Bill Frist’s former speechwriter Amy Holmes was on MSNBC with Chris Jansing talking about how NYC’s stop-and-frisk policy is racist. Mediaite has the video and excerpts:

Asked by Jansing about “the mistrust that develops between police and the citizens of any given city” which results from policing strategies like “stop-and-frisk,” Holmes said that she thinks this is a “huge problem.”
“We understand that from ‘stop-and-frisk’ the majority of arrest — I think over 90 percent — have to do with marijuana possession,” Holmes said. “I live in the West Village in New York City, and there’s no ‘stop-and-frisk’ policy there and I could point to you 10 people who were smoking pot openly, and they didn’t get arrested.”
“So, I’m very concerned that ‘stop-and-frisk’ is targeting certain communities, people of color, in a disproportionate way,” Holmes asserted, “and I can tell you, as someone who lives in Manhattan, they could come and find crime in my neighborhood, but they don’t because it’s frankly where a lot of wealthy white people live.”
Later, Holmes asked philosophically why some crimes, like prohibitions on marijuana possession, is worthy of strict enforcement in one neighborhood but not in another.
“If you go down to NYU, why aren’t those students being stopped and frisked?” she asked.

Guess what: The NYPD is targeting NYU area crime with daily arrests of drug dealers in Washington Square Park. If Holmes sees someone openly smoking pot in the future and an NYPD officer ignoring the situation, I would suggest that she film the crime to prove her point. But her idea that the police aren’t active against drug crime in the Village is simply preposterous.

And her claim that “over 90 percent” of stop-and-frisk arrests have to do with marijuan possession seems specious. The Washington Post published a chart from the Center for Constituional Rights that breaks down NYPD stops and what was seized.

Drugs seized slightly outnumber weapons seized.

And if you read the actual statistical analysis Judge Scheindlin relied on in her opinion striking down stop-and-frisk, you’ll see the data further discredits Holmes’s claim:

In other words, police stopped-and-frisked an individual based on a suspicion of a drug crime roughly eleven percent of the time. Of note, Holmes misses the next big stop-and-frisk court case which has to do with stops of those suspected of trespassing. If Holmes wanted to make a case against stop-and-frisk, it’s this trespassing issue that would seem to be a better fit than her red herring about petty drug offenses.