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.

Why more diverse police forces may not solve the problems which exist between police and disadvantaged communities of color

In the wake of the tragedies of the past year in places such as Ferguson and New York and Baltimore where black men have been killed by police officers, many have called for reforms to the police, pushing for greater diversity among police departments. But do black officers have an advantage over white officers in building relationships with black citizens? In new research which examines police–community relations in East St. Louis, Jacinta M. Gau and Rod K. Brunson find that the black community expressed concern over under-policing, slow response times, and police misconduct both on and off duty, even though the city’s police department also reflected the population’s black majority

Officer Race Versus Macro-Level Context: A Test Of Competing Hypotheses About Black Citizens’ Experiences With And Perceptions Of Black Police Officers

It has been proposed that hiring more Black police officers is an effective way to alleviate long-standing tensions between police and African Americans because Black officers will connect with Black citizens and treat them well. This hypothesis, however, fails to account for the macro-level context of the troubled locations in which African Americans disproportionately reside and wherein police–minority citizen problems are deep seated. The present study examines two competing hypotheses concerning the influence ofofficer race relative to that of ecological context in shaping African Americans’ experiences with and perceptions of local police. These hypotheses are testedusing in-depth interview data with Black residents of a majority-Black, high-crime, economically troubled city. Implications for policy and future research are discussed

“One Question Before You Get Gone..”: Consent Search Requests As A Threat To Perceived Stop Legitimacy

The use of consent searches in the war on drugs has brought this type of search to the forefront of the racial profiling debate. Studies using official traffic-stop data have attempted to determine whether minority drivers are more likely than White drivers to be asked for consent to search. This analytic strategy, though informative, does not account for the perceptual nature of racial profiling and the damage that might be done to drivers’ attitudes toward police if they react negatively to being asked for consent. The present study, using the theories of procedural justice and expectancy disconfirmation, analyzes the impact of officers’ requests for consent to search on drivers’ perceptions about the legitimacy of the stops themselves. Interaction effects are also modeled by breaking the sample down by race. Results suggest that consent search requests significantly damage perceived stop legitimacy only among White drivers; the effect is marginally significant among Black drivers and nonsignificant for Hispanics. This finding is interpreted within the bounds of expectancy theory, whereby minority drivers’ expectations for the way officers will treat them are lower from the outset than Whites’ are, so Whites, then, are particularly affronted by search requests. This suggests that perceived racial profiling is a complex, nuanced phenomenon and that race is more symbolic than predictive of stopped drivers’ attitudes toward police

Procedural Injustice, Lost Legitimacy, And Self-Help: Young Males’ Adaptations To Perceived Unfairness In Urban Policing Tactics

Legitimacy acts as the dividing line between a police force that merely possesses legal authority to enforce the law and one that enjoys both legal and moral authority. Research has shown that people who see the police as procedurally just are more likely to also view them as legitimate. Most of this research has been quantitative and has focused on the statistical link between procedural justice and police legitimacy. The present study offers a qualitative examination of in-depth interviews with young men residing in disadvantaged, urban neighborhoods to uncover the specific actions that police take that are seen as unjust and that erode legitimacy. In addition, evidence is revealed that compromised legitimacy can encourage young males to engage in certain self-protective behaviors that can, in turn, increase their risk of becoming the targets of police scrutiny. Implications of this finding for research and police policy are made

Revisiting Broken Windows Theory: A Test Of The Mediation Impact Of Social Mechanisms On The Disorder-Fear Relationship

Broken windows theory predicts that disorder signals a lack of neighborhood control, sparks fear of crime, and sets off a chain reaction ultimately resulting in crime. Support has been found for the disorder-fear link, but the present study argues that this link is actually intended to be indirect-perceived loss of control is what should cause fear. Methods: Hierarchical linear models and structural equation models test four hypotheses regarding whether social cohesion and expectations for social control mediate the disorder-fear relationship. Results: Results support partial mediation. Conclusion: Results suggest confirmation of a portion of broken windows theory, in that disorder may inspire fear partially as a result of its detrimental impact on neighborhood cohesion and shared expectations for social control

Such Misconducts Don\u27T Make A Good Ranger: Examining Law Enforcement Ranger Wrongdoing In Uganda

Wildlife crime has been recognized to be an important topic of study by criminologists in recent years. Prior research has highlighted the detrimental impact of corruption on conservation-related issues. Law enforcement rangers are often the primary protectors of protected areas and wildlife. Yet, like other law enforcement agents, they are not immune to misconduct and corruption. The present study offers an in-depth examination of rangers experiences with and perceptions of wrongdoing in a specific Ugandan protected area. Findings indicate that ranger wrongdoing is driven by a myriad of factors and manifests in various ways. These findings have implications for the understanding and prevention of ranger misconduct