A commenter to my blog report about the Fattah event yesterday correctly pointed out that Michael Nutter's crime plan, given as a testimony to State Judiciary Committee in August (always a great way to get media coverage!), includes the same use of the Kansas City Plan:
Get handguns off the streets by encouraging more frequent police use of their Constitutional stop & frisk powers recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court, the most effective method known for reducing gun violence (as shown in 5 separate tests in Kansas City, Pittsburgh and Indianapolis).
Anyway, click on "Continue Reading" for the comment and my response:
Dan, Michael Nutter laid out this same "stop and frisk" plan way back in August. In his testimony to the Pennsylvania Senate Judiciary Committee, Nutter was the first mayoral candidate to point to the successful "stop and frisk" policies of Kansas, Pittsburgh and Indianapolis. He was the first to say that we should use it in Philadelphia.
I don't recall Michael Nutter recieving as much praise about this plan back in August.
To which, another commenter added:
Agreed. I'm not sure how "impressed" would be at a mayoral candidate who has to be cornered and forced into answering a question about his own policy proposal. I'm assuming he avoided tha question because the answer appears not to poll very well in certain demographics:
http://www.phillymag.com/articles/pulse_guns_are_for_girls
And my response:
"Impressed" in parts of the plan. The next phase will be to convince everyone whether he will actually do it.
And a mea culpa out to you Nutter folks out there. As you can see, Wendy posted his crime plan here. I'm a sucker for numbers and for using strategies that have an empirically-proven track record. So yes, I'm impressed that that point is in Nutter's plan too.
However, I'm a little perplexed as to why the mainstream media hasn't picked up on that part of Fattah's and Nutter's Plans. I've read over the Inquirer, Daily News and Tribune articles and can't find any mention of what has been a somewhat controversial tactic. Like I said, it's a tactic that has come to be known as "stop and frisk" (which has gotten its own negative connotation), and that phrase doesn't appear anywhere.
I'm actually a little more impressed with Nutter's as he doesn't even dance around what this tactic is and he uses the phrase "stop and frisk." Not sure what I was doing when Nutter provided this testimony.
I'll try and get comment from the Evans and Knox camps about this specific point.