The Long Shadow of Stop-and-Frisk: Policing and Economic Mobility in Urban America

• In Event: Neighborhood Contexts and Educational Opportunity: Exploring Local Determinants of Student Success

Abstract

Over 3.5 million pedestrians are stopped by police in the United States every year. This project will explore the impact of frequent pedestrian stops and strict enforcement of minor offenses on the early-life trajectory of young minority men. We leverage a federal lawsuit that limited the ability of patrol officers to conduct stops in New York City, facilitating sharp and permanent reductions in stop rates. To estimate contemporaneous effects, we will build on the event-study framework of Tebes and Fagan (2024). This approach exploits neighborhood differences in exposure to the reform that are uncorrelated with pre-reform crime rates. Tebes and Fagan (2024) show that high-stop neighborhoods exhibited twice the reduction in stops and stop-related arrests following the reform, but did not experience relative (or absolute) increases in serious crime. Together, these facts provide an ideal setting to study the impact of stop-related policing of minor offenses: young minority men living in neighborhoods with comparable serious crime levels but different stop rates, experienced differential shocks to the likelihood of being stopped and arrested for minor offenses. We will first document the reform’s impacts on the likelihood of being arrested for a felony or violent misdemeanor offense, being arrested for a non-violent misdemeanor offense, leaving high school due to criminal justice involvement, and a variety of other educational outcomes. Next, we will develop a statistical model that leverages variation in stop exposure by neighborhood, race, sex, and birth cohort, to non-parametrically estimate impacts on long-term outcomes. These outcomes will include receipt of a high school diploma, being arrested, being incarcerated, earnings, employment, mortality, and other household outcomes (marriage rates, fertility decisions, neighborhood quality, and partner characteristics) and will be measured at various ages (e.g., 20, 25, and 30). If outcomes in high- versus low-stop neighborhoods converge, but only after the policy reform and only for groups with more exposure to police stops and stop-related arrests, this approach would provide compelling and novel evidence of how frequent exposure to pedestrian stops during adolescence and young adulthood affects one’s early-life trajectory.

Author

• Jonathan Tebes, University of Notre Dame
  Presenting Author