The sturm und drang over former City Councilman Michael Nutter’s “stop and frisk” crime-fighting proposal has reached a level that finally prompted the city’s chief electoral watchdog group, the Committee of Seventy, to denounce a TV ad.

The ad, sponsored by the non-profit group One Step Closer, uses old 1960s footage of police confronting civil-right demonstrators to conjure up images of a contentious time in American history.

“Using racially based ‘no-holds-barred’ tactics for political advantage has no place in any campaign,” said Committee of Seventy President Zach Stalberg.

But images aside, many people do question whether “stop and frisk” verges on unconstitutional denial of the rights enshrined in the Constitution.

According to a recent poll conducted by Temple University’s Institute for Public Affairs, Black and white Philadelphians disagree about the controversial policing tactic.

Two-thirds of whites favor the policy while 52 percent of Blacks favor it. Among registered Democrats the difference is greater, with 70 percent of whites favoring stop and frisk and 52 percent of Blacks.

University of Pennsylvania criminologist Lawrence Sherman reportedly advised Nutter on the proposal.

Sherman wrote in an e-mail to The Philadelphia Tribune: “Because of the issues raised about my research in recent debates among the candidates for mayor of Philadelphia, I believe it is very important to clarify and emphasize the following:

“1. Gun detection patrols that include a ‘stop and frisk’ based solely on evidence supporting reasonable suspicion of illegal gun-carrying has been repeatedly upheld as constitutional in a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings over the past 40 years.

“2. Well-trained police officers using stop-and-frisk tactics in five independent tests in Kansas City, Indianapolis and Pittsburgh have substantially reduced gun violence . . .

“3. These results have been peer-reviewed by either the U.S. Department of Justice or the Brookings Institution.

“4. There is no evidence in this work, or in any other research I know, showing that these life-saving patrols have ever led to racial profiling. Most have been conducted in single-race neighborhoods, in which suspects are selected based solely on behavior, not race.

“Gun patrols remain the single strategy for which evidence exists of an immediate short-term, neighborhood-focused reduction in gun violence.”

Kurt L. Schmoke, the first elected Black mayor in Baltimore, faced similar questions when he implemented a similar approach, using an old anti-loitering law, to stem the street drug-dealing and violent crime plaguing his city.

Schmoke, a two-term state’s attorney before winning the mayor’s chair, had to consider carefully whether he could even use this city ordinance, since it had been used extensively to harass African-Americans in the past.

Now dean of the law school at Howard University, Schmoke said in an interview that two key issues would determine the success in keeping such initiatives in constitutional bounds: sharply defining “hot spots” of criminal activity and the care in the training and management of police officers.

“The constitutional problem is a difficult one,” Schmoke said. “You get around it by how you define the ‘hot spots’ – you define a high-crime area as one in which there is a higher than average experience of felonies and misdemeanors, compared to the rest of the city, and a higher percentage of violent incidents.

“Then you have to make sure that you have trained the police officers well. We used an old anti-loitering law that had been on the books for many years. It had been used unfairly against Black people in the past, sure. But it all comes down to implementation.

“You have to make sure the police are well-trained,” Schmoke said. Laughing, he recalled that, “for every ten police officers you train” to work in a hot spot, “nine out of ten will implement the policy properly. It’s that one who doesn’t’ understand or who misinterprets the law and tries to arrest people you really don’t want arrested, who makes it difficult.”

That, he said, is where good management makes a difference.

During Schmoke’s three terms as Baltimore mayor, the use of the anti-loitering law figured prominently in the breakup of several notorious drug-dealing gangs and the conviction and long-term sentencing of their kingpins.

Civil rights complaints, expected by some critics of the then-new mayor’s aggressive policing policy, were mostly nonexistent.

For his part, Nutter points out that early in the campaign he announced a five-point plan for fighting Philadelphia’s epidemic of violent crime. Under his “Plan for Safety Now,” Nutter would declare a “Crime Emergency” in “Targeted Enforcement Zones, which are the city’s most crime-plagued neighborhoods.”

In a proposal reminiscent of Schmoke’s anti-loitering enforcement in Baltimore, Nutter would direct the police commissioner to identify targeted enforcement zones in which to aggressively fight crime. In addition to “promoting and sustaining the use of “constitutional stop-and-frisk strategies” to get illegal weapons off the streets, Nutter would:

• Prohibit or limit gatherings of people on sidewalks, streets, or any outdoor place in the designated neighborhoods;

• Halt or limit the movement of vehicles through or within the designated neighborhoods;

• Establish a curfew limiting the hours people could be outside their houses; and

• Prohibit the sale, carrying or possession on the public street or public sidewalks, or in any public park or square, of weapons on any kind.

“The word gets out, among the criminal underworld,” Schmoke said. “You have to make sure the police differentiate between the bus stops and the drug corners. But then the drug dealers start hanging out on the bus stops. The police have to watch. It becomes pretty obvious that these guys are letting all the buses go by and remaining on the bus stop.”

Nutter’s plan approvingly cites the installation of security cameras in targeted zones in the city of Chicago, and argues for expanded administrative authority for the police commissioner, to permit better use of techniques such as New York’s use of databases and analyses of the frequency of violent incidents in high-crime areas.

It also advocates a strong focus on repeat offenders, fugitives, and probation and parole violators, noting the high percentage of recidivism among ex-offenders. He also pledges to fight for increased resources to support his aggressive policing program from state and federal sources.

The last point Nutter makes in his anti-crime plan is the need to “develop a city where people can build better futures,” noting that economics is at the bottom of every developing crime trend. That’s a point about which many people will agree.

We’ll see what the voters think on Election Day.