I am grappling with the age-old conundrum of how to balance liberty and public safety. Last month, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that the NYPD's "stop-and-frisk" policy, which resulted in 4.4 million stops of mostly black and Hispanic New Yorkers between 2004 and 2012, violates the Fourth and Fourteenth amendments. Stop-and-frisk may have made the Big Apple a safer place — at least for some of its residents — but it did so at the unacceptably high cost of causing many of those same residents to fear the very people sworn to protect them.
More than 70 years ago, President Franklin Roosevelt invoked the freedom from fear as an indispensable component of liberty. Roosevelt spoke not only to those Americans made anxious by the lengthening shadows of World War II, but also to answer those who preached the gospel of totalitarianism as the answer to a disorderly, dangerous world. Roosevelt knew that no country is ever truly secure if the state must trample on the rights of its citizens to ensure domestic order.
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