Stop and Frisks

By: Maria Campos

In New York, the implementation of stop and frisk has been plagued by controversy, with some saying that it reduces crime while others condemning it for its use of racial profiling. While it is obvious that stop and frisk targets black and latino youth, there is a continued effort to spread its use to other cities, such as Oakland and San Francisco. In the recent ABC news article , former NYC police commissioner, Bill Bratton claims that the use of stop-and-frisk is an effective way to decrease crime. He has recently been appointed as a consultant to the city of Oakland and is confident that the use of this policy will bring change to Oakland’s crime rates. The stop and frisk policy has already spread to Los Angeles and Boston and he believes that Oakland could also benefit from this tactic.  

As the use of terry stops expands, the president of the NAACP , Benjamin Jealous, has recently denounced the use of them stating that “Its thesis is this when you boil it down...that color and age are reasonable grounds for suspicion."  The NAACP and critics of the terry stops point out that, not only is it targeting people of color, but also most of the stops are ineffective. As learned in lecture,the Oakland police force is already highly understaffed, implementing stop and frisk could contribute to the already difficult task of answering to emergency calls. Valuable resources that could be put to better use are being wasted on searching young teenagers who happen to cross paths with a cop. 

Terry stops also connect to the idea of the Panopticon.  In the panopticon, individuals learned to police themselves because they never knew who might be watching them from behind the window. In Overseers of the Poor, Gilliom states that “ as Foucault put it, they ‘internalize the gaze’ so that the operation of power becomes cheaper, easier, and more effective” (Gilliom,130). As seen in the video we watched during lecture, knowing that an individual will most likely be stopped and frisked because they are a young male of color changes the amount of time they spend outside with friends and also makes them wary of police officers. Overtime, the change in behavior would be internalized. This same idea of internalizing the gaze creates a division between the police and the community. The police is no longer seen as a legitimate force of protection but rather as invaders on the community. The use of terry stops and the targeting of specific communities creates hostility between the community and the police, making it more difficult to effectively police an area because of lack of cooperation from the very people who the police are meant to be protecting.