Curbing Unnecessary Police Stops Will Keep Communities Safe

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Police reform conversations tend to be sparked by high-profile incidents, like unnecessary police shootings or tabloid corruption cases. These are undoubtedly important and the mechanisms and policies that allow these incidents to happen should be addressed and rectified. But most people who come into contact with police aren’t physically harmed let alone killed during the encounter, but nevertheless these incidents can have a wide range of negative impacts within a community. While tragedies make headlines, many of the core problems with policing stem from practices that make up an officer’s daily routine.
In the October issue of Reason Magazine, I argue that police need to stop overpolicing the communities in which they work. Some common police policies and behaviors are not effective at crime control, and they too often target Black men and other people of color, increasing resentment in those communities. For every arrest an officer makes by means of a police stop, policymakers should ask how many innocent people the officer harassed and searched before he found someone he could arrest:
Aggressive policing techniques allow officers to confront individuals, question them, and perhaps search them for contraband such as drugs and guns. New York City’s stop-and-frisk program is the most notorious example of this style of policing. This program demonstrated to politicians that NYPD officers were in the streets discouraging crime with proactive tactics. Over the most active 10 years of the program, the New York Police Department recovered roughly 8,000 firearms by stopping, questioning, and frisking pedestrians. As in much of the rest of the country, violent crime in New York was trending downward during this period, so on its face, it may have seemed like an excellent anti-violence tactic.
What the NYPD didn’t highlight was that recovering those 8,000 guns required stopping roughly 4 million individuals, the vast majority of whom were black or Latino men — a firearm hit rate of 0.2 percent. Of course, officers also sometimes found drugs or people who had outstanding summonses for both petty and serious offenses. But even taking those cases into account, roughly 90 percent of the people the NYPD subjected to a stop and frisk were completely innocent of wrongdoing in the eyes of the law, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Of course we should change laws and hold police officers accountable for misconduct, but changing police policy decisions is even more important for the millions of people who deal with police officers in ways that will never make headlines. So long as politicians and police brass incentivize officers to make intrusive and unnecessary stops, cops are going to what it takes to keep their bosses happy. This puts officers in a no-win situation because they’re resented in their communities for doing what they’re told to do.
The article is now online at Reason.com, and you can check it out here.