Mano Suave–Mano Dura Rios, Victor M.; Prieto, Greg; Ibarra, Jonathan M.
American sociological review,
02/2020, Letnik:
85, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Stop-and-frisk and other punitive policing practices disproportionately affect marginalized communities of color. In response to calls for reform, police departments have implemented community ...policing programs aimed at improving relations with racialized communities. This study examines how a police unit used courtesy and respect in its engagement with a criminalized population, gang-associated Latinos, while relying on the stop-and-frisk practice. Our study reveals contextual and situational contradictions between modern police departments’ attempts to establish legitimacy and the hegemonic practice of investigatory stops. Drawing on observations and interviews conducted during a ride-along study, we find that stop-and-frisk, simultaneously used with reform practices like courtesy policing, yield a paradoxical policing approach, “the legitimacy policing continuum.” Officers regularly articulate a goal of respectfully interacting with courtesy to build community and trust—what we term “the mano suave”—while practicing a dominant logic of crime prevention through punitive measures—what we term “the mano dura.” We argue that community and courtesy policing are drawn on strategically in interaction and ultimately intertwined with and constrained by the racial bias at the heart of punitive policing practices like stop-andfrisk.
In some urban neighborhoods, encounters with police have become one of the primary points of contact between disadvantaged citizens and their government. Yet extant scholarship has only just begun to ...explore how criminal justice interventions help to shape the political lives of the urban poor. In this article, we ask: What are the consequences of the increased use of stop-and-frisks (Terry stops) in disadvantaged neighborhoods for communities' engagement with the state? Relying on a novel measure of local citizen engagement (311 calls for service) and more than one million police stops, we find that it is not concentrated police surveillance per se that matters but, rather, the character of police contact. The concentration of police stops overall is associated with higher levels of community engagement, while at the same time, a high degree of stops that feature searches or the use of force, especially when they do not result in an arrest, have a chilling effect on neighborhood-level outreach to local government. Our article marks a first step toward understanding what concentrated policing means for the democratic life and political agency of American communities.
This Essay takes seriously the relevance of law enforcement effectiveness and the role of empiricism in understanding the constitutionality of the police practices at issue in the Floyd case and ...urban police practices more generally; it also recasts the debate a bit. A critical but obscured issue is the mismatch between the level of analysis at which the Supreme Court articulated the relevant test for constitutional justification of a stop-and-frisk in Terry v Ohio and the scale at which police today (and historically) engage in stop-and-frisk as a practice. To put this more succinctly, while the Court in Terry authorized police intervention in an individual incident—when the police officer possesses probable cause to believe that an armed individual is involved in a crime—in reality, stop-and-frisk typically is carried out by a police force en masse as a program. Although the constitutional framework is based on a one-off investigative incident, many of those who are stopped—the majority of them young men of color—do not experience the stops as one-off incidents. They experience them as a program to police them as a group, which is, of course, the reality. That is exactly what police agencies are doing. Fourth Amendment reasonableness must take this fact into account. I make an argument here about how we should approach this issue.
Between 2003 and 2014, the majority of people stopped under the New York Police Department's policy of stop-and-frisk were non-white. This led to charges of racial bias. This paper examines whether ...biases persist after a stop occurs. Data on 587,479 stops from 2010 are analyzed to examine differences by race for six outcomes: use of force, being frisked, being searched, being issued a summons, being arrested, and yielding a productive stop. Multilevel logistic models are then estimated to examine the effect of precinct-level residential racial composition and crime rates on the odds of the six outcomes. Results show that blacks and Latinos are more likely to be frisked and to have force used against them; however, this risk depends on precinct-level characteristics. A supplementary analysis of stops from 2014 shows that decreased reliance on stop-and-frisk reduces the odds of force being used against blacks and Latinos to non-significance.
Determine whether black and Latino pedestrians are more likely to be frisked or subjected to the use of force under New York City's stop-and-frisk program.
Inverse probability weighted regression ...adjustment and covariate exact matching were used on the New York City Police Department's stop-and-frisk data from 2008 to 2012 to estimate the average treatment effect on the treated (i.e. the effect of being black or Latino) on four post-stop outcomes (being frisked, being subjected to any force, being subjected to weapon force, and being subjected to non-weapon force).
The results show that being black or Latino is associated with being frisked and subjected to non-weapon force. Race and ethnicity are not associated with weapon force.
Results are contextualized in terms of threat theory, administrative and organizational policy, and implicit bias. Because black and Latino pedestrians are still more likely to be frisked and subjected to non-weapon force after matching for relevant pedestrian and stop characteristics, particular attention is paid to the role of implicit bias.
•Being black or Latino is associated with being frisked and subjected to non-weapon force in New York City•Being black or Latino is not associated with weapon force in New York City•Findings align with previous research on racial and ethnic disparities in stop-and-frisk
Various methodological approaches to constructing external and internal benchmarks have been applied to estimate racial bias in police stop, question, and frisk (SQF) patterns. We apply an external ...benchmark of the race of the residential population and an internal benchmark of similarly-situated stops to estimate if racial disparities in New York City SQF data were impacted by the Floyd, et al. v. City of New York court settlement. We find that after the settlement, the racial composition of census tracts were no longer significant predictors of the stop rate after controlling for reported crime, socioeconomic factors, and police precincts. We further find that differences in SQF outcomes and hit rates between Blacks and Hispanics and similarly-situated others diminished substantially after the settlement. These findings suggest that court reforms may be an effective method for reducing racial disparities in SQF patterns.
Abstract Despite the emergence of the #SayHerName movement alongside #BlackLivesMatter, research on police encounters is rarely intersectional and has largely neglected the potentially violent ...consequences of gendered and racialized “controlling images.” Using New York City investigatory stop data (2007–2014), and drawing on controlling images theory, our analysis shows that Black men and women experience higher rates of police violence than White men and women. Within race, analyses indicate that Black men experience more police violence than Black women. The same gender gap exists for Whites, Asians, and Latinx persons, suggesting that broad cultural perceptions of femininity and masculinity shape police violence. However, these gendered frames mostly dissolve in instances of potentially fatal violence, as we find no gender differences within race or ethnicity in these extreme cases with one exception: police point their guns at Black men slightly more than at Black women. Further, the controlling image criminalizing Black men casts a long shadow—police are more likely to use violence on individuals stopped in the company of a Black man across gender, race, and ethnicity. This study provides a comprehensive, intersectional analysis of police encounters, both reaffirming and extending controlling images to understand why race, ethnicity, and gender disparities in state violence experiences persist.
Questions surrounding stop, question, and frisk (SQF) practices have focused almost exclusively on racial and ethnic disproportionality in the rate of stops, and whether police are engaged in racial ...profiling. This near-sole focus on the stop decision has overshadowed important questions about the use of force during Terry stops, resulting in a major gap in our understanding of the dynamics of SQF encounters. The current study addresses this issue through an examination of the nature, prevalence, and predictors of use of force during Terry stops using the 2012 SQF database of New York Police Department (NYPD; N = 519,948) and data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Results indicate that use of force was an infrequent event in NYPD stops (14%), and weapon force was quite rare (.01%). However, hierarchical multinomial logistic regression models show that Black and Hispanic citizens were significantly more likely to experience non-weapon force than White citizens, while controlling for other relevant situational and precinct-level variables. The findings suggest that minority citizens may be exposed to a racial or ethnic “double jeopardy,” whereby they are subjected to both unconstitutional stops and disparate rates of force during those stops. The study highlights the importance of expanding the focus on SQF beyond the racial profiling lens, as questions about the dynamics of police use of force decision-making raise equally important social and legal concerns.
Predictive policing is the newest innovation in the field of law enforcement. Predictive policing programs use algorithms to analyze existing crime data in an attempt to make predictions about future ...crimes: What crimes are likely to be committed, where crimes are likely to be committed, and a list of potential victims and offenders. Proponents of predictive policing champion the practice as an effective, proactive form of law enforcement that is free from bias due to its data-driven nature. However, as a matter of justice policy, predictive policing is just as discriminatory as traditional police practices, such as stop and frisk: Both are relatively ineffective; both have the potential to disproportionately target minorities; both are challenging forms of surveillance that create several important ethical and legal issues; and both are presented as objective, impartial, and equitable. This article has three primary goals: Highlight the potential and problematic similarities between stop and frisk and predictive policing; present the problems associated with predictive policing, including its questionable effectiveness, biased foundation, and faulty legal and ethical footing; and discuss the ways in which discriminatory criminal justice programs, such as stop and frisk and predictive policing, are presented to the public as objective, non-discriminatory policies.
Scholars know relatively little about how the location of a pedestrian police stop affects the racial distribution of post-stop outcomes, including the initiation of a search or a field interview. To ...address this gap, this research draws on a unique data set from San Jose, California, and underutilized spatial methods to examine the extent to which conflict theory explains post-stop enforcement patterns. We consider two iterations of the theory: (1) the racial threat hypothesis, which posits that Blacks and Hispanics are more aggressively policed in minority neighborhoods, and (2) the racial incongruity hypothesis, which holds that police tend to target minorities occupying concentrated White spaces. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) models indicate that Blacks and Hispanics face more aggressive post-stop enforcement than Whites but that stop location is not predictive. By contrast, geographically weighted regression (GWR) analysis shows that police are more likely to initiate searches and field interviews of Blacks and Hispanics in areas with high concentrations of White and minority residents. These findings illustrate the nuanced relationship between stop location, pedestrian race, and police behavior. Conflict theory is a valuable lens through which to view post-stop enforcement, yet evidence to support the minority threat and racial incongruity hypotheses was only visible at the micro level. This research adds to existing scholarship by demonstrating the utility of GWR in teasing out the nuanced, micro-level relationship between stop location and pedestrian race not captured in more traditional models.
