Stop and Frisk: The Use and Abuse of a Controversial Policing Tactic

    White and Fradella are both criminology professors, and the write this as a history of a controversial police tactic, not as a law book. One of the reasons for the controversy is the tactic’s feasibility for the police, and the lack of work it involves. Searching a house, computer, or business files would take a warrant, and that would mean long hours of observation, waiting for the judge to see you, presenting your evidence, and in the end, you might not even get the search warrant. The stop-and-frisk tactic requires less prep work, but there is a drawback; as shown in the book, there are forms that the police department makes you fill out for every stop made, and that can be even more tedious.

   The authors cite the concept of “reasonable suspicion” as a factor in the Supreme Court cases that ruled in the police officer’s favor, such as Peters v. New York. An example is a tenant who sees unfamiliar people in the building and calls 911, which the police respond to by stopping and frisking the suspects, and the reason they give to the judge will be “we were told by the tenant that they didn’t live there, they were tiptoeing around, and we thought they were burglars.” In the case of Terry v. Ohio one can argue that the street is a public space, so no warrant is required to be there. Then there’s the “reasonable suspicion” which came from their behavior, which made the police think they were casing the stores for a robbery.

    In the chapter on benefits and consequences, the authors do not draw any solid conclusions. The graphs show how the stop & frisk declined after 2013, but there’s been no proven uptick since. There’s no doubt that minorities are a substantial target, though the authors don’t devote the entire book to race. Another problem highlighted here is the mass hiring of cops in a short time, which leads to lowering of the bar when it comes to standards and background checks.

   Some might blame the whole problem on having the police do too much. Take for instance NYC Mayor Bloomberg, and his bright idea to have the NYPD search kids for cellphones. It came as a relief to some educators, fed up with smart-mouthed kids and disruptive sounds. To other educators, the cell phone sweeps were a burden; they resented the intrusion and the loss of class time. All of them wondered later if the heavy-handed tactic had accomplished anything. Does this go to show that the “massive sweeps” are detrimental?

   Achievements of stop & frisk have been hard to gauge. At the time of the Supreme Court case of Terry v. Ohio, there was less rampant drug crime, and the 1968 case wasn’t creating paranoia on either side. The citizens weren’t up in arms, and neither were the police. Now fast forward 40 years, and you have drug crime going on, and that means more suspects, so the police have their hands tied. Then you have affluent residents moving into gentrified areas, and they want the police to take care of the problem. Both sides end up in a bind. But as for stopping everyone you can, what are the consequences?