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Stop and Frisk: Continuity of Racial Control and Reconstructed Blackness

September 2019

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Natalie Byfield

St. John's University

This chapter looks at the human cost of the New York Police Department’s policy and practice of Stop and Frisk in New York City during the mayoral administration of Michael Bloomberg. It examines this policy within the historical context of the policing of and criminalization of blackness in the U.S. and the police’s role in the city’s history of racialized state violence. The chapter also identifies Stop and Frisk, as a more contemporary form of these historical racialization and criminalization practices. The chapter argues that, given the digital platform on which Stop and Frisk is deployed that transforms the information collected by police into data subjected to predictive analytics, Stop and Frisk is a window into the future of new forms of state control over meaning making about racial and ethnic categories of people, particularly Blacks and Latinos.

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