What the Courts Say About Stop-and-Frisk "Courts Putting Stop-and-Frisk Policy on Trial" (front page, July 11) attributes the claim of unconstitutionality to "recent rulings by federal and state courts." But even aside from the racial targeting of these frisks, the law has been clear for more than 40 years, and New York City has been blatantly violating it. Ever since a Supreme Court ruling in 1968, reiterated a number of times over 25 years, the law regarding when police officers are allowed to frisk has been clear: police may legally frisk people only if they have a reasonable suspicion, based on articulable facts, not a hunch, that the person frisked is armed and dangerous. That the police rarely have legally adequate reason to frisk is proved by the fact that their own statistics show that they find guns as a result of such frisks in less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the frisks - more than 380,000 of them last year, more than 85 percent of them blacks and Latinos. Either the police are spectacularly incompetent at assessing reasonable suspicion, or they are frisking illegally. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has tried to rally public support for this unconstitutional policy by claiming that it prevents crime, but he provides no proof of this claim. How is crime prevented by violating the rights of innocent people? The writer is a former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.