Stop-and-Frisk Controls Praised in Philadelphia Anthony Glenn, 32, said he had been stopped six times on Susquehanna Avenue in North Philadelphia over the last few months as he walked home at night from his job at a Walmart. PHILADELPHIA - Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York was dismissive when asked if his police department, under siege for the way it uses the police tactic of stop-and-frisk, might take a lesson from Philadelphia's response to a similar challenge. Why would any rational person want to trade what we have here for the situation in Philadelphia - more murders, higher crime? Mr. Bloomberg said in May, referring to an epidemic of gun violence that in 2010 pushed Philadelphia's homicide rate up for the first time since 2007, an incline that continued last year. City leaders here see it differently. A year after they settled litigation by agreeing to institute a host of safeguards to make sure that police stops were conducted legally, they say they are simply doing what is needed to make sure that aggressive crime fighting is accompanied by a respect for civil rights. As part of the agreement, the Philadelphia Police Department has set up an electronic database to track the legality of stops, adopted new training protocols and accepted oversight by an independent monitor. Philadelphia's willingness to put police procedures under the microscope has won praise even from the civil rights lawyers who in 2010 filed a class-action lawsuit, alleging that police officers were disproportionately stopping African-American and Hispanic men without sufficient cause. "The city agreed almost immediately after we filed suit to come to the table and discuss an amicable resolution," said Paul Messing, one of the lawyers, adding that he thought that Mayor Michael Nutter and others in city government "understood that this presented serious constitutional concerns." Yet finding the right balance has not been easy. City officials have watched in frustration as homicides have continued to climb: As of late Tuesday, 189 people had been slain in the city, compared with 169 at the same time in 2011. In most cases, Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey said, both victims and perpetrators have been African-American or Hispanic men. "I think we have to face some realities," said Commissioner Ramsey, who is African-American. We certainly do not want to be stopping people without the reasonable suspicion that we need to conduct a stop. But just because someone is complaining and they want to play the race card doesn't mean it's an inappropriate stop. The total number of stops, he said, is not the issue. The question is: Are you stopping the right people for the right reason? Philadelphia, like New York, ramped up the use of stop-and-frisk, arguing that it would help remove guns from the streets and serve as a deterrent. In his 2007 mayoral campaign, Mr. Nutter promised to use the tactic to help combat a "crime emergency" in some neighborhoods. That year, police officers made 136,711 pedestrian stops, but two years after Mr. Nutter was elected, in 2009, the number nearly doubled to 253,276 - higher proportionally, in a city of 1.5 million, than the 685,724 stops made by police officers in New York last year. Commissioner Ramsey said many factors could be driving the increase in homicides, including cutbacks in police department staffing and the fact that "we have an enormous problem with guns in Philadelphia"; the penalties for possession of an illegal firearm in New York are far tougher than in Pennsylvania, he noted. But he also said that after Philadelphia increased the use of stop-and-frisk a few years ago, gun violence decreased. There was a 22 percent reduction in homicides from 2007, a year before the policy began to 2009, "and our shootings went down." he said. Mr. Messing, the civil rights lawyer, said the problem was that as the number of stops escalated, the number of complaints he received grew even faster. "We were seeing huge numbers of stops being made without legal cause," he said, adding that at the same time, very few arrests were made and guns were seized in only about 1 in 1,000 stops. Mahari Bailey, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, said that when he returned to Philadelphia after graduating from Georgetown University's law school, he was repeatedly stopped by officers who often behaved aggressively. "It just became too much," Mr. Bailey said.