Stop and Frisk Has Lowered Crime in Other Cities
Dennis C. Smith is a professor of public policy at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. He has been a paid consultant for the New York Police Department in litigation involving stop and frisk.
New York was the leader in showing that police officers could do more than solve crimes; they could reduce them with more active techniques.
Updated July 19, 2012, 2:03 PM
My own research and a growing body of police studies show that stopping and questioning is an effective crime deterrent.
In 1990, New York had 527,257 victims of “serious crimes.” In 2011, there were 106,064. Murders dropped in that period from 2,262 to 504.
Research has converged on the conclusion that a shift from reactive to proactive policing by the N.Y.P.D. has played the crucial role in what the criminologist Franklin Zimring called a “Guinness Book of World Records crime drop.” Starting with community policing under Mayor David Dinkins, and greatly intensifying under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani with the Compstat system’s intensive monitoring of crime, the city flouted the leading theory that police cannot reduce crime but can only respond to it.
While crime rose in many large cities over the past decade, it continued to decline in New York City. Zimring singles out the use of focused vigilance with “hot spot” policing, which began in 2002, as a particularly plausible explanation. Our research shows that a central element of that approach is the increased use of stop and frisk in high-crime neighborhoods.
Data from the few cities that report police stops show their effectiveness. My trend analysis with SUNY Albany professor Robert Purtell found that the increased use of stops correlated significantly with accelerating drops in most of the major crimes. A Harvard study of policing in Los Angeles under William Bratton, when crime dropped significantly, reported a surge in stops by the L.A.P.D. (with per capita stop rate higher than N.Y.P.D.).
According to recent news accounts, when Philadelphia was making stops at a higher rate per capita than New York, crime declined, but violent crime began to rise when the stops were reduced after a consent decree following a legal challenge.
The Supreme Court has ruled that police do not have to wait until a crime has been committed but can make stops based on suspicion that a crime is about to occur. Police have great discretion to deal with behavior that arouses their suspicion. That is fortunate because such stops have been shown to be an effective tool for reducing crime, and there is no clear prevention alternative.
This is most beneficial for black and Hispanic communities that experience the greatest victimization rates, and particularly for young black and Hispanic males. They are disproportionately victims and perpetrators of violent crime. As a result of active crime-prevention techniques like stop and frisk, they are being arrested and imprisoned at a drastically lower rate. The number of inmates from New York City in state prisons is down 42 percent since 2000, while the rest of the state showed a 17 percent increase. This too is an important claim for the effectiveness of police stops.