Commentary: Investigative Police Stops—Necessary or Insidious? A Practitioner's Viewpoint

• Author: Vince E. Davenport
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12741
• Published date: 01 March 2017
• Date: 01 March 2017

Investigative Police Stops—Necessary or Insidious? A Practitioner’s Viewpoint 179

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 2, pp. 179–180. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12741.

Vince E. Davenport is a supervisory

senior policy analyst in the U.S. Department

of Justice, Office of Community Oriented

Policing Services. He retired as a senior

police commander with the Kansas City,

Kansas, Police Department in 2015 after 25

years of service.

E-mail: vince.davenport@usdoj.gov

Commentary

T he research presented by Charles R. Epp,

Steven Maynard-Moody, and Donald Haider-

Markel in their article “Beyond Profiling: The

Institutional Sources of Racial Disparities in Policing”

provides an eye-opening picture of harmful disparate

impacts on communities of color resulting from

pretextual traffic stops, also known as investigative

stops. These are traffic stops that are conducted by

police under the legal auspices of addressing a minor

driving infraction, but the actual intent of the officer

is to flesh out potential criminal activity. The authors’

findings are compelling and provide new insights into

the human costs and unintended consequences that

can flow from police actions.

The data show that people of color, especially African

Americans, are more likely to be targeted in these

stops and subjected to a more intrusive experience

(questioning, searches, etc.). The authors’ chief

criticism of the practice seems to be that it places a

premium on the quantity of stops made rather than

the quality of any underlying suspicion. From their

point of view, this renders the practice irredeemably

susceptible to individual officer biases, implicit or

otherwise.

The authors conclude that the effects of these stops

are particularly harmful and that the practice is a

leading contributing factor in the current crisis of

trust between police and communities of color.

Any police practice that produces disparate impacts

warrants the highest degree of scrutiny and mitigation

to the greatest extent possible. Law enforcement must

learn all that it can from this research, but it can ill

afford to “throw the baby out with the bath water.”

Investigative stops are indeed a staple of modern

policing nationwide, and with good cause. The nature

of police work necessitates that officers develop and

hone keen instincts, guided by experience, in order

to identify and disrupt criminal activity before crimes

are completed. The suggestion that officers abandon

investigative stops and turn a blind eye to objectively

suspicious activity is more than just counterintuitive;

it is tantamount to dereliction of duty. The challenge,

and the heart of this issue, is discerning what

constitutes nondiscriminatory suspiciousness.

Consider the following: an officer who knows her beat

well sees an unfamiliar car fail to signal a turn while

circling a neighborhood that has been experiencing

residential burglaries. Or an officer sees a vehicle

occupied by several young men being driven without

headlights late at night in a neighborhood that has

been plagued by gang violence. In both cases, only

minor traffic infractions are in play (turn signal and

headlights). However, experienced officers know

that residential burglars tend to operate during

midday when residents are at work and often

circle a neighborhood looking for the right target.

Experienced officers also know that drive-by shooters

often shut their headlights off when approaching a

target house.

Both of these examples are common reasons why an

officer would conduct a pretextual investigative stop,

and they illustrate the sensible imperative of this

practice. It is not clear whether the authors attempted

to distinguish between circumstances in which an

officer is acting on objectively reasonable suspicion

or merely engaged in what they might describe as a

fishing expedition. This is an important distinction

and evokes a broader conversation about “proactive

policing” generally.

Proactive policing is at the center of a recent

phenomenon dubbed the “Ferguson effect.” It

refers to spikes in violent crime as a result of officers

“backing off” proactive stops out of fear of becoming

involved in encounters that could end badly and

increase the likelihood of administrative sanctions or

criminal charges. In other words, many officers feel

vulnerable in the current climate of increased police

scrutiny and have chosen to minimize their exposure

by eliminating or seriously curtailing discretionary

stops. The underlying premise of the Ferguson effect

Vince E. Davenport

Police Commander (Ret.)

Investigative Police Stops—Necessary or Insidious?

A Practitioner ’ s Viewpoint