On Stop-and-Frisk, We Can’t Celebrate Just Yet

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/07/opinion/stop-and-frisk-celebrate.html

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Last year, New York City’s 290 homicides were a record low. That’s good news for the city, the Police Department — and police reformers. That’s because the reforms leading the department to cut back on stop-and-frisks are accompanied by such low numbers on violent crime.

Police reformers have long argued that ending stop-and-frisk would help communities, not harm them. But in objecting to the policy, we did not point to the negative long-term psychological or social effects this practice had on a generation of young black and Latino men — because we don’t really know what they are. It is urgent that social scientists, police departments and advocates measure the social costs, because burdensome and disparate policing happens all around the country.

We should start by listening to targets of these policies. A Harlem teenager named Alvin recorded being stopped by the police in 2011. It was not the first time the police had stopped him. The officers threatened to punch him in his face and break his arm, and told him they had stopped him because he was a “mutt.” Such first-person testimonials helped spark a national debate on stop-and-frisk and decrease the practice. But the ultimate effect on Alvin’s life is unknown.

How do we quantify the effects of incidents like this? We don’t know because we have not done the work to measure them. But if the reason stop-and-frisk was objectionable is that it placed too great a burden on black and Latino men, shouldn’t we find the time and resources? If we don’t, how are we to know if other practices do even greater harm?

It will not surprise anyone who remembers the former F.B.I. Director James Comey’s embarrassment over the lack of federal data on police use of deadly force to learn that there is also little research about what happens after a police stop. Failing to measure their consequences reveals how little our nation values the people who bear the burden of them.

What we do not know extends to New York’s own declining murder rate. While it is not clear exactly why crime is down, the Police Department praises advanced analytics for helping it control violent crime. The department uses a form of CompStat, which allows the N.Y.P.D. to use data on crime to focus their patrol resources. The implication is that even without knowing the causes of crime trends, the police can still achieve their goals if they measure “important” outcomes.

The problem is that crime has traditionally been the only outcome deemed important enough to measure. In fact, a recent National Academies of Sciences report on proactive policing lamented that compared with the research on how policing influences crime rates, “there is proportionally very little” research on racial bias or the social consequences of police contact. “These research gaps leave police departments and communities concerned,” the report added, “without an evidence base from which to make informed decisions.”

Change is urgently needed, considering emerging evidence that policing influences a wider array of outcomes than just crime. Research by Amanda Geller and colleagues suggests that police stops may increase stress and even provoke PTSD-like responses in young people, one of several outcomes that an emerging science connects to negative police contacts. A concrete example may be the untimely death of Erica Garner, the 27-year-old daughter of Eric Garner. Some attribute Ms. Garner’s heart attack to the stresses of surviving her father, who was killed by a New York City police officer.

We may never hear about other examples, in part because, as Corey France of Newark explained to The Atlantic in 2014, “It’s uncomfortable to speak about” police contact, although he’d been stopped several times. “You feel ashamed. I feel like even talking about it brands me as a criminal.” Mr. France’s experience finds support in work by the political scientists Vesla Weaver and Amy Lerman. Their research suggests that police stops prompt people to stay “off the grid” — using public services less frequently for fear of additional unpleasant police contact and even producing neighborhood-wide reductions in voter turnout.

Our own research at the Center for Policing Equity suggests that police stops can even facilitate future criminal behaviors. In longitudinal research, adolescent boys who were stopped without breaking the law were more likely to engage in illegal behavior later in life.

If policing like stop-and-frisk can make us more likely to get sick and less likely to vote, and more willing to break the law, then we must discover the full scope of its consequences. If we don’t, we can’t hold the police accountable for whatever those harms end up being.

More than that, when evaluating police reform, reductions in crime are not a sufficient measure of success because they are not a full measure of the lives that need protection.