Stop, question, and frisk
"Stop, question, and frisk" is a New York City policy whereby police stop suspicious-looking people, based on a criminal profiling model which includes factors such as race. Supporters claim the policy has reduced violent crime, particularly crime against minorities such as blacks and Hispanics. Opponents say that police stop minorities too much more (on a percentage basis) than the white majority.
Dylan Matthews of the Washington Post said,
- "Stop, question and frisk" is an NYPD policy wherein police will detain and question pedestrians, and potentially search them, if they have a "reasonable suspicion" that the pedestrian in question “committed, is committing, or is about to commit a felony or a Penal Law misdemeanor."[1]
Proportionality dispute
Critics of the NYPD stop-question-frisk policy claim that since blacks are stopped twice as often than their representation in the census (and whites one third as often), the policy is discriminatory. That is the chief reason given by a judge in August 2013 before the city council voted to create an inspector general to oversee the program.
Supporters of the policy cite statistics like the following, which suggest instead that blacks are being stopped significantly less often than their crime rate warrants:
- "... the National Institute for Justice (the Department of Justice’s research arm) ... concluded that 'black pedestrians were stopped at a rate that is 20 to 30 percent lower than their representation in crime-suspect descriptions.'"[1]
RAND said,
- "the magnitude of the disparities was considerably less than the raw statistics indicate. For example, according to the raw statistics, white pedestrians were frisked in 29 percent of stops, but those white pedestrians stopped in circumstances similar to black suspects were frisked 42 percent of the time, slightly less than the rate for black suspects (45 percent)."[2]
- Over the years, researchers have proposed a range of standards against which to compare the race distribution of police stops. For instance, investigators have argued that with race-neutral policing the race distribution of police stops should match that of the residential population in the city, or the race of arrestees, or that of crime suspects. [2]
