD Chief Defends Stop-and-Frisk—Despite Being Stopped and Frisked

New NYPD Chief Defends Stop-and-Frisk—Despite Being Stopped and Frisked
Mon, 4/1/2013 - by Rocco Parascandola
This article originally appeared on New York Daily News

The NYPD cop who will coordinate the department’s crime-fighting strategy revealed Friday that he was stopped by police during a visit to his Brooklyn home during a college break.

“I didn’t like it,” the NYPD’s new Chief of Department Philip Banks 3rd told the Daily News during an exclusive interview.

The memory of being mistreated by police has influenced Banks’ thinking on policing, but it has not kept him from endorsing the NYPD’s controversial practice of stopping and frisking people acting suspiciously in a citywide effort to take guns off the street.

“I certainly believe that stop, question and frisk is an effective strategy when it’s done correctly,” Banks said after his formal appointment to the position Thursday.

Banks, 50, who was born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, said the stop took place when he was home from college in the early 1980s and was visiting the block he used to live on. The graduate of Lincoln College, a historically black school in Pennsylvania, said he and some friends were in front of a building that had recently been the scene of drug dealing when three cops approached.

Two of the cops were “fine and professional and one was not,” Banks said.

“I was fine with the stop. I mean I didn’t like, of course, to be stopped,” Banks said. “It was just a disrespect that me and my college friends were shown. It was what was said.”

His experience, the 26-year veteran said, mirrors most of the complaints he has heard from minorities during his career.

Banks worked his way up the NYPD ranks before being named to replace Chief Joseph Esposito, who retired Wednesday after 44 years with the department. Banks most recently ran the Community Affairs Bureau and before that was the commanding officer of Manhattan North, which spans 12 police precincts.

He said the notion of police relations with a community is a two-way street, with citizens as wedded to that social contract as police officer — and also obligated to do the right thing.

He recalled a pastor’s response to a group of young men complaining about being stopped, questioned and sometimes frisked whenever they hang out in front of a particular building.

“You know that’s a corner that they sell drugs on,” the pastor said. “So, why don’t you go to another corner?”

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