Policing Guns and Youth Violence

To combat the epidemic of youth gun violence in the 1980s and 1990s, law enforcement agencies across the United States adopted a variety of innovative strategies. This article presents case studies of eight cities' efforts to police gun crime. Some cities emphasized police–citizen partnerships to address youth violence, whereas others focused on aggressive enforcement against youth suspected of even minor criminal activity. Still others attempted to change youth behavior through "soft" strategies built on alternatives to arrest. Finally, some cities used a combination of approaches. Key findings discussed in this article include: Law enforcement agencies that emphasized police–citizen cooperation benefited from a more positive image and sense of legitimacy in the community, which may have enhanced their efforts to fight crime. Aggressive law enforcement strategies may have contributed to a decline in youth gun violence, but they also may have cost police legitimacy in minority communities where residents felt that the tactics were unfair or racially motivated. Approaches that emphasize nonarrest alternatives and problem-solving strategies offer an intriguing but unproven vision for addressing youth gun violence. None of the initiatives presented in the case studies has been shown conclusively to reduce youth gun crime over the long term. The author suggests that policing alone cannot contain youth gun violence, but by carefully balancing enforcement with community collaboration, police departments can help shift social norms that contribute to youth gun violence

Dignity is the New Legitimacy

In this chapter, Jeffrey Fagan responds to Jonathan Simon’s essay by exploring the emotional dimensions of individual interactions with state actors. In a procedural justice vein, this chapter considers the dignitary implications of official maltreatment, focusing in particular on the dignity-injuring potential of unjustified, racially motivated, or otherwise abusive police stops. Such interactions not only personally humiliate, but they also deny the targeted individuals “basic and essential recognition” as social and political equals, instilling instead “a profound sense of loss.” Fagan calls for a jurisprudence that “recognizes the emotional highway between dignity and legitimacy.” This approach would “internalize[] the central role of dignity and respect to regulate the relations between citizens and criminal legal actors,” and condemn the “everyday indignities” inflicted even by officers whose conduct is “perfectly compliant with constitutional requirements.

Crime, Law, and the Community: Dynamics of Incarceration in New York City

Random Family (LeBlanc 2003) tells the story of a tangled family and social network of young people in New York City in which prison threads through their lives since childhood. Early on, we meet a young man named Cesar, who sold small amounts of crack and heroin in the streets near his home in the Bronx. During one of his many spells in jail, Cesar sees his father pushing a cafeteria cart in the Rikers Island Correctional Facility, New York City’s jail. Cesar had not seen his father in many years, but he was not very surprised to see him there. This was neither Cesar’s first time at Rikers, nor his first time in jail, and the same was true of his father. Cesar was at Rikers awaiting transfer to a prison in upstate New York, one of several prison spells he would face within his first three decades of life. In addition to seeing his father in jail, Cesar often encountered childhood friends from his Bronx neighborhood as he moved through the state’s prisons. Recent evidence suggests that the growing social concentration of incarceration is reciprocally tied to the spatial concentration of incarceration in poor urban neighborhoods. Cesar’s story suggests that incarceration has become part of the social and psychological fabric of neighborhood life in poor neighborhoods of New York and many other cities. It is in the background of childhood socialization and an everyday contingency for young men as they navigate the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Recent studies show that the risks of going to jail or prison grow over time for persons living in poor neighborhoods, contributing to the accumulation of social and economic adversity for people living in these areas as well as for the overall well-being of the neighborhood itself (Clear, Rose, and Ryder 2001; Lynch and Sabol 2002). As the risks of going to jail or prison grow over time for persons living in these areas, their prospects for marriage or earning a family-sustaining wage diminish as the incarceration rates around them rise, closing off social exits into productive social roles. Over time, incarceration creates more incarceration in a spiraling dynamic. This chapter illustrates this process using data from New York City on neighborhood rates of incarceration in jail or prison in five waves over a 12-year period beginning in 1986. Rates of incarceration grew slowly in the early 1980s and spiked sharply after 1985 as crime rates rose. Incarceration rates persisted at a high level through the 1990s, declining far more slowly than did the sharply falling crime rates. These analyses show that the use of incarceration, especially prison, seems to have differential effects across the city’s neighborhoods and police precincts, but that the overall excess of incarceration rates over crime rates seems to be concentrated among nonwhite males living in the city’s poorest neighborhoods

\u3cem\u3eFurman\u3c/em\u3e\u27s Legacy: New Challenges to the Overbreadth of Capital Punishment

A 2018 decision in the Arizona Supreme Court raised new strong claims that the death penalty in the U.S. has become a fatal lottery, with critical implications for its constitutionality and its future in American criminal law. In the case, Hidalgo v. Arizona, the defense provided preliminary evidence that over the past twenty years, nearly 98% of all first- and second-degree murder defendants in Maricopa County-the state\u27s largest county and location of the nation\u27s fifth largest city-were death-eligible. The Arizona Supreme Court conceded this point even as it rejected Mr. Hidalgo\u27s appeal. What the Arizona Supreme Court conceded, and what the evidence showed, was the expansive criteria for death eligibility made it impossible for states to perform the \u27constitutionally necessary\u27 narrowing function at the stage of legislative definition to prevent a pattern of arbitrary and capricious sentencing

Child Sexual Abuse

Over the past two decades awareness of child sexual abuse among academics and professionals has grown from several convergent trends: the discovery of child abuse in the 1960\u27s, concern by feminists over sexual assault and rape, increasing reports to law enforcement and child protective service workers of sexually abused children, and the general deprivatization of the family. More recently, general public awareness of child sexual abuse has followed well-publicized cases of child molestation in day-care centers, nationwide concern over pornography and its subsequent links to teenage prostitution, and runaway youth, delinquency, and family violence among adults

Cessation of Family Violence: Deterrence and Dissuasion

Family violence research has only recently begun to investigate desistance. Recent developments in the study of behaviors other than family violence, such as the use of addictive substances, suggest that common processes can be identified in the cessation of disparate behaviors involving diverse populations and occurring in different settings. Desistance is the outcome of processes that begin with aversive experiences leading to a decision to stop. Desistance apparently follows legal sanctions in nearly three spouse abuse cases in four, but the duration of cessation is unknown beyond short study periods. Batterers with shorter, less severe histories have a higher probability of desisting than batterers with longer, more severe histories. Victim-initiated strategies, including social and legal sanctions plus actions to create aversive experiences from abuse (e.g., divorce and loss of children) and social disclosure, also lead to desistance. Batterers are more resistant to change when they participate in social networks that support and reinforce violence to maintain family dominance. Desistance may also actually be displacement, where a violent spouse locates a new victim

No Runs, Few Hits and Many Errors: Street Stops, Bias and Proactive Policing

Equilibrium models of racial discrimination in law enforcement encounters suggest that in the absence of racial discrimination, the proportion of searches yielding evidence of illegal activity (the hit rate) will be equal across races. Searches that disproportionately target one racial group, resulting in a relatively low hit rate, are inefficient and suggest bias. An unbiased officer who is seeking to maximize her hit rate would reduce the number of unproductive stops toward a group with the lower hit rate. An unbiased policing regime would generate no differences in hit rates between groups. We use this framework to test for racial discrimination in pedestrian stops with data from the contentious “Stop, Question and Frisk” (SQF) program of the New York City Police Department (NYPD). SQF produced nearly five million citizen stops from 2004–2012. The stops are regulated by both Terry (federal) and DeBour (New York) case law on reasonable suspicion. Stops are well-documented, including a structured format for reporting the indicia of reasonable suspicion that motivated the stop. We exploit these data to examine the Floyd court’s claim. We decompose stops on the basis of suspicion, as reported by officers at the time of the stop. We conduct five tests to assess whether racial discrimination characterizes SQF stops: the allocation of officers relative to crime and population in specific areas, the decision to sanction conditional on a stop, the decision to arrest or issue a summons conditional on the decision to sanction, the efficiency of stops in seizing contraband including weapons, and updating processes by officers in their search activity. In each test, we include the reasonable suspicion rationale that officers indicated as the basis of the stop. We find consistent evidence of disparities in police responses to Black, Hispanic, and Black Hispanic civilians, and significant differences by race in the use of specific indicia of reasonable suspicion that motivate stops. The higher error rates for specific indicia of suspicion suggest that rather than individualized bases of suspicion, officers may be activating stereotypes and archetypes to articulate suspicion and justify street seizures

Juvenile Crime and Criminal Justice: Resolving Border Disputes

Rising juvenile crime rates during the 1970s and 1980s spurred state legislatures across the country to exclude or transfer a significant share of offenders under the age of eighteen to the jurisdiction of the criminal court, essentially redrawing the boundary between the juvenile and adult justice systems. Jeffrey Fagan examines the legal architecture of the new boundary-drawing regime and how effective it has been in reducing crime. The juvenile court, Fagan emphasizes, has always had the power to transfer juveniles to the criminal court. Transfer decisions were made individually by judges who weighed the competing interests of public safety and the possibility of rehabilitating young offenders. This authority has now been usurped by legislators and prosecutors. The recent changes in state law have moved large numbers of juveniles into the adult system. As many as 25 percent of all juvenile offenders younger than eighteen, says Fagan, are now prosecuted in adult court. Many live in states where the age boundary between juvenile and criminal court has been lowered to sixteen or seventeen. The key policy question is: do these new transfer laws reduce crime? In examining the research evidence, Fagan finds that rates of juvenile offending are not lower in states where it is relatively more common to try adolescents as adults. Likewise, juveniles who have been tried as adults are no less likely to re-offend than their counterparts who have been tried as juveniles. Treating juveniles as adult criminals, Fagan concludes, is not effective as a means of crime control. Fagan argues that the proliferation of transfer regimes over the past several decades calls into question the very rationale for a juvenile court. Transferring adolescent offenders to the criminal court exposes them to harsh and sometimes toxic forms of punishment that have the perverse effect of increasing criminal activity. The accumulating evidence on transfer, the recent decrease in serious juvenile crime, and new gains in the science of adolescent development, concludes Fagan, may be persuading legislators, policymakers, and practitioners that eighteen may yet again be the appropriate age for juvenile court jurisdiction

Stops and Stares: Street Stops, Surveillance, and Race in the New Policing

The use of proactive tactics to disrupt criminal activities, such as Terry street stops and concentrated misdemeanor arrests, are essential to the “new policing.” This model applies complex metrics, strong management, and aggressive enforcement and surveillance to focus policing on high crime risk persons and places. The tactics endemic to the “new policing” gave rise in the 1990s to popular, legal, political and social science concerns about disparate treatment of minority groups in their everyday encounters with law enforcement. Empirical evidence showed that minorities were indeed stopped and arrested more frequently than similarly situated whites, even when controlling for local social and crime conditions. In this article, we examine racial disparities under a unique configuration of the street stop prong of the “new policing” – the inclusion of non-contact observations (or surveillances) in the field interrogation (or investigative stop) activity of Boston Police Department officers. We show that Boston Police officers focus significant portions of their field investigation activity in two areas: suspected and actual gang members, and the city’s high crime areas. Minority neighborhoods experience higher levels of field interrogation and surveillance activity net of crime and other social factors. Relative to white suspects, Black suspects are more likely to be observed, interrogated, and frisked or searched controlling for gang membership and prior arrest history. Moreover, relative to their black counterparts, white police officers conduct high numbers of field investigations and are more likely to frisk/search subjects of all races. We distinguish between preference-based and statistical discrimination by comparing stops by officer-suspect racial pairs. If officer activity is independent of officer race, we would infer that disproportionate stops of minorities reflect statistical discrimination. We show instead that officers seem more likely to investigate and frisk or search a minority suspect if officer and suspect race differ. We locate these results in the broader tensions of racial profiling that pose recurring social and constitutional concerns in the “new policing.”

An Analysis of Race and Ethnicity Patterns in Boston Police Department Field Interrogation, Observation, Frisk, and/or Search Reports

The report, authored by researchers from Columbia, Rutgers and the University of Massachusetts, analyzed 200,000+ encounters between BPD officers and civilians from 2007–2010. It is intended to provide a factual basis to assess the implementation of proactive policing in Boston and how it affects Boston's diverse neighborhoods. It found racial disparities in the Boston Police Department's stop-and-frisks that could not be explained by crime or other non-race factors. Blacks during that period were the subjects of 63.3% of police-civilian encounters, although less than a quarter of the city's population is Black.