Stop, Frisk, and Assault? Racial Disparities in Police Use of Force During Investigatory Stops

Abstract

Black civilians are more likely to be stopped by police than white civilians net of relevant factors. Less is known about whether or not racial inequalities exist in police use of force during stops. Using data on over 2 million police stops in New York City from 2007 to 2014 and drawing on literatures on race, policing, and the Black Lives Matter movement, we test hypotheses regarding the associations between race, civilian behavior, age, and police use of force. We also investigate whether recent reforms reduced any observed inequality in police violence during stops. Findings show that Black and White civilians experience fundamentally different interactions with police. Black civilians are particularly more likely to experience potential lethal force when police uncover criminal activity and this disparity is greatest for black youth compared to white youth. Overall, if there were no racial disparities in police use of force, we estimate that approximately 61,000 fewer stops of black civilians would have included police use of force and 1,000 fewer stops would have included potential lethal force from 2007 to 2014. Furthermore, while reform efforts substantially reduced the number of stops annually, inequalities in police use of force persist.

American Policing and the Danger Imperative

“…Instead, longstanding associations between race, place, violence, and criminality perpetuate the funneling of police into minority communities (Anderson 2012;Capers 2009). As a result, Black Americans continue to disproportionately experience police stops, searches, arrests, and uses of force (Epp et al 2014;Gaston 2019;Kramer and Remster 2018), virtually guaranteeing that those most likely to be perceived as suspicious, violent, and criminal will be those most likely to encounter police primed for threat (Eberhardt et al 2004;Goff et al 2014). In turn, the concentration of police in Black communities contributes to decreased mental and physical health (Sewell and Jefferson 2016;Sugie and Turney 2017), lower educational attainment (Legewie and Fagan 2019), and disengagement from key social institutions and the labor market (Brayne 2014).…”

Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System: Prevalence, Causes, and a Search for Solutions

“…Once they had stopped a suspect, New York City police officers were more likely to use nonweaponized force against Black and Hispanic suspects than against White suspects, even after controlling for variables like the crime rate in the precinct, suspect demeanor, and the presence of a weapon (Morrow, White, & Fradella, 2017). They were also more likely to use potentially lethal force (i.e., draw a gun) against Black than White suspects (Kramer & Remster, 2018). Disparities in police officers drawing their weapons translated into disparities in shootings; in 213 metropolitan areas; police officers were more likely to shoot Black than White suspects, even when controlling for racial differences in criminal activity (Scott, Ma, Sadler, & Correll, 2017).…”

Mano Suave–Mano Dura: Legitimacy Policing and Latino Stop-and-Frisk

“…Herbert and colleagues (2017) identify three contemporary policing models: aggressive patrol, harm reduction, and coercive patrol. Aggressive patrol is a dominant form of policing in the United States, as seen through the legacy programs of intense surveillance (Harcourt 1998); police violence and stop-and-frisk strategies (Kramer and Remster 2018; Rios 2011; Simmons 2014); big data policing (Brayne 2017); aggressive enforcement of minor crimes among the poor (Wacquant 2009); criminalizing poverty through fines, fees, and costs (Harris 2016); and intrusion and arrest as deterrence (Parenti 2003). Other scholars describe this aggressive patrol as the new policing model (Fagan et al 2016), arguing that it grants law enforcement broad powers to control and intervene in the lives of marginalized populations and has had detrimental impacts on communities subjugated on the basis of race and class (Soss and Weaver 2017).…”