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.

Racial disparity and the legitimacy of the criminal justice system: Exploring consequences for deterrence.

Abstract: Minority (over) representation in the criminal justice system remains a puzzle, both from a policy and an intervention perspective. Cross-sectional reviews of the policies and practices of the criminal justice system often find differential rates of involvement in the criminal justice system that are associated with the nature of the criminal charge/act or characteristics of the offender; however, longitudinal reviews of the race effect often show it to be confounded by procedural and extralegal variables. This review focuses on how the cumulative policies and practices of the criminal justice system contribute to churning, or the recycling of individuals through the system. In conducting our review, we describe how the same criminal justice processes and practices adversely affect select communities. The consequences of policies and procedures that contribute to churning may affect the legitimacy of the criminal justice system as a deterrent to criminal behavior. A research agenda on issues related to legitimacy of the criminal justice system aimed at a better understanding of how this affects individual and community behavior is presented

Research & Action Report, Fall/Winter 2015

In this issue: Commentary with Andrew Levack, M.P.H. Global Connections: Kerr, Stein, Cape Verde, and SEED New Findings & Publications Q&A with April Pattavina, Ph.D. and Linda M. Williams, Ph.D. Recent & Upcoming Presentations Short Takes: Acceptances, Appointments & Recognition Spotlight on New Funding & Projectshttps://repository.wellesley.edu/researchandactionreport/1027/thumbnail.jp

Simulation Strategies to Reduce RecidivismRisk Need Responsivity (RNR) Modeling for the Criminal Justice System /

XI, 315 p. 30 illus.online resource