Finding a Home in the Stop-and-Frisk Regime

THEY DON'T GET STOPPED WHEN THEY CARRY THEIR FOOTBALL HELMETS, a high school football explained (Baker et al. 2010). Many of his players walked the few blocks home together, to or near the local high-rise housing complex project in Brooklyn. At the start of the season, the boys were stopped by police almost every day on their walk home. They were put up against the closest wall, yelled at, searched, and sent on their way. Several boys nearly quit the after-school program. When the coaches reached out to the patrolling officers, they were advised that the group of young men looked suspiciously like a gang gathering. Therefore, the officers were in their jurisdiction to stop the youths under the New York Police Department's (NYPD) stop-question-and-frisk program. The coaches conferred and came up with the idea of allowing the team members to carry their helmets home with them, despite it being against general policy--teens are notorious for losing school property. With their helmets gripped by the face masks, these boys became recognizable to police officers as an after-school football team. The boys told their coaches that they do not get stopped so much anymore (Baker et al. 2010). Stop-and-frisk, the controversial--yet widespread--approach to urban policing, is an incursion of state power into everyday life. This article is concerned less with stop-and-frisk as a legal issue or individual policing tactic than with the collisions of control, freedom, dignity, and surveillance that characterize the phenomenon. The central question asked is: What is at stake when life is lived under a stop-and-frisk regime? These broader normative questions are nearly unexplored within the context of stop-and-frisk, though recent law-and-society and related scholarship has engaged contemporary policing and law enforcement more broadly (including Davis 2011, Dilts 2012, Gottschalk 2014, Guenther 2013, Lerman and Weaver 2014, Murakawa 2014, Threadcraft 2014). By mapping the mass deployment of stop-and-frisk as a form of social control, this study examines the quality of life in the new carceral state. In this context, "quality of life" refers both to the colloquial usage--how good or bad one's life is--and to certain textures and boundaries of political life. Similarly, in tracing the processes by which stop-and-frisk practices are constructed as legitimate forms of state coercion, this study also examines the effects of neoliberal reform and structural racism at a time in which it is especially hard to pinpoint the mechanisms through which those operate. To get at the everyday quality of life, I deploy the framework of the home as a site of self-creation developed in Black feminist literature. Between 2005 and 2012, the NYPD documented over four million stops; about 87 percent of individuals stopped were identified as Black or Hispanic; in 90 percent of the cases, no citation or arrest was made. In an analysis of 2011, the New York Civil Liberties Union found that although they only made up "4.7 percent of the city's population, black and Latino males between the ages of 14 and 24 accounted for 41.6 percent of stops in 2011" (NYCLU 2012). Also in this report, the NYCLU found that, at the height of the program, guns were found in significantly fewer than one percent (.1138%) of all stops. Whereas this article focuses on New York as a case study, it is important to note that stop-and-frisk has become the US model of policing, prevalent in cities such as Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and Miami. Civil rights groups across the nation have reported abuses associated with these programs. Despite these controversies, however, stop-and-frisk has been integrated into institutional procedure as routine police work. The emerging interdisciplinary research on stop-and-frisk has explored the inefficiency, disruptiveness, and racial disparities endemic to the practice (see, inter alia, Fagan and Geller 2010, Ferrandino 2013, Rosenfeld and Fornango 2014, Zeidman 2012). …