By Jeffrey A. Fagan and Amanda B. Geller

Following Soto v. State (1999), New Jersey was the first state to enter into a Consent Decree with the U.S. Department of Justice to end racially selective enforcement on the state’s highways. The Consent Decree led to extensive reforms in the training and supervision of state police troopers, and the design of information technology to monitor the activities of the State Police. Compliance was assessed in part on the State’s progress toward the elimination of racial disparities in the patterns of highway stops and searches. We assess compliance by analyzing data on 257,000 vehicle stops on the New Jersey Turnpike by the state police from 2005– 2007, the final months of the Consent Decree. Specifically, we exploit heterogeneity of officer and driver race to identify disparities in the probability that stops lead to a search. We assume a crime-minimizing or welfarist rationale for stops, under which race-neutral factors are equally likely to motivate stops, regardless of driver or passenger race. We also test a Fairness Presumption by comparing search patterns between driver-officer pairs where the driver and officer are different races, and a set of race-neutral benchmarks where the driver and officer are the same race. Results of fixed effects logistic regressions show that Black and Hispanic drivers, when stopped, are more than twice as likely as White drivers to be searched, regardless of officer race. The results also suggest that search patterns vary significantly by officer race: Black officers are less likely to conduct a search in the course of a stop than are White drivers. We also see significant interactions between the race of officers and that of the drivers they stop: Black drivers are significantly more likely to be searched by White officers than they are by Black officers; on the other hand, Hispanic drivers are significantly less likely to be searched by either Black or White officers than they are by Hispanic officers. Racial disparities in the selection of stopped drivers for search and in the rates of seizure of contraband suggest that despite institutional reforms under the Consent Decree in management and professionalization of patrol officers, there were no tangible gains in distributional equity. We review the design of the Consent Decree and the accompanying oversight mechanisms to identify structural weaknesses in external monitoring and institutional design in the oversight of the State Police that compromised the pursuit of equality goals.

J. SOC. POL'Y & L. 16 (2020). Available at:

By David S. Abrams, Hanming Fang and Priyanka Goonetilleke

Police “stop-and-frisks” of pedestrians and motorists have become an increasingly controversial tactic, given low average rates of contraband discovery, incidents of abuse, and evidence of racial disparity. Study of the tactic by economists has been much influenced by Knowles, Persico, and Todd (2001; hereafter, KPT) who first suggested the use of a “hit rate” (contraband discovery rate per frisk) test to distinguish racial prejudice from statistical discrimination in highway searches by police officers. Models used by KPT and almost all subsequent literature (e.g., Anwar and Fang 2006) on the subject imply diminishing marginal returns to frisks. That is, if frisks decrease substantially, the rate of contraband discovery should rise, ceteris paribus. This is the first paper to test this assumption empirically using arguably exogenous variations in frisk rates (cf. Feigenberg and Miller 2022). 1 We study the period around the nationwide protests that followed the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, after which police frisks dropped tremendously and rapidly. Using extremely granular data from Chicago, we find that hit rates increased as police frisks plunged, in line with the predictions of KPT.

AEA Papers and Proceedings 2022, 112: 178–183 ,2022. 7p.

By Kevin Petersen, David Weisburd, Sydney Fay, Elizabeth Eggins and Lorraine Mazzerole 

Police stops are associated with reductions in crime but also a broad range of negative individual-level outcomes.

Police stop interventions produce meaningful and significant reductions in crime without evidence of spatial displacement. However, people subject to stops are associated with significantly less desirable mental and physical health outcomes, attitudes toward police, and self-reported crime/delinquency. For some outcome measures, the negative effects of pedestrian stops are considerably more pronounced for youth, though the data did not permit a comparison of individual effects by race.

What is this review about?

Police stops have become one of the most controversial yet widely-used crime prevention strategies in modern policing. This intervention involves the police-initiated stop of an individual (or group of individuals) on the street, for the purpose of investigation and/or questioning. Police stops have been commonly used as a tactic to combat violent and gun-related crime.

Campbell Systematic Reviews. 2023;1

By Andrew Bacher-Hicks and Elijah de la Campa

Millions of Americans—particularly young men of color—are stopped on the street by police
each year. This form of proactive policing has been embraced by cities across the country as a
way to maintain order in high-crime neighborhoods and deter more serious crimes before they
occur. However, civilian stops rarely lead to an arrest and little is known about the social
impacts of frequent, unproductive interactions with police. In this paper, we leverage the quasi-
random movement of New York City police commanders across police precincts to estimate the
net impact of stop and frisk policing on students’ long-run educational attainment. We find that
a commander’s predicted effects on stops—based on data from one precinct—is highly predictive of changes in average stops after that commander enters a new precinct. We find that increased exposure to police stops has negative effects on high school graduation, college enrollment, and college persistence. These effects are substantially larger for black students, the racial group overwhelmingly stopped by police. However, we also find increases in overall school safety and evidence of positive spillovers for white and Asian students, who are less likely to interact with the police directly. These results highlight the social effects of criminal justice policy and have important implications for inequality.

Working paper, 2020. 60p.

By Andrew Bacher-Hicks and Elijah de la Campa

In an effort to thwart crimes in progress and deter future incidents, police in the US conduct
millions of civilian street stops each year. Though this practice is commonplace in most large
urban police departments, little is known about the net impact of this strategy on crime. This
paper exploits the naturally-occurring movement of New York Police Department commanders
during the height of New York City’s Stop and Frisk program to estimate commanders’ effects on
civilian stops and their subsequent impact on crime. We generate predictions of commanders’ effects on stops in a precinct, conditional on neighborhood demographics, crime rates, and policing strategies. Commanders’ effects—estimated using data only from tenures in prior precincts—are highly predictive of observed stops in new precincts, which highlights the transferability of commanders’ tactical preference for stops. We find that a high-stop strategy decreases misdemeanor crime within a precinct, but has no effect on more serious felony offenses. Moreover, we find suggestive evidence that the decrease in misdemeanor offenses is partially offset by crime displacement to adjacent neighborhoods. We conclude by demonstrating that commander stop effects are uncorrelated with their effects on other proactive policing strategies, and that commanders trade off their ability to build police legitimacy in the community with their preference for stops. Contrary to broken windows theory, our findings suggest that stop and frisk tactics do not deter more

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  serious criminal behavior, and thus, police should consider alternatives to strategies that emphasize the proactive enforcement of low-level offenses.

Unpublished paper 2020. 71p.