Assessing Stop & Frisk

Abstract Chapter 8 asks “Is stop & frisk anything new?” Noting that police have always made stops, it places stop & frisk in the context of other policing crackdowns in Chicago’s modern history and concludes that it was indeed something new. The chapter summarizes what we learned regarding the efficiency, effectiveness, and equity of stop & frisk as an organizational strategy. It concludes that stop & frisk was quite inefficient, of unimpressive effectiveness, and raised serious equity issues. A toxic mix of both under-policing and over-policing was occurring at the same time. There is a discussion of options for improving stops, including statistical optimization, pushing procedural justice harder within the organization, and relying on body worn cameras to change police and public behavior. The chapter concludes with what should be a continuing conversation about the comparative merits of alternative strategies for preventing crime that compete with stop & frisk on these evaluative dimensions while still addressing the realities of crime on the ground.