Supreme Court Okays Police Stops and Frisks
In the case of Terry v Ohio, decided on this day, the Supreme Court approved the police tactic of “stop and frisk.”
The Court defined a “stop” as a temporary detention of a person about whom the police have “reasonable suspicion” that the person is either committing or about to commit a crime. Thus, a stop is short of arrest. A “frisk” is a pat-down of a stopped person’s outer garments to see if he or she has a weapon, and can be done only for the purpose of protecting the officer’s safety. Thus, a frisk is short of a full search.
Civil libertarians argued that the decision on this day gave constitutional sanction to an intrusive police practice where there is no probably cause. Supreme Court observers were generally surprised that the decision was made by the Warren Court, which had become famous for its decisions in Mapp v. Ohio (June 19, 1961) and Miranda v. Arizona (June 13, 1966), limiting intrusive police practices.
The issue of stops and frisks became a major controversy in the 2000s when the New York City Police Department (NYPD) engaged in an aggressive program of massive stops and frisks. The controversy lasted for fourteen years, and the number of stops reached a peak of 600,00 in 2012. A U.S. District Court, on August 12, 2013, declared the practice an unconstitutional violation of both the Fourth and the Fourteenth Amendments.
The Court: “We merely hold today that, where a police officer observes unusual conduct which leads him reasonably to conclude in light of his experience that criminal activity may be afoot and that the persons with whom he is dealing may be armed and presently dangerous, [and] . . . he identifies himself as a policeman . . . he is entitled for the protection of himself and others in the area to conduct a carefully limited search of the outer clothing of such persons in an attempt to discover weapons which might be used to assault him. Such a search is a reasonable search under the Fourth Amendment, and any weapons seized may properly be introduced in evidence against the person from whom they were taken.”
Essential reading: Michael D. White and Henry F. Fradella, Stop and Frisk: The Use and Abuse of a Controversial Policing Tactic (2016)
Read: Stephen Schulhofer, More Essential Than Ever: The Fourth Amendment in the Twenty-First Century (2012)
Learn more the NYPD stop and frisk case: www.ccrjustice.org
Learn more about police accountability: Samuel Walker and Carol Archbold, The New World of Police Accountability, 3rd ed. (2020)