What Works, What Doesn't, What's Constitutional?

• Published date: 01 February 2016
• Date: 01 February 2016
• Author: Gary Sweeten
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12176

POLICY ESSAY

STOP, QUESTION, AND FRISK

PRACTICES

What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s

Constitutional?

The Problem With Assessing an Unconstitutional Police

Practice

Gary Sweeten

Arizona State University

—The reality is most policy issues are moral questions that cannot be answered by

theory or for that matter research. (Laub, 2004: 18)

David Weisburd, Alese Wooditch, Sarit Weisburd, and Sue-Ming Yang (2016,

this issue) offer statistically sophisticated and careful analyses of the New York

Police Department’s (NYPD’s) controversial stop, question, and frisk (SQF)

practice. This tactic was a key element of the NYPD’s order maintenance efforts beginning

in the 1990s (Spitzer, 1999), and it flourished in the following decade, increasing sevenfold

from 2002 to its peak in 2011 when there were more than 685,000 stops. NYPD’s high-

volume use of SQF has ceased because Floyd v. The City of New York (2013) ruled that it

violated minority citizens’ constitutional rights. Thus, Weisburd et al. present a rare (and

perhaps the only) evaluation in the pages of this journal of the crime-reducing effects of an

unconstitutional criminal justice practice.

Evidence-based crime policy has a long history. Indeed, criminologists have sought to

effect evidence-based crime policy from the early stages of the discipline (Tonry, 2010). This

effort has gained momentum in recent decades with the groundbreaking What Worksrep ort

(Sherman et al., 1997), the Campbell Collaboration (Farrington and Petrosino, 2001),

and the National Institute of Justice’s Crime Solutions database (crimesolutions.gov/).

In these efforts, the foremost concern is rigorous evaluation of criminal-justice–related

policies or programs by using the highest possible scientific standards. Evidence in favor

Direct correspondence to Gary Sweeten, School of Criminology & Criminal Justice, Arizona State University,

411 N. Central Avenue, MC 4420, Phoenix, AZ 85004 (e-mail: Gary.Sweeten@asu.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12176 C2015 American Society of Criminology 67

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 15 rIssue 1