In Philadelphia, where police embraced an aggressive stop-and-frisk policy nearly three years ago in response to rising gun violence, the debate is about to begin in earnest.
Civil rights lawyers filed a federal lawsuit earlier this month, arguing that Philadelphia police have been targeting people based solely on race.
In 2009, officers stopped 253,333 pedestrians, 72 percent of whom were African American, the suit says.
But David Rudovsky, one of the lawyers who filed the suit, acknowledges that racial profiling can't be proved "solely by the numbers."
"The key question is: If you control for factors like police deployment and crime rates, would that explain the disparity?" he said.
Rudovsky said a better benchmark would be to look at the "hit rate" - how often the stops result in arrest or the discovery of a weapon or other contraband.
The lawsuit says just 8 percent of the stops in 2009 resulted in arrests, often for "criminal conduct that was entirely independent from the supposed reason for the stop." Beyond the overall number of stops by race in 2009 and the arrest percentage, Rudovsky and his cocounsel lack data to search for patterns and figure out precisely who gets frisked and why.
As part of a 1996 settlement of another civil rights lawsuit, the police agreed to provide such information and allow the monitoring of vehicle and pedestrian stops. Rudovsky and other monitors looked at hit rates through 2005.
"It turned out, interestingly, that the hit rate was higher for . . . whites," he said.
The current suit - filed by Rudovsky's firm, Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing & Feinberg, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania - details the experiences of eight African American and Hispanic plaintiffs who say they were repeatedly stopped by police without legitimate reason.
