In the years since Michael Bloomberg left the mayor’s office in New York, the legacy of stop-and-frisk policing widely used during his administration has become clearer. Crime in the city continued to decline, suggesting that the aggressive use of police stops wasn’t so essential to New York’s safety after all.
And evidence has emerged of the harms created by the strategy. We now know that students heavily exposed to stop-and-frisk were more likely to struggle in school, that young men were more likely to experience symptoms of anxiety and depression, that this exposure fostered cynicism in policing and government writ large, and that it made residents more likely to retreat from civic life.
In effect, Mr. Bloomberg’s policing record — one of his greatest liabilities as voters begin to appraise him at the ballot box — may have clouded the other accomplishments that form the strongest case for his bid as president, in areas like education, public health and good government.
Data suggests that the vast majority of street stops made by the police in New York at the height of stop-and-frisk weren’t particularly helpful in fighting crime: Few led to arrests or uncovered weapons. But research has found that a small subset of stops, those based on specific suspicions by officers and not general sweeps or racial profiling, do appear to have helped reduce crime.
The problem with stop-and-frisk (and the legal objections to it in New York) lay with the much larger universe of essentially unproductive stops.
“Who’s being affected by that?” said John MacDonald, a professor of criminology and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s going to be people who, for example, may be likely voters, who are trying to go to school, who are afraid because they normally wouldn’t have interactions with police that are intrusive. That’s not your average offender. That’s your average citizen.”
For that group of people, who were disproportionately black and Hispanic in New York, the effects of stop-and-frisk didn’t end when individual police encounters did, or even as the policy wound down.
“It’s not just that a stop happens, and a minute later it’s all over, and it was a temporary nuisance,” said Andrew Bacher-Hicks, a doctoral candidate in public policy at Harvard. “There are in fact long-lasting effects of exposure to high levels of stop-and-frisk.”
Recent research by Mr. Bacher-Hicks and Elijah de la Campa found that black middle-school students exposed to more aggressive policing were more likely to later drop out of school and less likely to enroll in college.
The researchers looked at parts of New York that had many stops, not necessarily because those places had high crime or other correlated factors, but because they happened to be assigned a precinct commander who was more likely to advocate frequent stops. Within these neighborhoods, students may not have been stopped themselves. But they went to school in communities where this kind of policing was pervasive.
The negative effects on education appeared for girls, too, even though they were far less likely to be stopped by police than boys or young men. That implies, the researchers suggest, that something deeply embedded in the girls’ environment — like fear or distrust of authority that students learned from it — might have hindered their education. More police stops, the researchers found, were also associated with chronic absenteeism.
That study adds to other research in New York finding that black male students who were more exposed to stop-and-frisk had lower test scores. And other research using surveys about experiences with the police has found that students around the country who were arrested or stopped, or who witnessed these encounters or knew of others involved, had worse grades.
That these effects appear strongest for black students suggests that aggressive policing could worsen racial achievement gaps in school as well.
“All these kinds of disadvantages can accrue and build up,” said Aaron Gottlieb, a professor at the Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who has studied policing and student grades. “Let’s say a police stop reduces the likelihood that you go to college. That’s going to impact your earnings in the long run.”
Other research shows that negative interactions with the police can shape how residents think about government and civic institutions, and even democracy more broadly.
“It teaches something really important — and something really negative — about what agents of the state and bureaucracies are supposed to be doing in your community, what role they play, what their character is,” said Amy Lerman, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
She and Vesla Weaver, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, have found that even minor encounters with police can reduce the likelihood of voting, a pattern other research of stop-and-frisk in New York has documented as well. Ms. Lerman and Ms. Weaver have shown that aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics can even have a chilling effect on whether residents use a service like 3-1-1 to report issues that have nothing to do with crime at all.
In the speech Mr. Bloomberg gave on stop-and-frisk last November, when he first apologized for the practice before announcing his campaign for president, he suggested that he had come to understand some of these deeper consequences, including the ways that the policy had damaged faith in law enforcement and government.
“The erosion of trust bothered me — deeply,” he said at the time. “And it still bothers me. And I want to earn it back.”
As more voters have come to hear his mea culpa, it has grown shorter, less nuanced. On the debate stage, Mr. Bloomberg has framed it as a wrong decision in hindsight, now behind him. But that is not quite the right lesson, researchers say, either for the mayor who would be president, or for the public having a reckoning with stop-and-frisk, too.
The full consequences are not behind residents, or the city. And the question now, Mr. MacDonald said, isn’t really to stop-and-frisk or not to stop-and-frisk. More limited (and constitutional) police stops can still be effective at curbing crime and removing guns from streets. It’s the mass deployment — touching students on their way to school; citizens who need city services; likely voters — that produces few benefits and broader damage.
Mr. MacDonald cited an analogy from former New York City police commissioner Bill Bratton: Stop-and-frisk is like chemotherapy to treat cancer. A little of it can help. Too much can be fatal.
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