Stop & Frisk and the Politics of Crime in Chicago
Abstract
This book examines the role of stop & frisk as one of America’s predominant crime control strategies. Historically, policing focused on responding quickly to reports of crime. Beginning in the mid-1990s, American policing moved toward proactive strategies, hoping to deter crime from occurring in the first place. In theory, stop & frisk promotes deterrence in two ways: by increasing an offender’s risk of being caught and punished, and by discouraging the general public from considering offending in the first place. In law, stop & frisk was validated by the Supreme Court as a reasonable compromise between limiting the personal freedoms of Americans and recognizing the risks presented by an increasingly armed and crime-ridden society. Officers could frisk an individual for a weapon even without the traditional requirement of probable cause. This book investigates stop & frisk in actual practice. It examines its origins as Chicago’s predominant strategy for responding to violent crime. The story includes the political agendas of two mayors and four chiefs of police. Further chapters examined how stop & frisk played itself out on the streets of Chicago, and its impact on public opinion. The book also examines the views of police officers who did the work of stop & frisk, and an analysis of its impact on murders and shootings. A final chapter considers alternatives to stop & frisk as it was practiced in Chicago.
... "I CAN'T BREATHE" and the 2014 cellphone-generated video that exposed the encounter in which police officer Daniel Pantaleo choked Eric Garner to death now stand as a striking reminder of the intrusive nature and interpretative impact that policing practices have on ordinary residents. Before Pantaleo targeted Garner for selling individual cigarettes, cities like New York and Chicago legally authorized proactive policing strategies that increased the frequency of encounters between police and residents in areas city officials identify as crime hotspots (Baumgartner et al. 2018;Fagan et al. 2016;Skogan 2023). Disproportionately targeting Black men (Brunson 2007;Duck 2017;Gau and Brunson 2015;Kirk and Papachristos 2011), these intrusive police stops have prompted residents like Ramsey Orta to respond to the pervasive presence of police by using their cellphones to record police behavior. ...
... Police disproportionately enact stop-and-frisk in low-income Black communities -even after controlling for crime and other factors (Fagan et al. 2016). In a recent Chicago survey, 40 percent of older Black men and 70 percent of younger Black men reported being searched, threatened, handcuffed or injured by police 2023). Thus, for many Black men living in low-income urban neighborhoods, a less restrictive legal threshold for police stops has created a constant threat of police stopping and searching them. ...
... Similar conditions have continued under the administration of Police Superintendent David Brown and Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Despite policy revisions and police reforms, police contact remains a common experience among Black residents who live on Chicago's South and West sides (Skogan 2023;Vargas et al. 2020). ...
Over the past decade, recording technologies have enabled organized activists and ordinary residents to capture and circulate videos of police misconduct. Existing research focuses primarily, however, on organized activists who rely on formal training programs to record police behaviors. If formal programs train organized activists to capture police abuses on camera, how then do ordinary residents determine when they should record police behavior? Drawing on in-depth interviews with Black men who live in a Southside Chicago neighborhood, this study finds that residents’ recurrent interactions with police enable them to interpret officers’ words and actions as symbols of police misconduct, which, in subsequent exchanges, serve as signals to record events with their cellphones – what I term “camera cues.” Camera cues facilitate situated conceptions of legal authority that trigger residents’ distrust of police, reflecting the micro-dynamic connections between individuals’ legal consciousness and legal cynicism. Equipped with cellphones, residents scrutinize officers’ outward displays and police–citizen interactions to challenge police misconduct. While recording police behavior makes it possible at least occasionally to resist the dominance of legal authority, doing so often involves additional risks, including the destruction of their cellphones, verbal and physical threats, and arrests.
... A seemingly similar sea change occurred in Chicago in late 2015. In a span of months, pedestrian stops plummeted 85%, from more than 500,000 (20 stops per 100 Chicagoans per year) to fewer than 100,000 (3). Critics of stop and frisk applauded this shift as a victory for civil liberties (4), while others argued that it caused a crime wave (5). ...
... The end of stop and frisk in New York in 2014 increased scrutiny of pedestrian-stop practices in other major U.S. cities. We use the term "stop and frisk" in our title and introduction for reader familiarity; this is the term commonly used in the press and in the literature [e.g., (3)]. Of course, many, perhaps the majority, of pedestrian stops in Chicago did not involve searches or frisks [page 130 of (3)]. ...
... Just 5 months later, in January 2016, they made fewer than 8000. With Chicago's (city) population of approximately 2.7 million, this change meant that the annualized stop rate dropped from more than 20 per 100 Chicagoans per year to less than four per 100 Chicagoans per year ( Fig. 1) (3,13). ...
Critics of stop and frisk have heralded its recent demise in several large U.S. cities. Proponents of stop and frisk respond that when the practice ends, crime increases. Both groups typically assume that the end of stop and frisk reduces the number of police-civilian interactions. We find otherwise in Chicago: The decline in pedestrian stops coincided with an increase in traffic stops. Qualitative evidence suggests that the Chicago Police deliberately switched from pedestrian to traffic stops. Quantitative data are consistent with this hypothesis: As stop and frisk ended, Chicago Police traffic stops diverged (in quantity and composition) from those of another enforcement agency in Chicago, and the new traffic stops affected the same types of Chicagoans who were previously subject to pedestrian stops.
Objectives
This study investigates the impact of police stop and search encounters (SSEs) on knife injuries and homicides in public places in London. While prior research has studied SSE impact on crime in general, we focus specifically on SSE relations to weapon-related injuries and deaths: whether conducting more SSEs over time has reduced such crimes.
Methods
The study analyzes 15 years of data (183 months) from the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) in London, including 58,503 recorded knife injuries and 4.3 million police SSEs. Two quasi-experiments and Autoregressive (AR) models were employed to examine correlations between changes in SSE volumes and trends in knife injuries and homicides over time.
Results
AR models revealed statistically significant reductions in knife murders and injuries in response to increased SSEs. Specifically, if SSEs were conducted at the 2008–2011 rate of 45,000 per month, there would be an estimated 30 fewer knife murders per year. Additionally, changes in SSE frequency were associated with notable crime rate shifts. A 66% reduction in SSEs from May 2014 led to 44 more knife murders and 1276 more injuries than expected. Conversely, a 55% increase in SSEs in January 2018 resulted in 27 fewer knife injuries per month.
Conclusions
The results suggest that increased SSEs can significantly reduce knife-related injuries and homicides in public places. This reduction translates into preventable healthcare costs of approximately £216,000 per month. These findings highlight the potential effectiveness of formerly higher levels of SSEs in preventing knife crime, with one fewer injury occurring every day in London.
Politicians and pundits commonly tout campaigning on crime and policing as an effective strategy for winning elections. Yet, scholars have only recently started examining the contributions of both variables to voting. The available research shows that scholars disagree, however, about whether crime and policing, independently or jointly, increase or decrease voter turnout and whether race or ethnicity condition these relationships. We examine these issues with a spatial analysis of voter turnout in the 2023 and 2019 mayoral elections in Chicago. We find that, at the electoral precinct level, turnout is negatively associated with violent and property crime and with police stops. In contrast, it is positively associated with police misbehavior complaints. These relationships are net of spatial error, spatial lags, and common predictors of voter turnout. We also find that crime and policing jointly influence turnout and that several of the crime and policing relationships interact with the percentage of Black and Hispanic residents.
Americans, above all poor Black Americans, are subject to extraordinary levels of police violence, incarceration, and penal control—levels that exist nowhere else in the developed world. This article outlines a comparative, structural explanation of America's extraordinary penal state, pointing to the structural arrangements and historical processes that created it and keep it in place; describing how these political and economic structures differ from those of other nations; and indicating how the macro-structures of political economy interact with community-level processes of social ordering and informal social control to shape street-level practices of crime, policing, and punishment. The article goes beyond the existing “political economy and punishment” literature by broadening the explicandum to include America's extraordinary levels of criminal and police violence; by describing the interaction of social and penal controls; by detailing the negative social indicators associated with America's peculiar political economy; and by highlighting causal factors such as social control deficits, state capacity limitations, and the effect of neighborhood disorganization and danger on the actions of criminal justice officials.
As an issue for public debate, police stops are not new. In the United States, the Kerner Commission in 1968 identified controls as one of the triggers of the urban riots of the 1960s. In England, the riots in Brixton, South London, in 1981 followed the massive use of the ‘sus laws’ to search young Black men during Operation Swamp. In both countries, high-profile incidents bring the debate to the forefront with some regularity. Indeed, we are very familiar with some of the associated names: Rodney King; Eric Garner; Michael Brown; George Floyd.
Transatlantic policing is experiencing an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy, epitomised by public responses to the murders of George Floyd and Sarah Everard during the COVID-19 pandemic. Legitimacy is lost when the police either fail to protect the public or rely on coercion rather than consent to achieve that protection. Recovering Police Legitimacy challenges conventional criminological, political, and public solutions to the problem by approaching it from the bottom up, beginning with policing as a practice constituted by a unique set of excellences, skills, and characteristics.
The author draws on his experience as a police officer and on the serial fictions of James Ellroy, David Peace, and Nic Pizzolatto to characterise the practice in terms of heroic struggle, edgework, absolute sacrifice, and worldmaking. These characteristics provide an analytic tool for revolutionising our understanding of the relations among policing as a situated practice, public protection, and police legitimacy and for identifying the different levels at which legitimacy is undermined. His conclusion is that recovery is possible but will be slow in pace and incomplete in scope.
Written accessibly for students, police officers, policymakers, scholars, and anyone with an interest in police legitimacy, this is a groundbreaking study of a pressing social problem.
This chapter introduces the question of governance, as it relates to police officers’ use of their powers to stop members of the public, and mechanisms to ensure these practices are open to challenge, transparent and accountable. We highlight key definitional issues and gaps in the literature and outline the various legal frameworks at play across our European Police Stops COST Action network. The complexity of the governance of police stops is influenced by the legal system, the approach to policing, the political structure and types of governance, including state and non-governmental control mechanisms. Given that the role of these factors varies across countries, we have adopted a thematic and comparative approach in this volume. Having outlined this approach and its limitations, we provide a brief outline of the topics covered by the chapters in this volume.
Many U.S. cities witnessed both de-policing and increased crime in 2020, yet it remains unclear whether the former contributed to the latter. Indeed, much of what is known about the effects of proactive policing on crime comes from studies that evaluate highly focused interventions atypical of day-to-day policing, use cities as the unit of analysis, or cannot rule out endogeneity. This study addresses each of these issues, thereby advancing the evidence base concerning the effects of policing on crime. Leveraging two exogenous shocks presented by the onset of COVID-19 and social unrest following the murder of George Floyd, we evaluated the effects of sudden and sustained reductions in high-discretion policing on crime at the neighborhood level in Denver. Multilevel models accounting for trends in prior police activity, neighborhood structure, seasonality, and population mobility revealed mixed results. On one hand, large-scale reductions in pedestrian stops and drug-related arrests were associated with significant increases in violent and property crimes, respectively. On the other hand, fewer vehicle stops and disorder arrests did not affect crime. These results were not universal across neighborhoods. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of debates concerning the appropriate role of policing in the 21st century.
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