In a fascinating paper, The End of Intuition-Based High-Crime Areas, Ben Grunwald (Duke) and Jeffrey Fagan (Columbia) engage an important criminal procedure question with the benefit of a massive data set. The paper begins with the Supreme Court's conclusion in Wardlow that a "suspect’s presence in a 'high-crime area' is relevant in determining whether an officer has reasonable suspicion to conduct an investigative stop." Perhaps not surprisingly, the Court's opinion in 2000 provides little guidance about what constitutes a "high-crime" area. The paper sets out to assess how the doctrine was operationalized by examining data on more than two million investigative stops conducted by the NYC police from 2007 to 2012.
The data are especially rich in that in NYC police officers who conduct an investigative stop are required to complete a form after each one. "The forms collect rich information on suspect demographics and the precise geographic location of each stop. The data also contain anonymized officer identifiers, which allow us to observe how the same officer behaves in different areas, and how different officers behave in the same areas. And, most important for our purposes, the forms require officers to check off a series of roughly twenty boxes, indicating the bases of suspicion that justified the stop. Fortunately, one of those boxes is for high-crime areas. We merged this dataset with crime statistics and racial and demographic information on small geographic areas in New York City.”
As the paper makes clear, the data cast uneasy light on the Wardlow decision. "Our results suggest that Wardlow may have been wrongly decided. Specifically, we find evidence that officers often assess whether areas are high crime using a very broad geographic lens; that they call almost every block in the city high crime; that their assessments of whether an area is high crime are nearly uncorrelated with actual crime rates; that the suspect’s race predicts whether an officer calls an area high crime as well as the actual crime rate; that the racial composition of the area and the identity of the officer are stronger predictors of whether an officer calls an area high crime than the crime rate itself; and that stops are less or as likely to result in the detection of contraband when an officer invokes high-crime area as a basis of a stop. We conclude with several policy proposals for courts, police departments, and scholars to help address these problems in the doctrine.”
Equally interesting is that the authors point the way for fruitful follow-up empirical work on this topic. "In future empirical work, legal scholars can use body camera footage or SSO to validate the most common factors invoked by officers to establish reasonable suspicion. They can do so by assessing the factual accuracy of police officers’ claims about the presence of these factors and by examining whether they are in fact predictive of criminal behavior. Armed with that information, scholars and courts will have a clearer picture of what Fourth Amendment factors provide a reliable basis for reasonable suspicion and meaningful protection against unreasonable intrusions on personal privacy."
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