User:Angelalin79/Terry Stop

Miscellaneous clarifications + court cases

Terry stops were first created as an investigative tactic. However, in the past 20 years, it has turned into a deliberate strategy instead to control crime. Because officers usually do not have supervision when they encounter civilians, whether or not they stop them is up to the officer’s discretion. Police officers primarily use situational factors based on criminal behavior to determine if a stop is needed. In essence, when they witness a person behaving suspiciously or violating the law, they will stop them. Other factors influencing decision making include personal attitudes and the administration decision making model where the officer works. It is possible for racial profiling to occur on a systematic level. The three modes of primary sources that the Court accepts in order to determine suspiciousness are information obtained from other sources, information based on the suspect’s appearance and behavior, and the time and place of the suspect. Officers can define what they believe is normal, and if and how the suspect deviates from this normalcy. Reasonable suspicion has been used for actions like standing in the wrong place, nervousness, exceptional calmness, or walking quickly in another direction. Past experiences of officers may evolve to suspect behaviors that are usually as innocuous as crime. For instance, social interactions such as hugging or handshakes can be perceived as a drug deal. Before 1968, law required that there needed to be substantial evidence in order to impede liberty. While seizures required substantial evidence, the Fourth Amendment did not protect consensual encounters. During the Terry case, the Supreme Court found that to protect the police officer from weapons, the police should have the power to search, even without probable cause. The Terry stop operates under the assumption that though stop and frisk is an intrusion, it pales in comparison to the possibility of harm.

Current protocols regarding the legality of Terry stops do not account for possible implicit bias of officers, especially since it is difficult to prove. The system therefore provides legitimacy to racially skewed decisions.

The Adams v. Williams case set a precedent in that police did not need a first person observation but could get information from a confidential informant instead. With regards to this case, Justice Marshall states, “Today’s decision invokes the specter of a society in which innocent citizens may be stopped, searched, and arrested at the whim of police officers who have only the slightest suspicion of improper conduct.”

In Pennsylvania v. Mimms, two police officers gave Mimms a ticket for driving a car with expired car tags. When they asked him to step out, they realized that he had a gun, causing them to promptly arrest him. The Court ruled in favor of the arrest, citing the idea of officer safety as their reasoning. Dissenting justices found that this furthers the expansion of Terry. Since the officers were allowed to ask Mimms to step out of the car, this set a precedent in that officers could now ask citizens to perform actions through warrantless intrusion without justification.

90% of individuals who are stop-and-frisked in New York City were free to leave afterwards. This demonstrates that they were not about to do serious criminal activity, which goes against Terry’s purpose of preventing serious crime.

The broken windows theory postulates that smaller offenses like loitering, drinking in public, and prostitution, lead to and are indicative of larger scale crime. Broken windows policing encourages the arrests of people who are conducting low level offenses for the purpose of preventing social disorder. In some communities, the appearance of disrepair does not necessarily mean that larger crime is occurring.

Racial disparities

Police officers may develop schemas after continuously being exposed to certain environments, like high crime minority neighborhoods, which can lead to their association of crime with race instead of suspicious behavior. Officers who have been in the police force for longer are more likely to have suspicions based on non behavioral reasons. Even forms of American culture that perpetuate negative stereotypes such as African Americans being violent can cause those who consume them to associate Black people with these stereotypes, even if they do not believe them, making implicit bias a possible factor in arrests. Black and Hispanic people are more likely to be targeted, and are more likely to be stopped than their local population percentage and their relative crime rates suggest. High police surveillance in impoverished communities results in increased rates of arrests and punitive policing, causing an increase in mass incarceration even in periods of time when the crime rates are decreasing. Terry stop regulations vary per area. Areas with high crime, like public housing, require less evidence for someone to be stopped. Because more Black and Hispanic people tend to live there, they will be stopped more often. In areas that are perceived to have high crimes, more police are deployed, which results in higher arrest rates, which are then used to justify more policing. When controlling for location based stops, Goel found that white people were more likely to have a weapon than Black or Hispanic people. Grogger and Ridgeway found that the same proportion of racial groups were stopped during the day and at night, suggesting that stop decisions were not based on the physical appearance of the driver. However, when it came to the post stop outcomes, black people are more likely to be held longer. With regards to marijuana, white people were 50% more likely to be dismissed on the charge, in comparison to black people. The National Research Council states that “more research is needed on the complex interplay of race, ethnicity, and other social factors in police-citizen interactions.”

Kramer and Remster found that there is a 27 percent increase in likelihood of black civilians experiencing force at a stop compared to a white person, and a 28 percent increase in likelihood that the officer would draw their gun. Even when the police did not stop the civilians on account of criminal behavior, black civilians are still 29 percent more likely to experience force compared to their white counterparts. Young civilians are also more likely to experience force compared to older civilians. Between 1996 and 2000, there was a disproportionate number of complaints regarding an officer’s use of force by African Americans in New York City. Governmental and nongovernmental organizations investigations have confirmed that police-perpetrated abuse has affected a sizeable number of civilians, especially people of color. Vrij and Winkel state that because black and white people have different styles of nonverbal communication, officers are more likely to interpret the actions of black people as fidgety, to use a greater range of voice and pitch, and to avoid eye contact with the officer, which causes the officer to treat them with suspicion.

A stronger police presence and more respect towards the residents are simultaneously desired in poor, minority neighborhoods. According to Cooper, police officers will attempt to use their power to enforce their masculinity. A majority of police officers are men, and the majority of civilians stopped are also men. Because of this, police officers are susceptible to the phenomena of the culture of honor stance and hypermasculinity, in which they are more prone to physical aggression in order to protect their social standing. This can result in police brutality, especially towards men of color. This can also explain why police officers tend to punish for disrespect, as a question of their authority is a challenge to their manhood.

Immigration does not have a positive correlation with crime, but immigrants are disproportionately enforced, stopped, and arrested within their racial/ethnic communities. Immigrants from racial and ethnic communities tend to be more unaware of what to do when stopped by the police, which is something that officers can take advantage of. After being stopped more often, immigrants may hold distrust towards the police. Because immigrant children feel that they are always viewed with suspicion, they begin to believe that they actually are a criminal.

In Riverland, California, gang-related Latinos have an inherent distrust of the police trying to build trust, since they believe that police officers are trying to gain something instead of protect them. Some police officers believe that this stop-and-frisk is for the sake of protecting the community and preventing youth members from joining gang related activity. For this purpose, police officers track Latino people using data like photos, frequent stops, and social media to figure out gang-associated activities, which often results in more overall stops for Latinos.

Effects

Usage of Force

There is not enough research on the use of force after drivers are stopped by the police in stop, question, and frisk practices. Black and Hispanic minorities experience a “double jeopardy,” in which they are both more likely to be stopped by police, due to racial profiling, and more likely to experience disproportionate force from the police. Acts of police force cause injury, death, civil litigation, public outrage, civil disorder, and a distrust towards the police.

Eric Garner and NYPD, Freddie Gray and the Baltimore police, and Michael Brown and the Ferguson police are notable examples of police force at Terry Stops that ended tragically. Although the deaths resulting from Terry stops are well known, much less is known about the police force used that do not end in serious injury or loss of life.

Morrow et al. studied NYPD’s SQF (stop, question, and frisk) records in 2010 to determine the frequency of force used at stops and whether the citizen’s race/ethnicity was a factor in the decision to use force. SQF tactics were found to disproportionately target minorities, regardless of control over variables like social and economic factors, precinct crime rates, and neighborhood racial or ethnic composition. SQF tactics did not seem to actually address crime either, as only 6% of stops yielded an arrest and only .15% of stops yielded a gun. In 2013, 44% of young minority New Yorkers had been stopped by NYPD nine or more times.

Using the US Census Bureau’s data from 2012, Morrow et al analyzed racial/ethnic disparities in the use of force among NYPD. Force was classified as hands, suspect on ground, suspect against wall, weapon drawn, weapon pointed, baton, handcuffs, pepper spray, and other; these were then categorized as no force, physical/non-weapon force, and weapon force. They found that non-weapon force occurred in 14.1% of SQF. However, when this was further separated by racial categories, while for Whites, only .9% experienced non-weapon force, 7.6% Blacks and 5.0% Hispanics experienced non-weapon force, eight to nine times more likely than Whites. There is a possibility that these results are due to implicit biases of police officers, which could be shaped by previous experiences in the workforce.

Psychological and Emotional Harm

A stop and frisk can be damaging to communities. Kwate and Threadcraft argue that Stop and Frisk is a public health problem and works to “produce bodies that are harassed, stressed and resource deprived, if not altogether dead.” Stop and Frisk creates an environment of fear that alters the behaviors of a community’s inhabitants and limits their freedom of action. The police conduct pat-downs that intrude upon the privacy of the individual, and can result in escalation through physical or sexual violence. During this process, officers sometimes use profanity and discriminatory slurs. Because of this, residents often have anger, fear, or distrust towards the police.

For those with mental disorders and disabilities, pat-downs can be traumatic, especially for those with sensory disorders. Those who have suffered through sexual trauma, which is prevalent among men with criminal justice histories and black people in poorer urban areas, can relive their trauma through the invasive procedure, resulting in stress, depression, and anxiety. This practice also increases the possibility of sexual exploitation or assault, especially in communities that are more vulnerable, like black and poor sex workers and sex trafficking victims. Because ways of transporting drugs have evolved, some police officers utilize methods such as stripping the civilian and searching their body for drugs, which can be traumatizing for both users and nonusers of drugs. Civilians have also reported that police officers often wait until their quota is filled up to bring the arrested civilians back to stations. Civilians must stay in the back of the van, which often was missing seats, for hours on end and packed with 15 or 16 people, without access to the bathroom.

In a study conducted by Cooper et al, young men who do not use drugs stated that they feel uncomfortable when stopped by a police officer because they were afraid that “unnecessary violence or life disruption was imminent during every police stop.” Those who have been stopped more often develop more allostatic load, resulting in low self esteem and despair. When residents of a community know they are being treated both unfairly, and unfairly due to their social identity, they are more likely to anticipate stigma and rejection due to their race. Marginalized communities that experience recurring injustice from the police distrust them and become more cynical of them, resulting in legal cynicism, which in turn results in decreased cooperation and respect toward the legal system. This loss of faith in the system causes depressed civic and political engagement. Community residents are less likely to call for the police to help when they believe the police are not on their side, instead turning towards other community members. This distrust towards police is passed down from generation to generation, otherwise known as legal socialization, as a means of protection, forcing the community to live in perpetual fear.

Items that are discovered during pat-downs that are incriminating, like clean needles, condoms, and other harm reduction tools, are used less to prevent arrest; this then is a danger to public health.

Solutions

Terry was originally created to prevent imminent armed robberies. Hutchins wishes to narrow the scope of Terry, and prevent certain police encounters from happening in the first place, and proposes to limit the reach of Terry stops so that officers may not stop someone based on a possessory offense under nothing more than reasonable suspicion.

Goel calls for the optimization of stop relating to criminal possession of a weapon (CPW). Because having a lower threshold of evidence to stop someone disproportionately affects Black and Hispanic people, optimization would result in less racial disparities for terry stops. Goel examines NYPD’s three million stops for cases where the stop yielded an individual involved with criminal possession of a weapon. In approximately 43% of these stops, there was less than 1% of a chance that the suspect had a weapon. Goel found that five stop circumstances are more likely to increase the likelihood of recovering a weapon for a stop: suspicious weapon, sights and sounds of criminal activity, suspicious bulge, witness report, and ongoing investigation.

Kwate and Threadcraft advocate for three ways to address Stop and Frisk, as a public health issue. First, they believe the health department’s city wide health surveys should include Stop and Frisk encounters, so that the data can be used to investigate health outcomes of a Stop and Frisk. Second, within 24 hours, reports of traumatic stops should be received by the city. Third, a registry should be created in which communities can report police encounters.

Many police departments all over the country have adapted courtesy policing as a response to criticism of racial profiling and police violence. Courtesy policing is when the police build rapport with the community through respect and friendliness. Legitimacy policing is a method used by police officers to interact with the community, where, in order to achieve a desired outcome, police officers utilize both punitive and courtesy strategies. While courtesy policing is used to gain trust and collect information, the punitive approach is used whenever it appears that the stopped people did not comply, making the police more aggressive; these approaches are adapted on a shifting continuum to the actions of the people they stop. People of color are more likely to see this community policing as degrading.

Cooper believes that in order to address hypermasculinity, which increases physical aggression in the police force, officers should be taught to not use command presence (where they use an authoritative tone of voice or even become physically violent) in situations where it is not needed. It should still be used when the officer is in a dangerous situation, but not when a situation does not require force. Instead of the officer punishing the harm doer, the officer should instead make it a goal to have a full understanding of the situation. Police training culture should not emphasize aggressive approaches and instead advocate for a more patient approach. An emphasis should be put on how to communicate with civilians who challenge their authority. Officers should also be made aware of any potential biases they may have.

Torres calls for more comprehensive data in stop and frisk reports. Specifically, since Latinos can also be white and black, current data is not as accurate.