Cato Scholars on Stop and Frisk

On Monday, President Trump told a gathering of police chiefs that cities faced with serious crime problems should return to the policing practice known as stop-and-frisk. “Stop-and-frisk works and it was meant for problems like Chicago.” This is an old theme for Trump, one he shares with former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose rumored 2020 presidential contender raises the possibility of a contest between two stop-and-frisk enthusiasts. In Terry v. Ohio (1968) the Supreme Court found the tactic constitutional, but judges since then have sometimes ruled, as in a high-profile case against New York City, that the tactic was being employed in unconstitutional ways. (Despite predictions from some quarters that crime would soar in New York City following that ruling, no such thing happened.)

Cato has had a lot to say about stop-and-frisk over the years. A sampling:

• “How did we the people of New York City allow this long-term disgrace to continue?” – the late Nat Hentoff, 2010.
• “A ‘stop’ is an involuntary citizen-police encounter… [Stop-and-frisk] can be a degrading and humiliating event to endure.” – Tim Lynch, 2012.
• “Statistics do not answer whether it is okay for an ostensibly free society to gratuitously stop-and-frisk its citizens.” – Trevor Burrus, 2013. 
• Even after the curtailment of the New York City program, “for too many Americans, the basic liberty to move freely in society has been debased and degraded by police fighting the drug war” – Jonathan Blanks, 2018.

For another dimension, see Cato’s 2016 survey report by Emily Ekins on public attitudes toward Policing in America [attitudes toward authority / views on effectiveness / who should be searched?]