A modest proposal for New York’s Stop-And-Frisk supporters, Mayor Bloomberg,and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly

Somebody ought to stop and frisk this character. This cranky post tells you where you can find him.

Hey NYPD, if you’re really looking for contraband, and if you’re really, really not doing racial profiling when you repeatedly stop all those Afro-American and Hispanic people coming out of their own homes in Harlem and Bed Stuy, I have a very helpful idea for you.

Why don’t you take, oh, say six months, and move a couple of dozen of your best stop-and-friskers to a few new neighborhoods where you can clearly demonstrate the color blindness and gender blindness of your stop-and-frisk policies?

I’m talking about the East and West 80s and 90s of Manhattan. Plus the Riverdale section of the Bronx.

That’s where you’ll be able to station stop-and-frisk cops around the private prep schools catering to the adolescent children of New York’s rich and powerful. They’re mostly white kids (with a some Asians, and a few Afro-Americans and Hispanics thrown in, sometimes on scholarship, as a token to diversity. And the schools prominently feature those minorithy kids in photographs on the school websites because...well, that's open to interpretation. But I'm getting off track here.)

Just stand at the entrances to any of those schools and pat down a few of the (mostly white) kids as they go in and out, after you notice them “behaving in a furtive manner.” Make 'em stick their hands in the air. Make 'em lie down on the sidewalk in their blue blazers, or plaid skirts and white blouses.

I’m talking, for example, about the preppy students of Chapin on East End Avenue, which in 2010 boasted an endowment of $78.5 million and charged tuition of $33,400.

Or how about the Dalton School, Trinity School, Horace Mann, and Riverdale Country School, whose website declares it’s in favor of (“Mind Character Community.”)

Or schools like Nightingale Bamford, whose motto, according to their website (it's nearly perfect for an institution that turns out future Mistresses of the Universe) is, “Being a Nightingale means that ­ no matter what you want to say to the world – you have the confidence to say it.” Which is close enough to the motto I propose for all of these schools, “Being filthy rich means never having to say you’re sorry.”

That’s only a partial list of New York prep schools, of course, but I think you get the idea. Their students are kids who aren’t likely to be carrying guns, but I’ll betcha that some intensive stop-and-frisking near their shcools will reveal a treasure trove of drugs, prescription medicines in possession of the wrong person, a hip flask or three filled with the hard stuff, and even some non-ballistic weapons. (“But these nunchuks and this 40-inch sword are for my after-school martial arts lessons, officer!”)

A few weeks of stop-and-frisks on the Upper East and Upper West sides and in Riverdale would create  such a hullaballoo that the practice would end, and the rest of the world would never have to endure warrantless, racially-targeted, quota-driven stop-and-frisks again. And I do mean a hullaballoo. After the first dozen or so arrests, the kids' parents, mostly denizens of Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, and Central Park West would march en masse from Wall Street, first on City Hall, then on Police Headquarters, and finally on the mayor’s personal private mansion itself, on 79^th between Fifth and Madison. They would pull the plug on municipal bond financings and political campaign contributions, upsetting the whole socio-political setup.

And stop-and-frisk would become a thing of the past.