Recent studies by police departments and researchers confirm that police stop persons of racial and ethnic minority groups more often than whites relative to their proportions in the population. However, it has been argued that stop rates more accurately reflect rates of crimes committed by each ethnic group, or that stop rates reflect elevated rates in specific social areas, such as neighborhoods or precincts. Most of the research on stop rates and police–citizen interactions has focused on traffic stops, and analyses of pedestrian stops are rare. In this article we analyze data from 125,000 pedestrian stops by the New York Police Department over a 15-month period. We disaggregate stops by police precinct and compare stop rates by racial and ethnic group, controlling for previous race-specific arrest rates. We use hierarchical multilevel models to adjust for precinct-level variability, thus directly addressing the question of geographic heterogeneity that arises in the analysis of pedestrian stops. We find that persons of African and Hispanic descent were stopped more frequently than whites, even after controlling for precinct variability and race-specific estimates of crime participation.
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Primary Article
An Analysis of the New York City Police Department's “Stop-and-Frisk” Policy in the Context of Claims of Racial Bias
Andrew Gelman Andrew Gelman is Professor, Department of Statistics and Department of Political Science, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 . Jeffrey Fagan is Professor, Law School and School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 . Alex Kiss is Biostatistician, Department of Research Design and Biostatistics, Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Center, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The authors thank the New York City Police Department, the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, and the Office of the New York State Attorney General for providing data for this research. Tamara Dumanovsky and Dong Xu made significant contributions to the analysis. Joe Bafumi, Rajeev Dehejia, Jim Liebman, Dan Rabinowitz, Caroline Rosenthal Gelman, and several reviewers provided helpful comments. Support for this research was provided in part by National Science Foundation grants SES-9987748 and SES-0318115. All opinions are those of the authors.
, Jeffrey Fagan Andrew Gelman is Professor, Department of Statistics and Department of Political Science, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 . Jeffrey Fagan is Professor, Law School and School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 . Alex Kiss is Biostatistician, Department of Research Design and Biostatistics, Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Center, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The authors thank the New York City Police Department, the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, and the Office of the New York State Attorney General for providing data for this research. Tamara Dumanovsky and Dong Xu made significant contributions to the analysis. Joe Bafumi, Rajeev Dehejia, Jim Liebman, Dan Rabinowitz, Caroline Rosenthal Gelman, and several reviewers provided helpful comments. Support for this research was provided in part by National Science Foundation grants SES-9987748 and SES-0318115. All opinions are those of the authors.
& Alex Kiss Andrew Gelman is Professor, Department of Statistics and Department of Political Science, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 . Jeffrey Fagan is Professor, Law School and School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 . Alex Kiss is Biostatistician, Department of Research Design and Biostatistics, Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Center, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The authors thank the New York City Police Department, the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, and the Office of the New York State Attorney General for providing data for this research. Tamara Dumanovsky and Dong Xu made significant contributions to the analysis. Joe Bafumi, Rajeev Dehejia, Jim Liebman, Dan Rabinowitz, Caroline Rosenthal Gelman, and several reviewers provided helpful comments. Support for this research was provided in part by National Science Foundation grants SES-9987748 and SES-0318115. All opinions are those of the authors.
Pages 813-823
Published online: 01 Jan 2012
Primary Article
An Analysis of the New York City Police Department's “Stop-and-Frisk” Policy in the Context of Claims of Racial Bias
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