Stop and Frisk Gun Reduction Breeds Disguised Harms

© 2001, 2010 Peter Free

 

Introduction

 

Street level "stop and frisk," an outgrowth of aggressive order maintenance policing, has proven itself to be a harmful solution to gun violence.  The tactic corrupts the reasonable suspicion stop sanctioned by Terry v. Ohio [1] in order to legitimate widespread, constitutionally indefensible "tossing" [2] of predominantly young and minority people in the quest for weapons.  As a result, officers harass politically disempowered demographic groups and create a confrontational psychology that takes, rather than preserves, life.

Stop and frisk escalates distrust and disrespect to hatred and violence.  It splits

society along ethnic and socioeconomic lines.  It demeans honorable law enforcement with excessive unguided discretion and does little to cope with gun violence.  Its negative consequences are masked beneath the mindless political rhetoric that disregards empirical fact in virtually all crime debate.  Stop and frisk tactics should be abandoned, and no prosecutor's office should condone them.

Conceptual Background

            Police have long suspected that potential criminal behavior can be nipped in the bud by descending upon a "disorderly" geographic area in force and intervening to confront even minor illegal activity. [3]  Presumably, the more intense this enforcement activity, the less likely potential offenders are to carry out criminal impulses or plans. The higher the number of contacts with miscreants, the higher the number of warrant and probable cause arrests.  The more numerous the frisks and searches, the larger the number of weapons and contraband seized.  With offenders and weapons temporarily off the streets, the crime rate presumably dips during the interim until they return.  When the community at large supports the crackdown, officers believe their actions validate community behavioral standards.

"Broken windows" theory, originated in 1982, formalizes these ideas.  It posits that disregarded disorder invites more serious crime. [4]  The theory encourages aggressive police action in areas prone to disorder [5] and decay.

New York City

A number of police departments around the country have implemented broken windows order maintenance policing.  New York's has been the most visible.  Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton initiated a quality-of-life order maintenance program in 1994. [6]  It was founded on the idea that proactive enforcement of misdemeanor laws against aggressive panhandling, graffiti writing, public drinking/urination, and subway turnstile jumping would reduce the social disorder that encourages more serious crime. [7]  In an effort to remove guns and other weapons from the street, the police department implemented a stop and frisk program.

In part, stop and frisk was an outgrowth of "community policing," a concept that seeks to integrate law enforcement agencies with the populations they serve. [8]  The New York City Police Department learned that community residents were more concerned about petty crime and disorder than they were about murder and armed robbery.  [9]  Therefore, the Department tried simultaneously to reduce fear and fight serious crime.

Police administrators reasoned that stopping people for minor order infractions would make it riskier for the criminally oriented to carry weapons in public.  Since Terry [10] had authorized frisks of exterior clothing for weapons when danger was reasonably suspected, the New York Police Department reasoned that legitimate “stop and frisk” would net a number of weapons if the tactic was used in high crime areas.  Without their weapons, potential offenders would commit fewer violent crimes. [11] The Department could win on both fronts.

Police supervisors were held accountable for obtaining effective results. Precinct commanders had to defend crime and enforcement statistics presented at biweekly meetings. [12] Some reasoned that this sort of accountability motivated commanders to impose informal quotas on their officers. [13]

Unexamined Premises

            Even before stop and frisk policy was implemented, potential problems should have been obvious.  It is not clear that a stop and frisk can have a significant or detectable impact on violent crime.  Most violent crime occurs where the police patrol function cannot get at it–indoors, often in private or quasi-private places.  It is only if one assumes that people will carry their weapons through public spaces to the site of their offense that stop and frisk has any chance of working.  Since weapons are so readily available in the United States, it is certainly not a given that the seizure of a proportionately few weapons will have any effect at all on crime.

Questions arise: (a) Are citizen-police interactions frequent enough to make even a small dent in weapons possession?  (b) Are there behavioral characteristics that efficiently identify offenders-to-be?  (c) Can police officers be trained and supervised to make these interventions in high numbers without stepping over constitutional lines?  (d) Are the perceptual gains occasioned by weapons seizures worth the costs to created by a directed and intrusive police presence in a free society?

Apparently Favorable Evidence from Kansas City

            Some encouragement for the New York City stop and frisk approach to weapons reduction came from Kansas City's gun reduction experiment in 1992.  The Kansas City Police Department increased patrols in a single district with the idea that if gun seizures increased, gun crime would decrease. [14] Unlike New York, Kansas City directed its effort at weapons inside vehicles on the assumption that the city's pedestrian traffic was

minimal and most people traveled by car. [15] Over a period of 29 weeks, the police department added 4,512 officer-hours and 2,256 patrol car-hours of overtime patrol to Beat 144. [16]  These patrol units did not respond to calls for service; they concentrated exclusively on patrol. [17]

The overtime officers seized 29 guns in addition to the 47 that regularly assigned units confiscated in the same beat.  One gun was seized per 84 patrol hours and one per 28 traffic stops. [18] Total gun seizures for the Beat increased 65 percent.  [19]  Gun crimes declined by 49 percent (a decrease of 83 offenses).  Total crime reports, however, did not decline.  Calls for service and calls about violence and disorder did not decrease.  And property and violent offenses were not reduced. [20]

 

 

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