A major newspaper’s editorial board did something truly rare: It admitted it was totally wrong.
On Monday, the New York Daily News editorial board acknowledged that the end of “stop and frisk” — the aggressive, controversial policing practice that New York City police previously used to stop, question, and frisk mostly innocent people on the street — did not lead to an increase in crime. The editorial board previously warned that a court’s ruling striking down stop and frisk as unconstitutional would lead to the end of a decades-long crime decline in New York City.
But in the new column, the editorial board concluded:
We are delighted to say that we were wrong.
The NYPD began scaling back stops under Kelly before Scheindlin’s decision and accelerated the trend under Commissioner Bill Bratton. As a result, the number of stops reported by cops fell 97% from a high of 685,700 in 2011 to 22,900 in 2015.
Not only did crime fail to rise, New York hit record lows.
The murder count stood at 536 in 2010 and at 352 last year — and seems sure to drop further this year. There were 1,471 shooting incidents in 2010 (1,773 victims). By 2015, shootings had dropped to 1,130 (1, 339 victims).
The downward march has continued this year — a marked contrast to crime spikes in many major American cities.
The editorial board even acknowledged that “Mayor [Bill] de Blasio knew better. Advised by [Police Commissioner Bill] Bratton before his election, de Blasio foresaw the possibility that the NYPD could fight crime while relaxing interactions with the public.”
The New York Daily News’s admission isn’t noteworthy just because an editorial board sucked up its pride and admitted it was wrong but also because it shows the potential win-win to policing reforms.
Stop and frisk grew to be controversial on a national scale because it became a symbol of excessive policing practices, particularly in minority communities — the kind that have triggered massive protests around the country over racial disparities in policing and the criminal justice system.
So the fact that even leading proponents of these practices are now admitting they were wrong — and that aggressive policing practices can end without leading to more crime — is a very good sign for the future of police reforms.
“Stop and frisk” was at best weak for crime-fighting — but definitely alienated minority residents
In some ways, the New York Daily News’s wrongness shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. The research has long found that the effects of stop and frisk on crime were weak at best. Some studies suggest stop and frisk didn’t have any effect whatsoever.
It’s notoriously hard to study these issues — how do you separate stop and frisk from other policing actions and contributors to crime? — but the body of evidence shows that police departments could stop aggressive overpolicing and use other strategies to make up for the small potential impact of ending stop and frisk.
That’s particularly pertinent because we do know stop and frisk had one big effect: It massively increased distrust, particularly among black and brown New Yorkers, toward police.
It’s not hard to see why. According to city data, the great majority of people who were stopped and frisked in New York City were minority residents. Almost all turned out to have no contraband on them — meaning they weren’t guilty of a crime. And 1 percent of black people who were stopped had weapons or contraband on them, while 1.4 percent of white people stopped did — suggesting that black people weren’t more likely to be doing anything wrong despite getting stopped more often.
New York City police at the time claimed that they were simply conducting a majority of stops in high-crime areas, which are disproportionately black and brown. But as criminologist Jeffrey Fagan found, even if you controlled for crime, minority New Yorkers were still disproportionately stopped:
The percent Black population and the percent Hispanic population predict higher numbers of stops, controlling for the local crime rate and the social and economic characteristics of the precinct. … The crime rate is significant as well, so the identification of the race effects suggests that racial composition has a marginal influence on stops, over and above the unique contributions of crime.
As a result of these racial disparities, stop and frisk fostered distrust and resentment toward police. That distrust could have actually led to more crime: The evidence shows that police can better solve and prevent crimes if they have the trust and cooperation of their community.
So it’s potentially a win for everyone involved that New York City managed to end this overly aggressive, racially biased tactic without causing a crime wave. And although criminologists still have a lot to learn from New York City’s massive, decades-long crime drop and what exactly contributed to it, the successful end of stop and frisk is a good sign for policing reforms in an era when the nation is more aware than ever of the brutality and racial biases of the US criminal justice system.