The Supreme Court ruled in 1968 that police must have objective evidence providing “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity before they can forcibly stop a citizen, and they must have an independent basis for fearing the person is armed before they frisk him. Reasonable suspicion is when a police officer believes that an individual has a weapon which poses a danger to the officer, the officer may stop that individual to search or frisk the individual for a weapon.
Reasonable suspicion requires objective evidence. A reasonable suspicion is not a Black person doing things that a bigot thinks they shouldn’t be doing. Reasonable suspicion is not an unwillingness to comply with an “unlawful” police order. The police can’t say, he didn’t want to be searched, and therefore I came to the reasonable conclusion that he probably has a weapon, which allows me to search him against his will. It’s this kind or circular logic that makes understanding what is and what isn’t a lawful police order difficult to determine.
Anyone, but especially Black people, risks their safety if they refuse to comply with a police order, lawful or not. So, chances are when a police officer or several police officers stop you in the street, you’ll likely comply. Understanding your rights, as they are laid out in the really excellent video below, can help keep you safe.
If the police behave professionally, they’ll let you know why they’re stopping you. They should say something like, we’re looking for someone who just robbed the convenience store wearing those same sneakers that you have on. Or something like that. In other words, what is the reasonable suspicion they have that you have or intend to commit a crime. If they don’t give you that information and then they demand that you comply with a physical search or “frisk,” what do you do?
To be sure, if the police do not have reason to believe that an individual is armed, above and beyond their suspicion that they have or might commit a crime, then an order from the police to comply with a frisk is illegal because it violates your constitutional right against unreasonable search and seizure. They can ask you to give up your constitutional rights, but they can’t order you to do it. At least, they can’t legally order you to give up your constitutional rights.
But it’s just a frisk, right? The word itself sounds benign enough. But having a heavily armed stranger ask you to put your arms on a car or a wall and spread your legs while he or she checks your pockets and runs their hands over your body in search of a weapon, isn’t benign. I don’t want a stranger putting their hand in my pocket, sliding their hand between my buttocks or beneath my breasts, do you? I certainly wouldn’t want a police officer doing that to any child of mine, as they did to the children in the video below. The entire encounter is recorded in this Facebook post.
Stop Police Terror Project-DC, one of the many groups within the DC Movement for Black Lives Coalition, has been working to end abusive stop and frisk policies for years. They have pushed for the passage and funding of the Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results (NEAR) Act. The main goal of the NEAR Act is to reduce violence in the District of Columbia by using a community-based public health approach to violence prevention and intervention instead of perpetuating broken and ineffective “war on drugs”-style methods like stop and frisk.
One of the key provisions of the NEAR Act is data collection. It mandates that D.C. police officers maintain records on each stop and frisk by filling out 16 data points after each instance, including the race or ethnicity of the individual and reason for the stop. Despite the fact that the D.C. Council has provided the DC Metropolitan Police Department with $150,000 to ensure that this data collection happens, the police department has to date failed to comply.
81.6 percent of police stops in the District of Columbia between 2010 and 2016 involved Black people.
What we do know from the limited stop-and-frisk data that the police have provided is that from 2010 to 2016, 81.6 percent of police stops involved Black people. In addition, a report from the Office of Police Complaints, an independent body that reviews and investigates resident complaints, found that 89 percent of use-of-force incidents by police involved a Black individual from Oct. 1, 2016 through Sept. 30, 2017. Office of Police Complaints numbers are useful, but they can only record those incidents that lead to a civilian complaint. One has to wonder what the numbers would look like if the DC Metropolitan Police Department were actively compiling them as each incident occurred.
89 percent of use-of-force incidents by police involved a Black individuals from Oct. 1, 2016 through Sept. 30, 2017.
And then there’s the question of the policy’s effectiveness. According to research done by Stop Police Terror Project-DC, Stop-and-Frisk does not keep people safe and is rapidly becoming the most discredited policing practice in the United States. Studies of the tactic in a wide variety of cities have revealed clear racial bias and extremely low “effectiveness” as the overwhelming majority of people stopped hadn’t committed any crimes. Almost 90% of the 5 million people stopped in New York City since 2002 have been completely innocent. Each of those years, at least 80% of those stops were of Black or Brown people. In Baltimore, police conducted several hundred thousand stops a year from 2010-2015, almost exclusively in lower-income Black neighborhoods. But only 3.7% of these stops resulted in any sort of criminal citation or arrest.
As a result of the DC Metropolitan Police Department’s failure to comply with the data collection provision of the NEAR Act and because of the ineffectiveness of the policy itself, Stop Police Terror Project-DC, in conjunction with the ACLU-DC, BLM-DC and other Movement for Black Lives organizations, have launched the No More Stop and Frisk Campaign.
No More Stop-and-Frisk: Panel & Workshop Campaign Launch
Saturday, January 5, 2019
6:30 – 9:30 PM
Anacostia Arts Center
1231 Good Hope Road SE
Originally, Stop and Frisk was meant to interrupt crime. But because it is so often used illegally, instead of stopping crime it is far more often the only crime being committed during an encounter with the police. For more information about the No More Stop and Frisk Campaign, contact sptdc@gmail.com
This may save the next man/woman life…. We are our own enemy
Unfortunately, you have a point.