Police street stops down by 30 percent
Cops: Stats on more Blacks being stopped due to various factors
Boston Police stopped nearly 30% fewer people on the street last year as the pandemic and protests over policing raged.
The cops stopped 10,224 people in 2020 as part of 5,717 “FIOs” — Field Interrogation and Observation encounters, which is the Boston Police Department term for stopping someone on the street. That’s down from 14,444 people stopped during 8,337 FIOs in 2019.
That’s a 29.2% drop year over year in the number of people stopped. The number of people stopped had been about level since 2016, at or a little below 15,000, after a sharp downward trend from a peak of 55,684 in 2008.
Last year was a complex one for policing, as the coronavirus pandemic changed the way people act and interact and also shifted criminal patterns in the city. At the same time, starting in late spring, protests happened nearly daily over racial issues and policing.
Black people continue to account for an outsized number of the stops, as 62.3% of the people were Black, as compared to 30.5% white. That disparity is down slightly from past years: in 2019, 69.1% of those stopped were Black, after it was 65.1% in 2018.
Boston is about 22% Black overall, per city statistics.
The police department cautions people not to draw conclusions about racial disparities from the raw data.
“There are many other complicated factors such as neighborhood crime, police deployments, and neighborhood social disadvantage, as well as individual factors such as criminal history and prior interactions that are correlated with the racial distribution of FIO subjects,” the cops said in a statement. “Determining racial disparities in BPD FIO practices requires careful statistical analyses before any firm conclusions can, or should, be drawn.”
The department did an analysis in 2014, and found that at the time, controlling for those other factors, they were stopping Black people at higher rates than would be expected.
In 2020, most of the people stopped — 61.4% — were between the ages of 18 and 34. Of the people stopped, 6.8% were younger than that. The data says “probable cause” led to 32% of the stops, “reasonable suspicion” to 28.7%, “encounter” to 20.7% and “intel” to 18.5%.
The department said its officers frisked or searched 31.4% of the people who they stopped last year, though 10.4% of the data is missing.
In recent years, police brass such as former Commissioner William Gross have touted the department’s declining numbers of arrests and stops as a positive alongside the city’s overall crime stats, which continue to trend downward overall.