Recently, audio from featuring former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg surfaced in which he enthusiastically endorsed stop-and-frisk. Some such arrests are wrongfully perpetrated by racist law enforcement officers; in such instances, disciplinary actions are rightfully taken. Maybe it is. Yet, those who benefit most from stop-and-frisk are law-abiding minorities, as Department of Justice statistics show that minorities, particularly poor ones, are far more likely to be victims of crime than others.
Since , cops throughout America have made "Terry" stops, so called because of the U. Supreme Court decision Terry v. If the police reasonably suspect that the suspect is armed and dangerous, the police may frisk the suspect, meaning that the police will give a quick pat-down of the suspect's outer clothing.
Ohio , U. Terry held that a stop-and-frisk must comply with the Fourth Amendment, meaning that the stop-and-frisk cannot be unreasonable. According to the Terry court, a reasonable stop-and-frisk is one "in which a reasonably prudent officer is warranted in the circumstances of a given case in believing that his safety or that of others is endangered, he may make a reasonable search for weapons of the person believed by him to be armed and dangerous. In Rodriguez v. Disabled people were housed in the city-run complex along with seniors.
There had been reports of drug dealing in the courtyard. Gesuelli scanned the pavement and a shrub bed with his flashlight, checking for anything that might have been tossed as the officers approached. Big Cat moved his hands slowly down the atrophied legs.
They do a lot of stopping and frisking. This was last fall. The three people in wheelchairs were all black; so was another man who sat with them, wearing a tank top that displayed his muscles, and a do-rag with a long train down his back.
In cities across the country, stop-and-frisk strategies have gained great currency. They aim to get guns off the street, to glean information and solve crime sprees, and, perhaps above all, to act as a deterrent, by letting criminals and would-be lawbreakers know that they might find themselves getting a pat-down at any given moment. Arguably, the policies have succeeded, helping to cut crime dramatically from New York to Los Angeles.
But they have also stirred the loudest and most painful present debate in American criminology: Are young men of color being unfairly—and unconstitutionally—singled out? The two cops headed back to their car and drove on. All were men of color. Big Cat, a year veteran in the department, is light brown, Puerto Rican. Gesuelli, nine years in, is white, Italian Irish, not so tall, soft around the middle.
His father has a small wholesale-liquor establishment in the neighborhood. Big Cat spent his childhood across town; his parents make and clean molds for a tool-and-die company. Leaving, they spotted three Hispanic men standing outside a fence bordering the parking lot.
Did they look, from a rational perspective, like they might be criminals? Did they fulfill the legal criteria for a stop? The guys stood around a car, one of them sucking on a lollipop. The cops approached and started asking questions. In the backseat, a little boy watched a video on a smartphone. In level tones, the cops asked the men where they lived, where they worked. They collected IDs and used their phones to run warrant checks. This went on for 10 minutes, with the two kids in the car.
The checks came back clean. Gesuelli wrote out summonses for public consumption, and the cops went on their way. Had the men been white, would the patrolmen have been so eager to bother them about two open beers? I asked them about how race plays into field inquiries, into who gets stopped and what happens from there. On a seedy block, they heard a thunk , glanced over and saw two young black men, and guessed that one of them had noticed the cops and thrown a gun under a parked car.
The officers jumped out. Up against it! When the cops asked whether they worked, one of them—wearing a striped shirt on his narrow frame, sporting thin-soled slip-on sneakers, and looking more hipster than gangster—said softly that he was an assistant to a dental hygienist and was studying to be a nurse.
Late last summer, after a nine-week civil trial, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin, of the U. The ruling may help bring about the first profound national change in policing in at least 20 years. The policy, she pronounced, was discriminatory, and showed little regard for the requirement that stops be based on rational grounds. It had led repeatedly to violations of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. Before, during, and after the trial, the NYPD argued that racial bias had nothing to do with its method, and that stop-and-frisk has been integral to the spectacular drop in crime—in murders and rapes, robberies and burglaries—that the city has seen in recent times.
To understand modern American thinking about the role of the police, it helps to focus on three documents. Only after its insistence on grand social transformation does the report turn to policing.
What they can do, it allows, is respond more swiftly after crimes have occurred, and thus bump up the odds of catching perpetrators. So it suggests that police departments add more call boxes. And it hinted at something worse: that they might be downright helpless. As Great Society ideals faded, the main crime-control policy the nation could muster was to lock up more lawbreakers and keep them away for longer.
More reactive criminology. This is the second document worth focusing on. Written by the social scientists James Q. The real story is far more complicated, and it would serve those who criticize stop-and-frisk well to consider the successes that it and other forms of proactive policing achieved, as well as the evidence suggesting that it was necessary and rooted in something other than racism.
The available data make a serious case for stop-and-frisk's ability to drive down crime when deployed with targeted precision. Indeed, consider the case of New York. Criminologists often focus on homicide statistics to track violent crime. In New York, homicide rates rose from 4.
The homicide rise was concentrated in firearms-related homicides. In , under Mayor David Dinkins, New York began to expand its police force and adopted a community policing model emphasizing foot patrol and combating low-level disorder. Three years later, after the election of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, New York began to place greater emphasis on stop-and-frisk tactics, in which officers would briefly detain someone they suspected of wrongdoing and perform a pat-down frisk for weapons.
New York also adopted a system of statistical analysis known as "Compstat," which targeted enforcement at hot spots of crime and imposed greater managerial accountability on police command staff. The policy was continued by New York's next mayor, Bloomberg , who took office in Beginning in , New York experienced the broadest and deepest decline in violent crime of any major American city. By , Bloomberg's last year as mayor, the murder rate had dropped to 3. Chicago, in contrast, with a population less than half that of New York, had homicides in New York's homicide drop was concentrated in firearms-related homicides committed outdoors.
It is difficult to identify any factor unrelated to policing that explains this extraordinary crime decline. Changes in the composition of New York's population or its economic conditions do not explain the drop, according to criminologists who have studied the data. The legalization of abortion and increased incarceration rates probably explain some of New York's crime decline, but not nearly all of it. And although the crack epidemic likely fueled the crime surge, it seems unlikely that drug-related violence abated on its own.
There is little evidence, for example, that the demand for illegal drugs lessened in New York during the crime drop. Instead, it appears that New York discovered better ways to prevent drug-related violence.
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