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

• In Event: Race, Law and the New Policing

Abstract

The use of proactive tactics including Terry stops are essential to the “new policing.” 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 surveillance in the investigative stop activity of Boston Police Department officers. We show that Boston Police officers focus field investigations in two areas: gang members and high crime areas. Predominantly minority neighborhoods experience higher levels of field interrogation and surveillance activity, controlling for 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. 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.”

Authors

• Anthony A. Braga, Northeastern University

• Jeffrey Fagan, Columbia University

• Rod Brunson, Rutgers University

• April Pattavina, Wellesley College