Reform and Community Level Participation
The Overturn of SQF in New York City
Alexis Palmer (NYU)
Eleven years after the official over turn of Stop, Question, and Frisk (SQF) in New York City there is still a debate about the appropriate ways for officers to interact with citizens on the street – and what information they have a right or obligation to record. How police stops impact citizens and their wider communities is of critical importance, but difficult to fully understand until long after policies have unfolded. However, within the bounds of privacy, detailed data on police actions and where they occur can provide the needed information to trace back how effective policy changes are and what consequences they have.
These can include: what impact did Stop, Question, and Frisk have on the population? Was its overturn effective? And how do these communities look now?
Given the detailed data on police stops and locations in New York City going back to 2003, we can show that living in a neighborhood that had one standard deviation more police stops during the height of SQF makes an individual as much as 6% less likely to vote in a given election. This is [something] compared to the effect of [something] on overall voting. More importantly, however, though the number of stops made by police drastically declined in 2013, people living in neighborhoods that had been heavily policed did not become more likely to vote. Though the policy change was effective at changing police behavior, at least in observable stops, it was not effective at undoing any negative impact on communities as a result of the original government policy.
However, it is not as simple as the citizens who directly experienced SQF being less likely to participate. We can also show that people who move into neighborhoods that were heavily policed after SQF ended themselves become less likely to vote. To be clear, two individuals move from similar places and into neighborhoods that have similar average incomes, population demographics, and current number of police stops. But, person A’s new neighborhood used to be a frequent target of SQF before they lived there and person B’s new neighborhood did not. Person A is significantly less likely to vote after they’ve lived in their new neighborhood, despite having similar rates of participation before.
What does this mean? It ties into the broader impact of Stop, Question, and Frisk on the public. Work in communities has shown, for instance, that 88% of young people believe residents don’t trust the police and only one in four would report someone who had committed a crime. Students who lived in heavily policed areas were more likely to drop out of school and less likely to go to college. Communities reported feeling occupied by the police and would organize to protect each other instead.
This deep distrust created by this policy is connected to the lack of participation; when residents feel that government representatives are not working for them or even actively against them, this perception extends to the broader government. Why try and use your voice in a system that does not seem to respond to you or your community? The result is the demobilization of populations that are perhaps the most in need of political representation. Further, these attitudes can be passed to new community members; past work has shown that as much as a third of your voting behavior is tied to where you live. Therefore, this lack of political efficacy can be perpetuated within communities despite the reform of police behavior. Instead, some more direct repair and involvement of all citizens in the political process may be necessary.
Alexis Palmer is a PhD candidate in Politics at New York University, where she studies political trust, policing, narratives, and natural language processing methods. Starting in Fall 2024, she will be a Neukom Fellow at Dartmouth University.