The claim that the NYPDs stop-and-frisk policies are a key element of effective crime control seems laughable once you actually look at the numbers produced by the policy. From 2004-2009, out of 2.8 million stops made by the police, fewer than 6 percent resulted in an arrest of any kind a rate that is actually lower than that which has been produced in other jurisdictions using random checkpoints. When it comes to finding guns, drugs or stolen property among the principal goals that defenders of the practice cite as justification for it the stops are even more inadequate, with guns being found in only 0.15 percent of all cases, and drugs or stolen property recovered in only 1.75 percent of all stops. In the heavily-policed Brownsville community of Brooklyn, arrests occur in fewer than 1 percent of all stops made, and out of 50,000 stops in the community just since 2006, only 25 guns have been recovered: thats a hit rate of about one-twentieth of a percent.
Among the reasons for such pathetic hit rates, Fagan notes that a disproportionate share of all stops are justified on police incident forms on the basis of vague and subjective reasons, such as an individual making furtive movements, being in a high crime area, or for other unspecified reasons. In those cases, which represent roughly half of all stops made, the hit rates are even worse than in the larger sample. In other words, as a crime-control tactic, stop-and-frisk is inefficient at best, downright irrational at worst. Officers are apparently suspecting people of criminal activity on the basis of clues and signals that are proving to be ill-informed. Yet rather than rethink their assumptions, they continue to use the same reasons for their racially-disparate stops year after year.
Interestingly, the racial disparities are even harder to explain when you consider what Fagan and a colleague discovered even as far back as the 1990s; namely, that as bad as the hit rates were overall for stops-and-frisks, they were actually far lower for persons of color. When searched, blacks and Latinos historically have been about a third less likely than their white counterparts to actually be found with illegal contraband or other evidence of criminal activity. Although the disparities in hit rates have been reduced since the 1990s, blacks stopped and searched are still nearly 10 percent less likely than their white counterparts to receive some kind of sanction (either arrest or a court summons) after being stopped by the NYPD. Far from suggesting that the cops are bending over backwards to be kind to African Americans, this fact suggests that still today, the police are quicker to suspect blacks for less legitimate reasons than they are whites, and thus, after searching them, less likely to actually find evidence of actual wrongdoing.
Furthermore, and as Fagan amply demonstrates, in what may well be the most rigorous statistical analysis ever performed on the subject of racial profiling, the correlation between police stops in a given precinct and reports of crimes in those precincts is generally pathetic. For violent crime, there is no significant correlation between reports of crime and the number or racial distribution of stops made, and the racial composition of a precinct alone actually predicts stops three times better than reported crimes. In other words, the fact that people of color commit the lions share of violent crime in New York cannot possibly justify the level of racial disproportionality in stops-and-frisks.
