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13 JIJIS 99 (2013)
Don't Trust the Police: Stop Question Frisk, Compstat, and the High Cost of Statistical over-Reliance in the NYPD

handle is hein.journals/jijis13 and id is 111 raw text is: Hanink 99 DON'T TRUST THE POLICE: STOP QUESTION FRISK, COMPSTAT, AND THE HIGH COST OF STATISTICAL OVER-RELIANCE IN THE NYPD Peter Hanink* Criminology, Law & Society at the University of California, Irvine Using data collected by the New York City Police Department, this research applies social disorganization theory and conflict theory to the NYPD stop question frisk practice. This paper discusses the rise of stop question frisk along with the implementation of CompStat and explores whether the rate at which the police employ stop question frisk within a precinct is based solely upon a precinct's crime rate, or whether the stops rate is influenced by factors such as race or poverty. This research draws three conclusions. First, the crime rate in a given precinct is the strongest predictor of the rate of stops within it. Second, the interaction between the percentage of precinct population that is Black and the percentage below the poverty line is a statistically significant predictor of the rate of stops. Third, the use of stop question frisk as a police practice may help explain the lower rates of police approval among Black New Yorkers. Consequences for police legitimacy are discussed. Once the poster child for rampant crime and urban decay, New York City is now the safest big city in America with the same rate of violent crime as Sunnyvale, California. 1 While the precise cause of this dramatic decline in violent crime remains a topic of scholarly debate, within popular media and among police departments, much of the credit has gone to reforms carried out by former Boston, New York City, and Los Angeles Chief of Police, William Bratton (Fagan & MacDonald, 2012, p. 14; Kelling & Sousa, 2001; Eck & Maguire, 2000). Bratton's major contributions to the NYPD were the wide-scale adoption of the practice of stop question frisk (SQF) guided by the Broken Windows philosophy of crime prevention (Kelling & Bratton, 1998; Wilson & Kelling, 1982) and the implementation of CompStat, short for COMPuter STATistics, a mariagement system that uses statistics to inform police decision-making (Bratton & Knobler, 1998; Skolnick & Caplovitz, 2001). This article shall examine how the practice of SQF was implemented in New York City along with CompStat, discuss the impact of these implementations, and measure how a practice that is, on its face, race-neutral may have become race-based in practice. @ 2014 by author, reprinted here by permission. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: phanink@uci.edu. Press Release, Mayor Bloomberg And Police Commissioner Kelly Announce New York City Remains The Safest Big City In America According To FBI Uniform Crime Report (September 13, 2010) available at http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/pr/pr_2010-nyc-safest-big-city.shtml.

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