Blurred Boundaries of ‘Known’ Drug Locations: The Roles of Community Characteristics, Race, and Previous Drug Arrests in Police Decision-Making

• In Event: Multidimensional Approaches to Studying Crime and the Intersections of Race, Ethnicity, and Community Characteristics

Abstract

Harris’s (1994) description of the ‘location plus evasion’ standard decided in Illinois v Wardlow, highlights two factors that courts have argued, combined, are sufficient to generate reasonable suspicion for a police stop: location in a high crime area and evasion of law enforcement. Past research suggests officers determine a place is a “known high crime area” or a “known drug location” based on their own experiences with past arrests and/or discussions at roll call and, moreover, that these amorphous intuitions can encompass most or all areas of the city. Using data from the Contexts of Drug Enforcement (CODE) dataset on felony drug enforcement in one large Southern County, this study builds on Grunwald & Fagan (2019) to explore how an objective marker—past felony drug arrests in the community—influences whether police conclude that those arrested on felony drug crimes are “in a known drug location” at the time of arrest. Ostensibly extraneous factors, like community characteristics and race of the accused, are also examined as predictors of officer perceptions of arrest locales as “known” drug locations.

Authors

• Elizabeth Griffiths, Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice

• Kay Levine, Emory University