Court Order Lets NYPD Continue ‘Stop-and-Frisk’

Mayor Rahm and his bluster-filled top cop try this and that ineffective measure to “stop the violence” in black and Hispanic neighborhoods. NY City had the answer. One judge nixed it (no matter if it improves life in neighborhoods). But an appeals panel ruled her out of order and took her off the case.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has credited [‘Stop-and-Frisk’] with helping drive crime in New York City to record lows. But Democratic mayoral nominee Bill de Blasio repeatedly attacked the Bloomberg administration for using stop-and-frisk too often against minorities in high-crime neighborhoods, and said he would reduce its use.

Many have credited his outspoken stance against the policy with helping him win the Democratic primary election. He faces Republican Joe Lhota on Tuesday in the city’s general election. In a statement, Mr. de Blasio said he was disappointed by Thursday’s order. “We have to end the overuse of stop and frisk—and any delay only means a continued and unnecessary rift between our police and the people they protect,” he said.

City officials praised it. “We could not be more pleased with the Court’s findings,” New York City Corporation Counsel Michael A. Cardozo said in a news release. “In short, the ruling of unconstitutional practices is no longer operative, and that question will now receive a fresh and independent look both by the appeals court and then, if necessary, by a different trial court judge.”

This de Blasio is something else in the way of dogmatic far-leftism.

Holding Them Closer – Parents for life

Once, the idea was the independent, self-reliant child.

Nearly 30 years ago, sociologist Robert Bellah and his team of co-authors in Habits of the Heart (1985) described the American parenting ideal as the production of independent children who “leave home,” both figuratively and literally. To never leave home, they wrote, violated the cardinal American virtue of self-reliance, contradicting self-understandings that individuals should “earn everything we get, accept no handouts or gifts, and free ourselves from our families of origin.” The essence of parenting was preparing children for just such a separation, reflecting the American belief that a meaningful life could be had only by breaking free from family and giving birth, in a sense, to oneself. “However painful the process of leaving home, for parents and for children, the really frightening thing for both would be the prospect of the child never leaving home.” Successful launching was the quest, and the empty nest, even though it required adjustment, the reward. If these were the habits of the parenting heart in the 1980s, American parents clearly have had a change of heart.

Now it’s different, we gather from the Culture of American Families Survey, conducted by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.

Two-thirds of American parents of school-age children now say they would “willingly support a 25-year-old child financially” if needed. Two-thirds say they would encourage a 25-year-old to move back home if he or she had difficulty affording housing. Parents still hope, of course, that their adult children will attain financial independence, but this aspiration is no stronger than the hope that children will retain “close ties with parents and family”—both are considered “essential” by about half of American parents. The quest for long-term connection with children has taken central stage. Parenting is still about formation, but its overriding concern has pivoted from formation to connection. One has only to consider parents’ responses to the statement “I hope to be best friends with my children when they are grown” to know something new is happening at home. Almost three-quarters of today’s parents of school-age children (72 percent) agree that they eventually want to be their children’s best friends; only 17 percent disagree. The successful formation and launching of children still matters; it is just that parents don’t want to launch them very far.

You don’t stop being a mother and a father, in other words.

more more more here at this U. of Virginia-based publication.