More stop-and-frisks, please
We are longtime critics of the explosion of stop-and-frisk under Mike Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Ray Kelly. But unless it is abused, stop-and-frisk is a good tactic for police. And the same data that showed the tactic being rampantly overused a few years ago strongly suggests that it is being underused today.
As social scientists, we try to base our opinions on evidence. Using data, we can easily demonstrate that under Bloomberg’s administration, stop-andfrisk became a numbers game. Quotas were the name of the game for cops. Whether with summonses, arrests or stops, the police were abusing their power due to the enforcement of top-down, numbers-driven edicts.
Our research in two separate surveys, in 2008 and 2012, and other data clearly show the abuse of stop and frisk in those years. Our 2012 survey of retired NYPD officers of all ranks — which was cited in the federal stop-and-frisk case, Floyd vs. City of New York, and published in the peer-reviewed journal Public Administration Review — indicates that prior to 1995, only 9.1% of officers felt high pressure to write stop and frisk reports. This number skyrocketed to 35.1% in the Bloomberg years.
That same survey indicates that officers felt less pressure to obey the law, dropping from 46.9% feeling high pressure to obey during the Giuliani administration to 35.7% under Bloomberg. This is a lethal combination: high pressure to write stopand-frisk reports combined with lower pressure to obey the constitutional rights of the people being stopped.
Ultimately, these pressures led to nearly 700,000 stops in a single year under Bloomberg.
Before Bloomberg took office, however, crime was already down 60% from early-1990s highs. Under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, cops conducted about 100,000 stops per year.
Importantly, there were no heavy quotas on stops as in the Bloomberg era. There was training throughout the entire department on when and why a cop should use the tactic. We know this because one of us was a captain that coordinated and conducted the training.
Today, crime is beginning to inch upward. Year to date, major crime reports are up about 17% and shootings have increased over 20%.
Police officers should have the discretion to do what is necessary. Yet at this point, with a federal monitor overseeing the department, the NYPD is conducting roughly 10,000 stops per year. Rather than seeing a top-down numbers game to drive stops up, we risk seeing a topdown numbers game to hold them down.
It seems clear that judicious use of stop-andfrisk combined with other effective police tactics is the prudent move. NYPD needs to ramp it up a notch — without abusing its power.
Every forcible stop must have individualized reasonable suspicion. The NYPD and watchdog groups must carefully monitor the race of those being stopped.
Importantly, this tactic alone is insufficient to get guns off the streets since very few stops uncover guns. Stops must be combined with other successful tactics such as intensive interrogation of arrestees, working with the feds to curb gun-running,gunbuy-backprogramsandcommunity partnerships. Partnerships will be more successful if stop-and-frisk is not abused. That is, people will more likely “say something” if they “see something” when police are working with them, not abusing them.