Stop-and-Frisk Generated 5 Million Encounters and Found Contraband 1.5% of the Time

Five million times. Between 2002 and 2013, police officers of the New York City Police Department stopped, questioned, and frisked approximately five million people on the streets of the city, and in 88% of those encounters — 4.4 million times — the person stopped was completely innocent. No arrest. No summons. No contraband. No weapon. Nothing. A human being was walking down a public street in the largest city in the United States of America, and an armed officer of the state detained that person, questioned that person, and in many cases placed hands on that person’s body, searched pockets, demanded identification, issued commands, and then, having found nothing, released that person to continue walking — carrying now, in addition to whatever they had been carrying before, the particular weight that comes from being treated as a criminal suspect in your own neighborhood for the crime of existing in your own skin. And 87% of those 5 million people were Black or Latino.

These numbers are not estimates. They are not approximations derived from sampling or modeling. They are the NYPD’s own data, recorded on forms that officers were required to fill out after every stop, compiled into a database by the New York Civil Liberties Union, and presented to the public in annual reports that documented, with the precision of a ledger, the most comprehensive program of racially targeted policing in modern American history. The numbers tell a story that is simultaneously simple and devastating: a city decided that the constitutional rights of its Black and Latino residents were optional, implemented a program that suspended those rights millions of times, produced almost no public safety benefit, and inflicted psychological damage on an entire generation of young men whose relationship with authority was permanently shaped by the experience of being stopped, searched, and released on the streets of their own neighborhoods.

The Legal Foundation: Terry and Its Children

The legal authority for stop-and-frisk derives from the Supreme Court’s 1968 decision in Terry v. Ohio, a case that, like so many consequential legal decisions, established a principle that was reasonable in its original context and catastrophic in its application. The case involved a Cleveland detective named Martin McFadden who observed two men repeatedly walking past a store window, conferring with each other, and consulting with a third man. McFadden, a 39-year veteran of the force, suspected they were casing the store for a robbery. He approached the men, identified himself as a police officer, and when one of them mumbled a response, McFadden patted down the outside of his clothing and found a pistol.

The Supreme Court, in an 8-1 decision, held that McFadden’s stop and frisk was constitutional under the Fourth Amendment, establishing the standard that an officer may briefly detain a person if the officer has “reasonable suspicion” that the person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a crime, and may conduct a limited pat-down if the officer has reasonable suspicion that the person is armed and dangerous. The standard was lower than probable cause — the threshold required for an arrest — but it was still a standard. It required articulable facts. It required specific, individualized suspicion. It was meant to be the exception, not the rule.

What New York City did with Terry was transform an exception into a policy. Under the administrations of Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, and under the operational direction of Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, the NYPD was explicitly instructed to conduct stops at a massive scale, with officers evaluated and promoted based in part on the number of stops they recorded. The reasonable suspicion standard, which was supposed to require individualized assessment, became a rubber stamp: officers checked boxes on UF-250 forms indicating “furtive movements” or “high-crime area” or “suspicious bulge” — justifications so vague and so universally applicable that they could be, and were, applied to anyone, anywhere, at any time.

The Data That Damned the Program

The NYPD’s own data tells the story with an eloquence that no editorial could match. In 2011, the peak year, officers conducted 685,724 stops. Of those, 53% were of Black people, who constituted 23% of the city’s population. An additional 34% were of Latino people, who constituted 29% of the population. White people, who constituted 33% of the population, accounted for 9% of stops. When stops did produce results, the racial disparity inverted: white people who were stopped were more likely to be found carrying weapons or contraband than Black or Latino people who were stopped, suggesting that the threshold of suspicion applied to white people was higher — officers needed more reason to stop a white person, which meant that when they did stop one, they were more likely to find something.

Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia Law School, who served as the court-appointed expert in the landmark Floyd v. City of New York case, conducted a comprehensive statistical analysis of the stop-and-frisk data and found that the racial disparities could not be explained by crime rates, by geographic distribution, or by any race-neutral variable. Even after controlling for precinct-level crime rates, the racial composition of the neighborhood, and the reported reason for the stop, Black and Latino New Yorkers were stopped at rates that were significantly and inexplicably higher than white New Yorkers. The disparity was, in Fagan’s analysis, the result of a policy that targeted people by race.

The Psychological Toll

In 2014, Amanda Geller, Jeffrey Fagan, Tom Tyler, and Bruce Link published a study in the Journal of Urban Health that did something no previous research had done: it measured the psychological consequences of being stopped and frisked. The findings were not surprising to anyone who had been stopped, but they were devastating in their clinical documentation of what common sense already knew. Young men who had been stopped by police reported significantly higher levels of anxiety, significantly higher levels of post-traumatic stress symptoms, and significantly more avoidance behaviors — changing walking routes, avoiding certain streets, staying indoors — than young men who had not been stopped. The effects were dose-dependent: more stops produced more symptoms. And the effects persisted: young men who had been stopped reported elevated anxiety levels even years after the stops occurred.

What the Geller study documented was the creation of a trauma response in an entire generation of young men. A young Black man growing up in Brownsville or East New York or the South Bronx during the peak years of stop-and-frisk was not occasionally inconvenienced by police contact. He was systematically subjected to a program of state-administered harassment that produced clinically measurable psychological damage. He learned, through repeated experience, that walking while Black in his own neighborhood was sufficient cause for armed strangers to detain him, question him, and touch his body. He learned that his constitutional rights were theoretical — that the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure did not apply to him in practice, regardless of what the document said. And he learned that the institution that was ostensibly responsible for his safety was, in his lived experience, the primary source of his danger.

“There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem.”
— Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965

The Crime Reduction Myth

The primary justification for stop-and-frisk, offered by its architects and defenders with the confidence of people who have never been stopped, was that it reduced crime. Giuliani claimed it. Bloomberg defended it. Ray Kelly insisted upon it. William Bratton, who served as police commissioner under both Giuliani and Bill de Blasio, argued that proactive policing was responsible for the dramatic decline in crime that New York experienced beginning in the 1990s.

The data tells a different story. Crime in New York City began declining in 1991, more than a decade before stop-and-frisk was scaled to its peak levels. Crime declined during the years when stops were increasing, and it continued to decline after stops were dramatically reduced following the Floyd ruling. In 2012, the NYPD conducted 533,042 stops. In 2016, under the reforms mandated by the court, it conducted 12,404. That is a 98% reduction. And crime continued to fall. Murders in New York City hit historic lows in the years after stop-and-frisk was effectively ended, a fact that is as inconvenient for the program’s defenders as it is clarifying for everyone else.

Moreover, the comparison with other cities is dispositive. Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Houston — cities across the country experienced comparable crime declines during the same period without implementing stop-and-frisk at anything approaching New York’s scale. The factors that drove the national crime decline — demographic changes, the waning of the crack epidemic, changes in policing technology and strategy, economic growth, and other variables that criminologists continue to debate — operated across all cities. New York’s unique contribution was not lower crime. It was the suspension of constitutional rights for millions of its residents of color, a suspension that produced almost no measurable public safety benefit beyond what other cities achieved without it.

Floyd v. City of New York

In August 2013, Judge Shira Scheindlin of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York issued a 195-page ruling in Floyd v. City of New York that found the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program unconstitutional. The ruling was grounded in an exhaustive review of the evidence — statistical analysis, expert testimony, the testimony of officers and of people who had been stopped — and it concluded that the city had implemented “a policy of indirect racial profiling” that violated the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.

Judge Scheindlin did not order the NYPD to end stop-and-frisk. She ordered the appointment of an independent monitor to oversee reforms, and she ordered the implementation of a pilot program for body-worn cameras. Her ruling was careful, measured, and grounded in the law. And the response from the city’s political establishment was revealing: Bloomberg called the ruling “a very dangerous decision” and warned that it would lead to increased crime. Kelly accused the judge of bias. The city appealed. The people whose rights had been violated for a decade were told, by the officials who had violated those rights, that the violation was for their own protection.

Other Cities, Same Pattern

New York was not unique. It was merely the most documented. Chicago’s stop-and-frisk program, revealed through a 2015 ACLU of Illinois analysis, showed that Black Chicagoans were stopped at a rate four times higher than their share of the population. Philadelphia’s program, subject to a consent decree since 2011, showed similar racial disparities. Baltimore’s, examined in the Department of Justice’s 2016 investigation following the death of Freddie Gray, revealed a pattern of stops concentrated in Black neighborhoods with little or no connection to actual criminal activity.

The pattern is consistent across cities because the underlying mechanism is consistent: when police departments are incentivized to generate stops as a performance metric, and when officers are given broad discretion to determine who looks “suspicious,” the result is a program that targets the people whom the officers’ implicit and explicit biases identify as suspicious. And in a country where Blackness has been associated with criminality since before the country existed, that means the program targets Black people. This is not a failure of individual officers, though individual officers certainly bear responsibility. It is a structural outcome of a structural policy, as predictable as gravity and as destructive as the policies that preceded it.

What Works Instead

The end of stop-and-frisk in New York did not leave a void. It created space for approaches that actually reduce crime without suspending constitutional rights. Operation Ceasefire, the focused deterrence strategy developed by David Kennedy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has demonstrated in multiple cities that targeting the small number of individuals responsible for the majority of gun violence — through a combination of direct communication, social services, and targeted enforcement — produces measurable reductions in shootings and homicides without mass stops. The approach works because it is precise where stop-and-frisk was indiscriminate: instead of stopping millions of people to find a handful of offenders, it identifies the offenders first and directs resources accordingly.

Community policing models that embed officers in neighborhoods, build relationships with residents, and prioritize trust over enforcement metrics have shown consistent results in reducing both crime and the fear of crime. The key variable is trust: communities where residents trust the police report crimes at higher rates, cooperate with investigations at higher rates, and participate in public safety efforts at higher rates. Stop-and-frisk destroyed trust in every community where it was implemented, and the destruction of trust made those communities less safe, not more, by creating a population that viewed the police as an occupying force rather than a protective presence.

The legacy of stop-and-frisk is not a policy debate. It is a scar on the psyche of a generation. There are men in their thirties today who were stopped for the first time when they were fourteen, who were stopped dozens of times before they turned twenty, who rearranged the geography of their daily lives to avoid encounters with police, who learned to keep their hands visible and their voices neutral and their eyes down not because anyone taught them these behaviors but because the alternative was a knee on the ground and hands on their bodies and a search that found nothing because there was nothing to find. Those men are fathers now, some of them, and they are teaching their sons the same survival behaviors, not because the policy still exists in its peak form but because the lesson it taught — that your body is not your own when the state decides it wants to examine it — does not expire when a judge issues a ruling.

Five million encounters. 4.4 million innocent people. A contraband hit rate of 1.5%. A weapons recovery rate even lower. A constitutional violation so massive, so sustained, and so racially targeted that a federal judge required 195 pages to document it. And a generation of young men who learned, through the accumulated weight of millions of interactions between armed officers and unarmed citizens, that the Fourth Amendment is a promise that America makes to some of its children and withholds from others. That is the legacy. That is what was built, at enormous expense, over the course of a decade. And it will take longer than a decade to repair the damage, because trust, once destroyed, does not rebuild itself on the schedule of those who destroyed it. It rebuilds, if it rebuilds at all, on the schedule of those who were asked to bear the cost of its destruction.