Stop and Frisk: The Use and Abuse of a Controversial Policing Tactic

256 pages, $30.00. Reviewed by JoAnn Baca, Jon M. Sands, and Aaron Taylor In Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968), the Supreme Court sanctioned the police to stop, question, and frisk individuals on suspicion. The opinion by Chief Justice Earl Warren fashioned a new Fourth Amendment standard allowing stops of individuals at less than probable cause. This liberal Court created a practice that, over the next half century, greatly expanded police powers and led the police to use Terry stops aggressively. The police use of Terry stops has become controversial, with its disparate racial impact on minorities decried and its overall effectiveness questioned. This timely book examines the creation, use, and abuse, of Terry stops. Michael D. White and Henry F. Fradella are criminologists. They want to understand how Terry changed police practice and its impact on criminal justice, community policing, and attitudes toward law enforcement in the communities most affected by it. Their focus is primarily on New York City, although they also discuss other cities. They picked New York City because it has become a case study on its use of “stop, question, frisk” (SQF) tactics to combat crime. White and Fradella examine the various studies done and the litigation surrounding police proactive approaches that too often target minorities. They trace the rise of Terry from its common law origins, how the Court circumscribed it to police safety, and how the reach of the case was expanded far beyond the contours of police safety. They conclude that abuses take place when Terry is used as a law enforcement initiative, proactively targeting select populations, rather than as a means of investigation. The proactive use of SQF in tandem with “broken windows” policing, meaning addressing all manners of infractions and petty offenses as a means to instill respect for law and order, can have a racial component and exacts a toll on minority relations with the police and the community. Recognizing that Terry’s reach is not likely to be rolled back, as courts remain sympathetic to the cop in the street, they conclude that reform must come from policing itself. Terry’s reformation must be through “reform school,” where training, data analysis, and new police techniques replace the rough-style crackdowns in minority neighborhoods, which include jumping out of patrol cars and the beating to the punch those thought to be inclined to criminal activities—meaning frequently throwing punches and beating suspects. One profits from returning to key precedents. In the first chapters, White and Fradella return to Terry and the context of the case. They describe the common law origins of the ability of law enforcement to stop and question, the night watch accosting strangers in the community, demanding to know their business. From these antecedents, the authors chart the development of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, its basic concepts of probable cause and reasonableness, and its state as the 20th century began, with the increasingly perceived need of police to act on suspicion when something was afoot. The modern age required modern policing, and, starting in the 1930s, legal institutes and committees proposed model codes allowing stops of individuals at something less than probable cause. By the mid-1960s, state legislatures were passing statutes allowing such stops. The rise of the crime rate and the turmoil of the times landed the issue before the Court. The chapter on Terry is worth reading. A beat detective in Cleveland spied suspicious behavior of three African-American men, supposedly casing out a store. He stopped them, searched, and found a gun on John W. Terry. The officer acted on suspicion, but the stop was premised on protecting the officer rather than on preventing crime. Soon, though, Terry was used to expand reasonable suspicion and to increase the authority to frisk. The authors argue that the deference to police and the enormous weight given to the individual assessment of the officer on the beat, together with the concerns for police safety and the “war on drugs,” led to the present expansiveness of what is deemed reasonable suspicion. Of course, the issue of race is always in the background. The authors trace the expansion of reasonable suspicion from Terry to the present time through key cases. Their study serves as a useful treatise on the subject. After discussing the legal background in the first half of the book, the authors turn to Terry in practice, specifically in New York City. In the 1980s and 1990s, to combat rampant crime, or at least the perception of it, the NYPD adopted the policy of “broken windows policing. ” Essentially, the police concentrated in high-crime areas and focused on all manner of offenses. Minor infractions that used to be ignored, such as subway turnstile jumping, littering, even jaywalking, drew attention, with the intention of controlling disorder. The practice was expanded to an even more aggressive SQF approach. This policy gained notice as crime rates declined, and crime-ridden areas became safer. The policy also led to an increased stop-and-then-arrest rate for minorities as they and their neighborhoods were targeted. Was the policy and its practice successful? As the authors discuss, the data compiBook Review