An Upper East Side couple penned a heartfelt letter to their local precinct station house, thanking the cops there for stopping and frisking their son — saying it was a wake-up call that saved his life.
“A 19th Precinct Officer stopped, frisked and arrested him,” the couple said in the message, which was posted Monday on the precinct’s Twitter feed.
“We believe that the key to turning our son’s life around, the thing that saved his life, was the arrest. We will always feel gratitude to you.”
The couple — who identified themselves only as “A Mother and Father” — said that their son was kicked out of high school some five years ago as he became a heavy drug user.
Nothing they did to set him straight worked, from pleading to counseling. He even started dealing, sometimes to youths, “which was worse than harming himself,” they wrote.
But they said that after his stop-and-frisk and arrest, he spent a night in jail. It was a real eye-opener, they said.
“Facing felony counts, he decided to go into rehab, to impress the judge,” they said.
Now their son has been scared straight. They said he has “been clean ever since,” and just graduated from college last December, according to the posted letter.
In its tweet, the 19th Precinct — headed by Inspector Clint A. McPherson — said officers there were honored by the letter.
“We may seem like the bad guys to some people, but it’s letters like this that make our work worth it & truly life changing,” the tweet said.
The note arrived with no name or return address and cops have no clue who sent it.
Nevertheless, the message proves the practice of stop-and-frisk isn’t all bad, a police source claimed.
“Stop-and-frisk was always a valuable tool [but] the bosses abused it by giving cops a quota,” the source said. “It is still a great way to lower crime and make gun arrests.”
The policy has been highly controversial. In 2013 federal Judge Shira Scheindlin issued a 195-page decision saying the policy equaled “racial profiling,” as the vast majority of those stopped and frisked were minorities who had done nothing wrong.
She ordered the policy be changed, and the city, under then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, appealed. But Mayor de Blasio, who ran on a platform of ending the practice, dropped the appeal.
In 2012 — the last year before the ruling, when the program was in full swing in New York — 532,911 people were stopped and frisked, according to American Civil Liberties Union data.
Of those, 89 percent were innocent, 55 percent were black, 32 percent were Latino, and just 10 percent were white.
The policy still continues, but with new rules.
In 2015, there were only 22,939 stop-and-frisks, with 80 percent turning out to be innocent, 53 percent black and 27 percent Latino, the ACLU said.