Stop and Frisk Practices in New York City

Stop and Frisk Practices in New York City

American urbanism is defined by a deep segregation of urban space by race and class (Massey and Denton, 1993; Wilson, 1987; Sampson, 2012). African-Americans, and people of Hispanic or Latino identity, have traditionally faced explicit bigotry and discrimination in housing markets, as well as in markets for jobs, education, and other aspects of society. Even after the end of (some but not all) formal mechanisms of discrimination after the victories of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, African Americans and Latinas/Latinos still experience a wide range of implicit discriminatory effects -- and most American cities remain deeply divided spatially. Communities of color suffer from capital disinvestment -- or the replacement of mainstream financial opportunities with various kinds of predatory practices (pawn shops instead of mainstream banks, for instance) -- and higher rates of crime and poverty.

The role of the state is crucial in this divided, unequal urbanism. At the national scale, America's political economy has from the beginning been defined by racial inequalities -- and these inequalities have by no means disappeared with the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency. At the urban scale, communities of color have faced disparate impact from two long-term trends that have been underway for decades: the withdrawal of the welfare state, and the expansion of "tough-on-crime" policing practices. The withdrawal of the welfare state involves cutbacks to social insurance and social assistance to poor and working class people and places, and a punitive ideology of "neoliberalism" (Hackworth, 2007) emphasizing that poor people should demonstrate personal responsibility and work to lift themselves out of poverty. Yet the deep spatial segregation of large cities presents formidable barriers to inner-city workers unable to reach suburban jobs, and often unable to compete for downtown jobs that require advanced educational credentials of the sort that require major, long-term financial investments. Since the 1970s, moreover, industrial restructuring has destroyed more and more of the jobs that traditionally offered reasonable pay and prospects for career advancement for workers with limited formal education. All of these trends have had disproportionate effects on segregated communities of African Americans and Latinas/Latinos.

With an economy unable to provide sufficient mainstream economic opportunities in the inner city, it should come as no surprise that one finds a wide range of "behavioral pathologies" (Wilson, 1987) in these communities. Landscapes of severe poverty tend also to be places where youth drop out of school, where teenage pregnancy is common, and where "hustling" and other criminal activities often seem to be the only reasonable way for destitute people to survive. The inner city, therefore, is where we often find the most harsh response by the state through the institution of policing. The prominent urban sociologist Loic Wacquant (2008, p. 32) puts it best:

"...it is in the segregated Black and Latino areas of the American urban core that relations with the police are the most antagonistic and the most virulent. Residents of the ghetto are torn between their need for protection from rampant crime and their fear that police intervention will add to the violence, not diminish it, due to their discriminatory and brutal behavior."

This "discriminatory and brutal behavior" has a long history. Incidents of police brutality have often been the trigger for urban uprisings in American inner cities -- from the wave of rebellions in the late 1960s to the violence in South Central Los Angeles following the 1992 acquittal of five police officers who had been videotaped beating a black motorist, Rodney King, after a traffic stop. This is not to villainize police as individuals: individual police offers working in high-crime areas are often presented with impossible situations and risks created by long-term economic and social changes that they simply cannot be expected to correct. And yet the institutional responses of police forces as social institutions almost invariably make the situation worse, where "the forces of order act as if they were waging a trench war with the residents, treating them as an army of occupation would its enemies." (Wacquant, 2008, p. 32). Comparing the police to an army of occupation may seem extreme, but consider the "Rampart Division" scandal of Los Angeles in the late 1990s: Several dozen members of a special anti-gang unit engaged in systematic beatings and shootings of suspects; they fabricated police reports and lied in court; and they planted drugs and guns on suspects to justify arrests and shootings.

Wacquant (2008), Alexander (2012), and other analysts have theorized the growth of police violence and racism as a systematic feature of American inequality. A few generations ago, America's inability to integrate a racially marginalized "underclass" was dealt with through a combination of urban spatial segregation and a welfare state that provided just enough social assistance to prevent widespread, sustained rebellion; with the withdrawal of the welfare state, however, urban poverty and disorder have led to a growing reliance on criminal justice practices and policies to deal with systemic inequality. If the welfare state involved "warehousing" poor communities of color in the segregated inner city, today we are seeing "law-and-order" policies that target not only violent criminals, but also a wide range of nonviolent offenses -- such as the hundreds of thousands of people in America incarcerated for nonviolent offenses like minor drug possession charges.

The other pervasive feature of tough-on-crime policing is the institutionalized suspicion of individuals and communities. This involves racial and ethnic profiling, as well as the deployment of specialized police squads in high-crime neighborhoods -- where geographical profiling leads to a presumption of suspicion of individuals by virtue of their location. These processes have been particularly pronounced in New York City, where there has also been a broad coalition of analysts and organizers who have challenged the practice. As a result of long legal struggles, the New York City Police Department was forced to begin to collect systematic information on officers' "stop and frisk" activities, and then to release the data to researchers.

In this project, we will explore these data to see what we can learn about what Wacquant (2001) has called the "deadly symbiosis" of ghetto and prison. It's a serious issue, with major consequences for innocent individuals arrested by the police -- and who then have an arrest record that shapes how they are treated by police and other institutions.

CopyLeft 2013 Elvin K. Wyly. Except where otherwise noted, this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License

Litigation & Advocacy

New York Civil Liberties Union (2012). Stop-and-Frisk 2011. New York: New York Civil Liberties Union.

New York Civil Liberties Union (2012). Stop and Frisk: The Facts. New York: New York Civil Liberties Union.

John Schmitt, Kris Warner, and Sarika Gupta (2010). The High Budgetary Cost of Incarceration. Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Theory

Jeffrey Fagan and Garth Davies (2000). "Street Stops and Broken Windows: Terry, Race, and Disorder in New York City." Fordham Urban Law Journal 28(2), 457-506.

Jeffrey Fagan and Tracey L. Meares (2008). "Punishment, Deterrence, and Social Control: The Paradox of Punishment in Minority Communities." Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 6, 173-229.

Cheryl Gowar (2008). Globalization and the Transformation of Citizenship. Ph.D. Dissertation. New Brunswick, NJ: Department of Geography, Rutgers University.

Police Perspectives and Mainstream Criminology

Anthony A. Braga, Andrew V. Papachristos, and David M. Hureau (2012). Crime Prevention Research Review No. 7: Police Programs to Prevent Crime in Hot Spot Areas. Washington, DC: Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice.

John Tierney (2013). "Prison Population Can Shrink When Police Crowd Streets." New York Times, January 25.

City Comptroller John Liu at a protest against the New York City Police Department's "Stop and Frisk" policy, June 2012. Source: Photograph by John Good, distributed via Wikimedia Commons and reproduced here under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

References

Alexander, Michelle (2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press.

Hackworth, Jason (2007). The Neoliberal City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Sampson, Robert J. (2012). Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wacquant, Loic (2008). Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Analysis of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Wacquant, Loic (2001). "Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh." Punishment & Society 3(1), 95-133.

Wilson, William Julius (1987). The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

SAS Code for Preliminary Results

January 11, 2013

libname nypd "g:\nypd";

options linesize=130;

proc contents data=nypd.stop2007; run;

proc contents data=nypd.stop2008; run;

proc contents data=nypd.stop2009; run;

proc contents data=nypd.stop2010; run;

*************************************;

*Data cleaning procedures to reconcile mismatches;

*between character and numeric variables and other;

*technical inconsistencies across years. NYPD;

*documentation specifies that variable coding is consistent;

*for 2006 to 2010 -- making it impossible to match with 2003;

*2004 and 2005 data. 2006 data, however, have more than a dozen additional;

*inconsistencies beyond those corrected in the code below. Therefore, we will confine our database to;

*stop-and-frisk activities from 2007 to 2010 inclusive;

data nypd.new2007 (compress=yes);

set nypd.stop2007;

length x_stname $ 32;

x_stname=stname;

x_htft=0; x_htft=ht_feet;

x_htin=0; x_htin=ht_inch;

x_beat=0; x_beat=beat;

x_post=0; x_post=post;

x_pct=0; xpct=pct;

x_timest=0; x_timest=timestop;

x_datest=0; x_datest=datestop;

x_repcmd=0; x_repcmd=repcmd;

x_revcmd=0; x_revcmd=revcmd;

x_addpct=0; x_addpct=addrpct;

length x_xcoord 7 x_ycoord 7;

x_xcoord=0; x_xcoord=xcoord;

x_ycoord=0; x_ycoord=ycoord;

drop pct timestop repcmd revcmd addrpct xcoord ycoord ht_feet ht_inch beat post datestop stname;

run;

data nypd.new2008 (compress=yes);

set nypd.stop2008;

length x_stname $ 32;

x_stname=stname;

x_htft=0; x_htft=ht_feet;

x_htin=0; x_htin=ht_inch;

x_beat=0; x_beat=beat;

x_post=0; x_post=post;

x_pct=0; xpct=pct;

x_timest=0; x_timest=timestop;

x_datest=0; x_datest=datestop;

x_repcmd=0; x_repcmd=repcmd;

x_revcmd=0; x_revcmd=revcmd;

x_addpct=0; x_addpct=addrpct;

length x_xcoord 7 x_ycoord 7;

x_xcoord=0; x_xcoord=xcoord;

x_ycoord=0; x_ycoord=ycoord;

drop pct timestop repcmd revcmd addrpct xcoord ycoord ht_feet ht_inch beat post datestop stname;

run;

data nypd.new2009 (compress=yes);

set nypd.stop2009;

length x_stname $ 32;

x_stname=stname;

x_htft=0; x_htft=ht_feet;

x_htin=0; x_htin=ht_inch;

x_beat=0; x_beat=beat;

x_post=0; x_post=post;

x_pct=0; xpct=pct;

x_timest=0; x_timest=timestop;

x_datest=0; x_datest=datestop;

x_repcmd=0; x_repcmd=repcmd;

x_revcmd=0; x_revcmd=revcmd;

x_addpct=0; x_addpct=addrpct;

length x_xcoord 7 x_ycoord 7;

x_xcoord=0; x_xcoord=xcoord;

x_ycoord=0; x_ycoord=ycoord;

drop pct timestop repcmd revcmd addrpct xcoord ycoord ht_feet ht_inch beat post datestop stname;

run;

data nypd.new2010 (compress=yes);

set nypd.stop2010;

length x_stname $ 32;

x_stname=stname;

x_htft=0; x_htft=ht_feet;

x_htin=0; x_htin=ht_inch;

x_beat=0; x_beat=beat;

x_post=0; x_post=post;

x_pct=pct;

x_timest=timestop;

x_datest=0; x_datest=datestop;

x_repcmd=repcmd;

x_revcmd=revcmd;

x_addpct=addrpct;

length x_xcoord 7 x_ycoord 7;

x_xcoord=xcoord;

x_ycoord=ycoord;

drop pct timestop repcmd revcmd addrpct xcoord ycoord ht_feet ht_inch beat post datestop stname;

run;

data nypd.master(compress=yes);

set

nypd.new2007

nypd.new2008

nypd.new2009

nypd.new2010;

run;

proc contents data=nypd.master; run;

proc freq data=nypd.master;

tables race*frisked

race*searched

race*arstmade;

run;

proc freq data=nypd.master;

tables race;

where (arstmade="Y") and (pistol="Y" or riflshot="Y" or asltweap="Y" or machgun="Y");

run;

Preliminary Results

Between 2007 and 2010, more than 2 million people were stopped and questioned by NYPD officers. Officers "frisked" about half of the suspects, searched about 200 thousand of those, and made about 135 thousand arrests. Police officers reported finding guns on 2,684 suspects.

Number of stops per gun found:

817.7

"In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don't. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color 'criminals' and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination -- employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service -- are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it."

Michelle Alexander (2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, quote from p. 2.

Red: significant spatial clusters of older-than-average Black men stopped, frisked, searched and arrested. Blue: significant spatial clusters of younger-than-average Black men stopped, frisked, searched, and arrested.

Writing

I've started organizing a few notes and brainstorms. Look in this directory from time to time for updates...

Brett Stoudt (2013). "2011 Police Stops." New York: Public Science Project, City University of New York.

New!

All stops have been geocoded, along with a limited selection of other variables from the full database. Download this zip file, unzip to "C:\DATA\NYPD," and begin exploring patterns by race, ethnicity, and arrest/summons/innocent status...