After the Stop: Exploring the Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Police Use of Force During Terry Stops

• Author: Michael D. White,Henry F. Fradella,Weston J. Morrow
• DOI: 10.1177/1098611117708791
• Published date: 01 December 2017
• Date: 01 December 2017
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

After the Stop:

Exploring the Racial/

Ethnic Disparities in

Police Use of Force

During Terry Stops

Weston J. Morrow

1

,

Michael D. White

2

, and

Henry F. Fradella

2

Abstract

Questions surrounding stop, question, and frisk (SQF) practices have focused almost

exclusively on racial and ethnic disproportionality in the rate of stops, and whether

police are engaged in racial profiling. This near-sole focus on the stop decision has

overshadowed important questions about the use of force during Terry stops, result-

ing in a major gap in our understanding of the dynamics of SQF encounters. The

current study addresses this issue through an examination of the nature, prevalence,

and predictors of use of force during Terry stops using the 2012 SQF database of New

York Police Department (NYPD; N¼519,948) and data from the U.S. Census

Bureau. Results indicate that use of force was an infrequent event in NYPD stops

(14%), and weapon force was quite rare (.01%). However, hierarchical multinomial

logistic regression models show that Black and Hispanic citizens were significantly

more likely to experience non-weapon force than White citizens, while controlling

for other relevant situational and precinct-level variables. The findings suggest that

minority citizens may be exposed to a racial or ethnic ‘‘double jeopardy,’’ whereby

they are subjected to both unconstitutional stops and disparate rates of force during

those stops. The study highlights the importance of expanding the focus on SQF

beyond the racial profiling lens, as questions about the dynamics of police use of force

decision-making raise equally important social and legal concerns.

1

Department of Criminal Justice, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA

2

School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA

Corresponding Author:

Weston J. Morrow, Department of Criminal Justice, University of Nevada, 1664 N. Virginia Street,

Reno, NV 89557-0214, USA.

Email: wmorrow@unr.edu

Police Quarterly

2017, Vol. 20(4) 367–396

!The Author(s) 2017

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DOI: 10.1177/1098611117708791

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Keywords

police use of force, stop and frisk, NYPD, race, ethnicity

Introduction

Under common law, English constables and ‘‘watchmen’’ were permitted to

detain ‘‘night-walkers’’—suspicious people encountered at night (Ronayne,

1964, p. 214). As with much of the common law tradition, this authority was

imported to the United States. But it took until 1968 before the U.S. Supreme

Court issued three landmark rulings that set federal constitutional benchmarks

for stop-and-frisk within the framework of the Fourth Amendment: Terry v.

Ohio and the companion cases of Sibron v. New York, and Peters v. New York.

Collectively, these rulings afforded police the discretion to stop citizens based on

reasonable suspicion. These cases also made clear that law enforcement officers

may superficially ‘‘pat down’’ a suspect if there is reasonable suspicion to believe

the suspect is armed. Although Terry and its progeny clearly sanctioned stop-

and-frisk as a policing tactic, over the past 20 years, stop-and-frisk morphed into

an aggressive crime-control strategy quite different from the tactic outlined in

Terry (Fradella & White, 2017). This move from an individualized investigative

tactic—based on particularized, reasonable suspicion—to a broader ‘‘Stop,

Question, and Frisk’’ (SQF) crime control strategy is most commonly associated

with of policing activities in New York City,

1

but large-scale SQF programs

emerged as a popular crime control strategy among law enforcement agencies

across the United States. At the same time, the strategy has caused consider-

able controversy, as researchers and legal scholars have demonstrated a sig-

nificant disconnect between stop-and-frisk as an investigative tactic and SQF

as a broad crime control strategy (Fradella & White, 2017; White & Fradella,

2016). The former, sanctioned by Terry, is grounded in a historical and legal

tradition dating back hundreds of years; the latter is constitutionally question-

able, at best. Indeed, the experiences of a number of police departments over

the last decade or so tell a story—one characterized by overuse and misuse of

SQF; violations of citizens’ Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights;

strained police–community relationships; low or no police legitimacy; and sig-

nificant emotional, psychological, and physical consequences experienced by

mostly minority citizens (Fratello, Rengifo, & Trone, 2013; Ofer &

Rosmarin, 2014).

The harm created by abusive SQF practices in these jurisdictions has led to

scrutiny of the strategy by advocacy groups, media, the courts, and the U.S.

Department of Justice. In New York, for example, controversy over the SQF

program of New York Police Department (NYPD) led to more than a decade

of litigation in the federal courts, culminating in an August 2013 ruling that

368 Police Quarterly 20(4)