The crime rate has dropped in New York and nationally.

But don’t worry! A U.S. District Court  judge in New York soon may give a ruling that helps get those numbers up.

The suit involves New York’s “stop, question, and frisk” policy that is a big factor in the drop in crime.

Heather Mac Donald explains:

New York-style policing—including the practice of stopping, questioning and sometimes frisking individuals engaged in suspicious behavior—ought be the city's most valued export. Since the early 1990s, New York has experienced the longest and steepest crime drop in the modern history of policing. Murders have gone down by nearly 80%, and combined major felonies by nearly 75%. No other American metropolis comes close to New York's achievement. Bostonians are twice as likely to be murdered as New Yorkers, and residents of Washington, D.C., three times as likely.

The biggest beneficiaries of a dramatically safer New York have been law-abiding residents of formerly crime-plagued areas. Minorities make up nearly 80% of the drop in homicide victims since the early 1990s. New York policing has transformed inner-city neighborhoods and allowed their hardworking members a once-unthinkable freedom from fear.

But the police department has been “dogged by misconceptions, including the notion that New York policing is racist.” A suit, Floyd v. New York, charges that the stopping and questioning of individuals who are behaving suspiciously is racist. Lawyers from the elite firm of Covington & Burling, where the partners are no doubt far removed from what ordinary citizens experience in the way of street crime, are on the case.  The Center for Constitutional Rights is also supplying legal expertise to overturn this anti-crime measure.

The lawyers claim that the majority of the people stopped and questioned are members of a minority. But the reality is that the majority of crime in New York is committed by members of minorities. Blacks were 78 percent of shooting suspects and 74 percent of victims. Whites in New York committed a smidgen over 2 percent of these crimes. Young black men are the segment of the population most likely to be murdered.

But the rich, liberal lawyers ignore this.

Unfortunately, most of the people who will be adversely affected if U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin rules against the policy are law-abiding minority residents of New York who live in neighborhoods far removed from the milieu of Covington & Burling lawyers. But damned, doesn’t it feel good to be a liberal crusader?