The stop-and-frisk tactics that Blow and other civil libertarians condemn were championed by William J. Bratton, an innovative but controversial supercop whom Mayor Rudolph Giuliani appointed New York Police Department (NYPD) commissioner in 1994. Bratton became best known for his policy of zero-tolerance, “broken-windows” policing, which operates on the theory that when minor offenses are not dealt with, neighborhood crime will grow. Through this lens a man holding a brown paper bag that might contain an open alcoholic beverage looks like a possible challenge to the social order and should be stopped and frisked. Or an officer can interpret a “furtive” look by a person on the street as possibly relating to a crime; the person could be a lookout. The practice of stop-and-frisk rests on a 1968 Supreme Court decision that established the benchmark of “reasonable suspicion”—a standard lower than the “probable cause” benchmark used previously.
During the two years Bratton ran the NYPD, the record shows, homicides fell 44 percent and serious crime overall dropped 25 percent, and these numbers continued to fall after he left. But everywhere he’s been in charge, Bratton has been criticized by experts who contend that he has a gift for manipulating numbers. Sometimes crime statistics can be used to distract the public from actual problems, the way standardized test scores sometimes stand in the way of substantive education.
To young black and Hispanic males, stop-and-frisk and broken-windows policing can turn them into targets rather than ordinary citizens. In Harlem, George Lucas changed his route home from work to avoid a stretch of Seventh Avenue because of frequent brushes with police. “The inconvenience of walking out of my way still saves me the worry and frustration about being stopped,” said Lucas, twenty-eight.8
Another major Bratton innovation was to use computers and statistics to discover where and when crimes were most likely to occur and to saturate those places with police patrols at the right time. This technique was probably more effective at lowering the crime rate. After leaving the NYPD in 1997, Bratton, who had been competing for media attention with Giuliani, took the helm of the LAPD before entering the private sector. Stop-and-frisk, which has been used in other cities as well, remains a New York City mainstay and has left a coast-to-coast trail of civil justice controversies.
Jeffrey Fagan, a professor of law and public health at Columbia University, has noted that rates of gun and contraband seizures resulting from stop-and-frisks in New York “are no greater than would be produced simply by chance.” This finding turns the concept of reasonable suspicion on its head. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert provided some perspective: “From 2004 through 2009, city police officers stopped people on the street and checked them out three million times. Many were patted down, frisked, made to sprawl face down on the ground, or spread-eagle themselves against a wall or over the hood of a car. Nearly 90 percent of the people stopped were completely innocent of any wrongdoing.” While crime has been going down, he pointed out, “the number of people getting stopped has been going up.” Of 575,000 stops made in 2009, 504,594 were people who had “committed no crime, were issued no summonses, and were carrying no weapons or illegal substances.”9
“No one,” Herbert argued, “wants to stop the police from going after the bad guys.” But he also noted, “Blacks and Latinos are more likely to be stopped than whites, even in areas where there are low crime rates and where residential populations are racially or predominantly white.”10 Given the evidence, it’s difficult to contest the assumption that stop-and-frisk tactics can constitute an around-the-clock roundup of usual suspects, most of them black or brown.
Lieutenant Neal Griffin of the San Diego County, California, Police Department described how some of these procedures work on a real-life street. One of his pet peeves is what he refers to as the phony weapons charge. The way he explains it, an officer pulls over a young man and inside the car finds a toy bat—the kind often handed out on bat day at baseball stadiums around the country. If the driver fits a “certain demographic” and admits that he keeps the bat for self-defense, which is a common response, he’s in a world of trouble. “But don’t worry,” Griffin said. “Neither of us would be arrested for it because we’re 50-plus-year-old white guys…. But if you are 17–20, brown or black, stopped by the police and the above scenario plays out… the cuffs are going on and you’re getting booked. Bail is between five and twenty grand. If it’s Thursday, you’ll sit in jail until Tuesday.” And that’s if you can post bond. Typically, Griffin said, the prosecutor visits the arrested youth and points out that what he’s done is defined as a felony. “But I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said Griffin, acting out a role he knows so well. “My one-time offer…. You plead out today to a misdemeanor conviction… and I’ll let you walk out of here with time served and three years’ probation.” Or does the arrestee prefer to “sit in jail for the next 90 days or so and wait for a trial date?”11
If the young man takes the deal, Griffin noted, he’s surrendered his civil rights for three years. During that time, police can stop and search him solely because of his probationary status. Police can search his home too. And even if he finishes the three years with no new charges, he’ll be permanently stained by a criminal weapons conviction that will follow him the rest of his life, an indelible mark of Cain that will torpedo job applications and other efforts he might make to improve his situation. Prospective employers won’t see the specifics. They’ll just see a weapons conviction and conclude this is a bad-news gang kid who was caught carrying a gun.
In New York, the dark side of stop-and-frisk can be heard in the digital recordings of roll call secretly made by Officer Adrian School-craft at the Eighty-First Precinct in Brooklyn.12 The recordings were damning evidence that commanders had threatened to fire officers who didn’t write their share of summonses and conduct their share of stop-and-frisks. Schoolcraft’s evidence made it clear that the NYPD, while officially denying the existence of quotas, was punishing cops for not meeting quotas. At the same time, to boost their statistics, commanders refused to follow up on more serious criminal complaints and even went so far as to downgrade felonies such as rape to misdemeanors.13 If crime was down, then the cops in charge could climb the promotion ladder based on subterfuge. Meanwhile, cops on the street had an inaccurate picture of what was going on in their precinct because twisting the numbers took precedence over reporting reality. The aim was to aggressively harass residents for minor violations or no violations at all and to ignore serious offenses that would make the commanders look bad, thus steering officers into behavior that was precisely the opposite of their mission.
Schoolcraft, who was uniformly respected on the street, was targeted by his commanders. Eventually, he played the recordings, made in 2008 and 2009, for the Village Voice and also reported his findings to Internal Affairs. His superiors responded by ordering officers to burst into his home, handcuff him, and place him in a psychiatric ward, where he was held against his will for six days.14 The action was eerily reminiscent of the Soviet regime’s response to dissidents. When the hospital finally let Schoolcraft go, he was handed a bill for $7,000.
Placed on suspension without pay, he filed a $50 million lawsuit against the NYPD. There was no feasible way to deny what he’d recorded, and eventually, the department was forced to file internal charges against a commander, two sergeants, and two officers, based on his report. “This is a citywide problem. It is not limited to the 81st Precinct,” said Schoolcraft’s attorney, Jon Norinsberg.15