Philly to begin "stop, question and frisk" Jan 7

[KeithPA]

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/ho.../12065647.html

Ramsey sees crime emergency

Expect Michael Nutter's new police commissioner to start out of the gate next month at a sprint.
Charles H. Ramsey, Nutter's choice to replace Sylvester M. Johnson, fully agrees with the incoming mayor's promise to declare a crime emergency in some parts of the city on his first day in office, Jan. 7.

"Declaring a state of emergency is fine with me," Ramsey, the former Washington police chief, said in an interview Friday. "Crime is at an unacceptable level. . . . It's certainly something we have to get a handle on real quick."

How Ramsey will carry out the emergency response is less certain. He spent much of last week getting his bearings in his new city - meeting with Johnson and the department's command staff as well as attending several district roll calls to introduce himself to the rank and file.

"One reason I came up now, even before I take over, is to start the process of getting that sense and that feel of what's going on," said Ramsey, 57. "I think you have to rebuild the airplane while it's in flight. That's the nature of the business.

"If I wanted an easy job, I certainly would not have chosen Philadelphia. I was looking for a challenge. And that's what this is."

Taking command of the 6,700-officer department is not the only thing on Ramsey's mind. He and his wife, Sylvia, a school psychologist, are shopping for a house. They've already toured Mount Airy, Chestnut Hill, Fairmount and Rittenhouse Square.

"My wife wants a home, a single-family home," he said. "A Realtor is taking us around. Half the time I don't know where I'm at."

In time, the city's landscape will become more clear. And so will Ramsey's crime-fighting strategy.

Ramsey, who worked in Chicago for 29 years before he took over Washington's troubled Metropolitan Police Department in 1998 and served until the end of last year, met Nutter about three months ago when the candidate sought him out in Washington.

"We had dinner together and hit it off immediately," Ramsey said. Nutter offered him the job in the days after the election and introduced his commissioner-designate to the public Nov. 15.

Ramsey said he and Nutter were in agreement on Nutter's crime-fighting strategy, including Nutter's promise to employ a controversial "stop, question and frisk" policy to target illegal weapons.

Though outgoing Commissioner Johnson has warned that Nutter's stop-and-frisk strategy could risk "disaster" by alienating the public, Ramsey said the aggressive tactic was a "valuable tool" as long as it was conducted within the law.

"You need reasonable suspicion in order to stop them," Ramsey said in an interview the day his selection was announced. "There's a way in which you interact with people - you don't want to alienate folks by being rude and abusive. Usually when people get stopped by policemen, what they complain about is not the initial stop, they complain about they way they were treated and disrespected by the police officers."

Ramsey said the Philadelphia Police Department is in good condition compared with the force he took over in Washington in 1998, which was demoralized, under-equipped and scandal-ridden at the end of Mayor Marion Barry's term.

Upon arrival in Washington, Ramsey took immediate action to restore the department's tarnished integrity. He put an end to uniformed officers working part time in strip clubs and bars (off-duty Philadelphia officers are prohibited from working in establishments that serve alcohol).

"That doesn't make you popular with people who have those jobs . . . but you have to have a department that people have respect for, that the integrity of the department is intact. It's very, very important. It's more important than anything, quite frankly. Because if you don't have that, you don't have much of anything else, you know."

He said the Washington force had a reputation for the "indiscriminate" use of force. Eighty percent of the officers had gone more than two years without firearms training. "We totally revamped our training, and our shootings dropped 77 percent," he said.

While he has not analyzed the large number of recent civilian shootings by Philadelphia police - officers have killed about three dozen people in the last two years, the largest number since 1980 - he noted that that six Philadelphia officers have been shot in the last two months - one fatally - and that the environment was much different from Washington's.

"The bottom line is that there's an awful lot of force being used against our officers," Ramsey said. "I'm not going to have them sit there being sitting targets while somebody's taking shots at them."

In Washington, he was able to impose his will quickly by appointing his own command team. He won't have that freedom in Philadelphia, where the city charter limits him to pick only members of his command staff. While Ramsey said he supported a proposal to change the charter to give him more flexibility, he is prepared to work with the system he has.

"I have to assemble my team now and work with them," he said. "But hopefully that changes in the future, not just for me, but for future police commissioners."

Though the Philadelphia department is swirling with stories that Ramsey will disband certain units or jettison established practices, the new commissioner said he was still learning his way around and had made no decisions.

"Rumors always start," he said. "When I took over the Washington, D.C., police department, the first thing they thought was I was going to bring checkerboard caps like they have in Chicago. . . . We'll take a look at those kinds of things; those are minor tweaks. The biggest challenge I have to get my hands around first is crime-fighting strategies and how we're going to approach crime."

AWESOME!

Not sure why he even mentions reasonable suspicion is if their policy is to stop, question, and frisk

[nijwnfi]

Hope the city coffers can support the upcoming "racial profiling" cases.

[WhiteFeather]

Declaring a state of emergency

surround the city, check everyone's papers, bring in the PA guard to arrest all the criminals and get all the "illegal" guns (what ever they are) off the streets.

Then if we could ONLY get Philly District Attorney Lynne Abraham to do her job, prosecute criminals relentlessly, instead of just plea bargain cases away to make her job easier then something would be accomplished, saving police and citizens lives instead of the catch and release policy that she uses now.

[The Drew]

What I want to know is who exactly they're going to stop in this manner...

Sounds like a bit of racial profiling gonna be going on... And if not there will be the accusation of such.

[ChamberedRound]

The sad thing about this is that even if the police find illegal weapons on people, the city and the state as a whole are going to have to pay for the myriad of civil suits that come up because people's basic rights were violated. IMHO, "suspicion" is much different from "probable cause".

[knight0334]

Where are these areas located??

Maybe I should take a walk there with an SBS under my cowboy duster, plus a couple pistols.. (LTCF of course).

I've been needing a windfall as of late... maybe this it my new meal ticket.

[Emptymag]

I'm sure they are also looking very closely at the Predator drone program that the Dallas police dept. has started...

This stuff is really scary, and that comes from a pretty conservative person.
Can people not see what is happening?

This country needs a whole lot of these...



for these...

[Penguini66]

Ramsey said he and Nutter were in agreement on Nutter's crime-fighting strategy, including Nutter's promise to employ a controversial "stop, question and frisk" policy to target illegal weapons.

Though outgoing Commissioner Johnson has warned that Nutter's stop-and-frisk strategy could risk "disaster" by alienating the public, Ramsey said the aggressive tactic was a "valuable tool" as long as it was conducted within the law.

"You need reasonable suspicion in order to stop them," Ramsey said in an interview the day his selection was announced. "There's a way in which you interact with people - you don't want to alienate folks by being rude and abusive. Usually when people get stopped by policemen, what they complain about is not the initial stop, they complain about they way they were treated and disrespected by the police officers."

Somebody want to school me?

When does an officer have the right to "frisk" you? Or in other words, under what circumstances do you have to comply with a "frisk"?

Do you have to first be under arrest to be searched or can they search you to try and find something to arrest you for?

[Penguini66]

Maybe I should take a walk there with an SBS under my cowboy duster, plus a couple pistols.. (LTCF of course).

I like your thinking.

[LittleRedToyota]

Somebody want to school me?

When does an officer have the right to "frisk" you? Or in other words, under what circumstances do you have to comply with a "frisk"?

Do you have to first be under arrest to be searched or can they search you to try and find something to arrest you for?

you do not have to be under arrest for a "terry search".

see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_v._Ohio

it will be interesting to see how far the philly PD pushes this before they get smacked down by the ACLU.