The New York Police Department (NYPD) as far back as the 1960s has applied the “stop-question-and-frisk” program, more popularly known as “stop-and-frisk” (Weisburd et al. 2014). “Stop-and-frisk” refers to a police practice in which a police officer might stop a motorist or a pedestrian under suspicions of unlawful possession of a weapon or likelihood of committing a crime and question them; if the questioning does not confirm any suspicions or escalate the encounter, the individual is released. Otherwise, the officer would frisk the individual and if necessary, take them into custody (Weisburd et al. 2014). In the past, such practice has been made possible through warrants and a court oversight. However, the modern practice of stop-and-frisk by the NYPD has been increasingly scrutinized for its questionable constitutionality and implicit bias against certain minority groups (Weisburd et al. 2014). Some members of the NYPD have attempted to publicize the precise mechanism of how the department unjustly applies stop-and-frisk throughout New York City. Instead of commendation, the department and the police union have threatened these individuals. Nevertheless, police officers should have taken upon themselves to resist the practice even more so before the final injunction in 2014 (Lee, 2016). A thorough analysis of the stop-and-frisk program reveals that the program had numerous faults. However, police officers continued this practices despite the evidence-based flaws (Weisburd et al. 2014), thus compromising the rights of individuals and the integrity of the police force.
The Pitfalls of Stop-and-Frisk
The prevailing arguments for maintaining stop-and-frisk were made by former mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg during their tenure. They claimed that the practice reduced crime and made neighborhoods safer (Taylor, 2012). However, the Washington Post has said that such claims are improvable (Lee, 2016). Despite the absence of any substantial evidence on crime reduction due solely to stop-and-frisk, the NYPD and the police union have advocated for its expansion and a more discriminant application. In response, an officer of the NYPD argued that the inherent bias in the program pit the police against the very people that they are trying to serve and protect (Eterno, 2012). Over time, people become apprehensive of the police and uncooperative, undermining any serious effort to investigate crimes or perform routine duties. As such, it would have been in the best interest of the individual members of the NYPD to speak against the practice from its very inception. Maintaining the program could have served certain political agendas in the short run, but from a social standpoint, the erosion of the trust between the police and the community and the constant apprehension among those targeted by the practice is more damaging in the long run.
Officers should have resisted stop-and-frisk more vocally because it encourages bad behavior by other members of the NYPD and gives the department a negative reputation. The warrantless nature of stop-and-frisk has incentivized the police to intrude into certain aspects of the lives of people in parts of Harlem and Brooklyn (The Young Turks, 2012). Normally, a public congregation in an impoverished neighborhood or owning a derelict vehicle is not a cause for suspicion. However, with stop-and-frisk in effect, such gatherings and traffic stops due to a broken taillight or other minor infractions have essentially allowed the police to harass individuals. The fact that the NYPD unofficially instructed officers to reach a certain quota of stop-and-frisk partly motivated these harassments (Eterno, 2012). As a result, the department effectively sanctioned officers to find fault where there was none. Because of the financial hurdles associated with getting out of such stop-and-frisk arrests, the poor become the unwitting victims of such practice. As such, if more officers had resisted the practice on moral grounds, fewer people would have been mistreated. Not doing so shows a lack of decency and an absence of sympathy for a fellow citizen.
Police officers’ duty is to uphold democratic law, thus they should have also resisted stop-and-frisk because the practice is fundamentally unconstitutional. Proponents of the practice—the mayors, the police chiefs, and the police union—have argued that stop-and-frisk be Constitutional (Gayle, 2013). According to the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, all individuals have protection from warrantless search, except under probable cause. While the argument made for stop-and-frisk does seem to conform to the Constitution, the NYPD violates it because of how the department carries it out. Firstly, there are no warrants for search, seizure, or arrest under stop-and-frisk. Second, the officers abuse it greatly to such an extent that an overwhelming majority of the >600,000 people stopped and frisked in 2011 were African Americans and Latinos (Devereaux, 2012). Mayor Bloomberg attempted to justify such disparity by claiming that minorities are likely to become participants in and become victims of crimes (Robinson, 2011).
Statistically, such claims may be valid. Nevertheless, statistics alone do not justify stop-and-frisk because it is unique because of how it violates the victims’ civil rights. It undermines the equal protection of all and targets those that are already disenfranchised by assuming guilt until proven otherwise. As a result, it perpetuates the indictment of the poor. No matter how effective stop-and-frisk may be, it violates one of the basic tenets of the Constitution (Gayle, 2013). For rational police officers and those genuinely concerned with justice for all, the continued practice of stop-and-frisk should have been a thorn in their side.
Again, police officers are positioned to uphold democratic law and thus should have voiced stronger opposition to stop-and-frisk because it was to a great extent morally unjust and undemocratic. Immanuel Kant Kant’s moral philosophy is intertwined with “man’s faculty of judgment, which rules out blind obedience” (Arendt 1963, p. 121). Kant emphasized that morality applies to every rational being. According to Kant, a moral action is determined by reason rather than by emotional impulses. In this regard, an action is moral when it is reasoned, and the moral value of an action is based on the rational behind the action or its motive and not the consequences (Duty-based ethics, n.d.).
According to Kant’s duty-based ethics, some acts are either right or wrong, and individuals are obligated to act in the right way regardless of whether it will produce bad or good consequences.
“…all that is left of Kant’s spirit is the demand that a man do more than obey the law, that he go beyond the mere call of obedience and identify his own will with the principle behind the law- the source from which the law sprang. In Kant’s philosophy, that source was practical reason.”
(Arendt 1963, p. 121).
Kant posited that each and every person was a legislator and that the moment a person starts to act by using practical reason, he or she finds principles that could and that should be the principles of law (Arendt, 1963, p. 121). In this regard, police officers should not have just followed the law but should have instead questioned the appropriateness or value of the orders they received regardless of the consequences. It is not entirely proven if stop-and-frisk contributed to bringing the crime rate down. However, studies and statistics revealed that some police officers abused the power of the system and engaged in discriminatory practices especially against blacks and Hispanics, who were stopped far much more than whites and other races (Knafo, 2016). The tactics of the program caused racial profiling and made the potential targets of the practice fear police officers.
Although police officers voiced their concerns regarding the practice and how it was being abused, several senior officials and their colleagues ignored their claims (Knafo, 2016). Their move to try and stop the program was right when viewed from the perspective of administrative ethics, which emphasizes and supports the application of moral principles to the conduct of officials in all organizations (Thompson, 1985). It assumes that people in organizations cannot only make moral judgments, but they can also be objects of moral judgments. Thompson (1985) posits that morality asks how a policy or an action serves the interests of everyone or if a person who did not know his or her specific circumstances such as social class or race would accept it. In the case of stop-and-frisk, it did not serve the interests of everyone because minorities and the poor were the ones who were mainly targeted and arrested.
Thompson emphasizes the importance of higher officials to encourage just law to set an example and rectify the faulty practices of others in order to establish fair order and appropriate responsibility. He states
“Organizations tend to produce patterned outcomes; they regularly make the same mistakes in the same ways. While officials may once or twice reasonably claim they should not have been expected to foresee a harmful outcome to which their well-intentioned actions contributed, there must be some (low) limit to the number of times they may use this excuse to escape responsibility” (Thompson 1985, p.560)
As much as some police officers were against practicing this policy, a majority of them and their senior officials supported the use of this practice, despite the moral, unconstitutional objections. The continuous use of the practice despite the negative outcomes is a systemic problem, though these members of authority are “well-intentioned” the lack of responsibility of the impact of their actions allowed the program to remain enacted for several years. Thus, those police officers that voiced their opposition to the program, as they believed it was an abuse of their authority are of crucial importance to the function of the police organization.
Several officers spoke out and took action regardless of the negative consequences that they knew would follow (Knafo, 2016). Such can be exemplified in the case Floyd v. The city of New York; several minority officers, testified against the New York Police Department stating that it had stopped and searched thousands of minorities in the region in ways that directly violated their civil rights. They spoke out and took action regardless of the negative consequences that they knew would follow (Knafo, 2016). Although they were successful, many officers at that time and before received much backlash from their colleagues for arguing against it (Knafo, 2016).
Some factions oppose the notion that police officers should act morally and in some cases go against the wishes of their superiors and the set policies. They support the conventional theory and practice of administrative ethics, which stipulates that administrators should act in agreement with their superiors’ orders and the policies of the organization or agency they serve (Thompson, 1985, p. 55). In other words, this implies that administration should be ethically neutral and not exercise independent moral judgment (Arendt, 1963). However, such a stand impedes holding administrators accountable by citizens and prevents officials from acting on their principles and morals.
While stop-and-frisk may or may not have been an effective means of ensuring peace and safety throughout New York City, police officers had an imperative to resist the practice from moral, social, and legal perspectives. Morally, the harassment of minority and poor populations demonstrates a lack of common decency and sympathy. Socially, it perpetuates mistrust and lack of cooperation between the police and the community. Legally, it undermines the Constitution. Those who argued that stop-and-frisk was wrong and that it did little good to ensure the social peace were finally vindicated when the Courts refused to extend the practice in 2014. It did not have to take an injunction to bring an end to it. Individual officers are authority figures that serve the purpose of upholding the rights of the democratic public and therefore could of and should of resisted from engaging in such practices once the adverse outcomes and question of constitutionality began to emerge. Failure to do so out of fear of jeopardizing their personal career further compromises the integrity of the police force and highlights the systemic flaws of abuse of power within institutionalized policing.
