SOCIAL SCIENTISTS James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling first introduced a concept called “broken windows theory” in the March 1982 issue of The Atlantic Monthly:
Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one un-repaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)
The theory gained a lot of attention and in 1985, the New York Transit Authority hired Kelling as a consultant. In 1990, William Bratton (who described Kelling as an “intellectual mentor”) became president of the New York Transit Police and then in 1993, was hired as mayor Rudy Giuliani’s police commissioner. Giuliani and Bratton enacted a “broken windows” policing agenda by aggressively pursuing minor offenses. One of their key tactics was “stop-and-frisk,” where an officer could stop, interrogate, and search someone if there was “reasonable suspicion” the person had committed a crime. Stop-and-frisk usage surged in the early 2000s; in 2002, NYPD stopped 97,296 people and in 2004 that number increased by more than triple to 313,523. At its peak in 2011, NYPD stopped 685,724 people.
Activists condemned this practice as discriminatory, saying it targeted Black and Latino New Yorkers. The data supports their claims: in the early 2000s, Black and Latino New Yorkers made up about 50% of the city’s population, yet they were targeted in over 80% of the 4.4 million stops the NYPD made between 2004 and 2012. Most of these stops were on innocent people, with over 85% of searches resulting in no arrests or summons. Yet, in these stops, frisks of Black New Yorkers would yield a weapon half as often as frisks of white New Yorkers.
As a result of this discriminatory enforcement, on August 12, 2013, Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy unconstitutional as a violation of New York’s Fourth Amendment rights. Following this ruling, the number of stops made by the NYPD plummeted as shown in the figure below.
Following this ruling, the number of stops dropped to about 12,000, a large difference when compared to the hundreds of thousands of stops in the peak of the stop-and-frisk era.
Supporters of the “broken windows” theory of policing would expect a huge surge of crime following this severe and sudden reduction in policing presence, but New York City crime data shows a different trend. The figures below show that per capita violent crime and per capita property crime figures both continued to decline following the 2013 court ruling.
The NYPD is far from the only police department to employ stop-and-frisk. Washington, DC’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) began releasing its police stop data in 2019 and the ACLU found discriminatory patterns similar to those found with the NYPD. Despite making up only 46% of DC’s population, Black people were subjected to about 75% of all police stops in 2020. Even when controlling for the police district in which the stop occurred, the discriminatory nature of the stops is still glaring.
I have updated the analysis using the MPD’s 2023 stops data and have also incorporated some data from the MPD’s “use of force” dataset, which documents each instance an officer uses force on a subject.
The figure below looks at each police district and compares the racial make-up of each district and how much of the district’s total stops each demographic group account for.
The red bars show the proportion of the district’s population for a given demographic and the blue bars show the proportion of the district’s total police stops for a given demographic. If the two bars are the same height, that means that demographic is stopped proportionately to their presence in the district. If the blue bar is higher than the red bar, then the given demographic is stopped by police by a disproportionately high amount. The discriminatory nature of police stops is most evident in police districts 1 and 2 where Black people make up about 25% and 8% of the districts’ populations, yet account for 75% and 46% of each districts’ police stops, respectively.
The figure below looks at all of DC and compares black and white people across several different metrics:
The contrast between how the police treat Black DC residents compared to how they treat white DC residents is striking; despite making up similar amounts of DC’s population (44% and 39% respectively), 70% of MPD stops; 82% of MPD stops in which the subject receives no warning, ticket, or arrest;, 91% of all police searches; and 90% of all police searches in which no objects are seized are of Black people. Meanwhile, for white people, those numbers are 12%, 5%, 2%, and 2%—a clear indication of discrimination. To give a different perspective to some of these numbers, about 1 in 5 stops of Black DC residents result in no warnings, tickets, or arrests, while only about 1 in 35 stops of white DC residents have that outcome, yet Black DC residents are stopped nearly 6 times more often than white DC residents.
These stops can have a variety of outcomes and when examining those that result in police violence, we see Black DC residents disproportionately harmed. Even if you were to accept the number of stops as your baseline, any use of force metric is disproportionately high against Black DC residents.
These numbers tell the story of a police force that readily escalates with certain parts of the population. They show that the recent police killing of Justin Robinson is not an outlier, but part of a consistent pattern. Multiple officers approached Robinson pointing firearms at him, with one even yelling “I’ll shoot you in your fucking face.” The shouting officer (Vasco Mateus) then fired 10 rounds at Robinson at close range. MPD’s use of force data reveals that over 87% of the time that police are pointing their firearms, it is against Black subjects. Since 2013, MPD have killed 46 people, 40 of which were Black people. The police culture of disproportionately stopping Black people does not just end there; it creates a culture of police violence against Black people.
Ultimately, the numbers that made a judge rule NYPD’s policies unconstitutional do not look much different than the numbers we see today in Washington, DC. While Judge Shira’s ruling did not eliminate racial discrimination in the NYPD’s stops (as seen with current data), the ruling did massively reduce its footprint. Despite New York City having a population of over 8 million and Washington, DC. having a population just shy of 700,000, the NYPD conducted 16,971 police stops in 2023 while the MPD conducted 62,722. If the MPD conducted stops at the same population scale as NYPD did in 2023, they would have only stopped 5,055 people. This practice is invasive, discriminatory, and creates police violence. Judicial intervention is needed to prevent the MPD from continuing this mass violation of constitutional rights.
I encourage everyone to sign Stop Police Terror Project DC’s petition to end stop-and-frisk in Washington, DC.
