I've got a lot of issues with the tone of the MSNBC article, and the underlying assumption. In the past few years, many police departments have shown a significant increase in documented stop & frisk or vehicle searches. Why? Because the cops are now required to document them, when they weren't necessarily required to do so before.
Beyond that -- it did address the terms it threw around. "Stop & frisk" is actually a pretty specific law enforcement action, with specific standards to meet to justify it (assuming that the officers are playing by the rules). The officer needs reasonable suspicion (articulable facts and circumstances, that based on an officer's knowledge, training, and experience lead him to believe that criminal activity is afoot) to detain a person. This can include, as the article seems to allude to, physical descriptions of the suspect in a crime -- which often start out with the race of the suspect. So we're not really talking randomly snatching people up... But then, to frisk (a cursory search of the outer garments for weapons), the officer must have reasonable, articuble suspicion that the suspect is armed. Again -- for a robbery lookout, it's a given. But it's also common that gang members have weapons, so gang members are often frisked, too. In a search based on a lookout or other strong suspicion that the suspect committed a crime, limited searching for evidence of that crime MAY be accepted, under certain exceptions.
The article doesn't mention consensual searches, where the officer discovers someone who raises his professional suspicions without rising to the level of reasonable articulable suspicion. The officer initiates a consensual encounter ("Hello, good citizen, would you mind talking to me for a moment?"), and proceeds to request permission to search the person. If granted -- this is a consensual search, and can go as long as the person lets it! Consensual encounters can be fertile ground for biased policing, I admit. Accordingly, many agencies now document consent searches and require officers to attend frequent in-service training on the dangers of bias-based policing.
