is that it doesn't quantify what would lead to an end of the declared state of emergency.

I'd say that the length should be based on two things: it should end if the crime drops below X threshold (maybe the 92/93 numbers or whatever they were that the candidates were basing their "I won't run again if the crime numbers don't go down" pledge on) AND if the crime rate doesn't significantly drop within a defined period of time.

If the state of emergency and reduced civil liberties aren't working to reduce crime, they should not continue. The plan should define how long we want to experiment with this.

I made this point in early February:

To the extent that Nutter is wedded to this idea (he cites Mayor Goode as precedent), any declaration of emergency should be imposed with a much tighter time frame than Nutter's incredibly open-ended "the emergency powers will be extended until crime has significantly decreased and safety has been restored to all parts of Philadelphia."

Jennifer

As I just commented on Dan's thread:

Nope, for better or worse the police don't need warrants for stop and frisk under Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. They just need what the court calls "reasonable articulable suspicion" (much less than probable cause, which is what you need for a warrant).

This is the issue: reasonable articulable suspicion as a standard in practice depends very heavily on police discretion. Though the court uses the term "articulable" it really falls sort of short of that; what happens is that stop and frisk relies on police intuition on who is likely to be committing a crime based on experience, which often can get blurred with prejudice and racial profiling.

There are real concerns with the expansion of legal stop and frisk in the way that Nutter (and possibly, though to a lesser extent, Fattah) plan to do. See this thread for a discussion of those concerns and the various legal standards, as well as Dan's thread from today, which describes why Nutter's plan raises particular issues.

Jennifer

I don't actually have my own opinions anymore. Like most women, I'm just an empty vessel, waiting for Tom Knox to fill my empty brain. (BTW, this is an unrelated minor nitpick, but why are so many men with post-graduate degrees such bad spellers? It offends the copy editor in me.)

No, Adam, I'm actually someone who wiped the blood from her brother after the cops kicked the shit out of him and almost killed him. This is probably foreign to your experience and that of the rest of the gently-reared eggheads on this board, but I've seen police abuse up close and I prefer to err on the side of caution.

Press secretary, Knox campaign. Blogger on hiatus, former award-winning journalist.

Concomitant with my opinion that you do not have to be black to opine on matters involving the black community, I don't think it is necessary to be the victim of police brutality to have an opinion on it. (It is bizarre to see all of these personal narratives -- all of which I am sure are true -- required to justify opinions about a policy on police brutality.)

You don't have to be one of the Black Panthers on Columbia Avenue to have an opinion on Rizzo's policing tactics is a version of that point.

It's OK if you have never been the victim of police brutality, or any brutality. While I think it is an important intersection that most liberals believe in some form of post-modernism, which requires retelling stories that don't get told to give a voice/narrative to the oppressed outsider, as a way of giving oppressed thought a narrative -- it sometimes has the effect of creating a barrier around others who are interested in the conversation and feel like they don't have the "oppressed press credentials" to join in.

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I do not work for/support any candidate for any office in Philadelphia.