Selling the ‘Stop’ in ‘Stop and Frisk’

By AL BAKER

There’s no doubt that the New York City Police Department’s tactic of stopping and frisking people on the street can create tensions with those stopped, and within the neighborhoods where many of the encounters occur. Yet the department is loath to give up the tactic, calling it a core law enforcement tool.

The Newark police director, Garry F. McCarthy, speaking at a law enforcement breakfast recently in Manhattan, proposed one idea: “Sell the stop.”

Meaning: After you do it, explain why you did. Nicely.

Chosen to lead his city’s police force in September 2006, Mr. McCarthy, 51, is the son of a United States Marine. He retired from the New York Police Department as the deputy commissioner of operations after a career of more than 20 years. In his speech, he raised the notion of street-stop encounters — known in the Police Department’s language as “stop, question and frisk” encounters. And he said the police in Newark want to make these interactions opportunities to bridge the often caustic divide between officers and civilians, and not linger as moments that foment discord.

“Even a negative police interaction, if done in the proper circumstance, can leave somebody with a positive mindset when you’re done,” Mr. McCarthy said.

The issue resonates in New York City, where last year, the police force set a record by compiling more than half a million street stops. And the pace is on the rise this year, with officers making 319,156 stops through June, departmental statistics show.

“When you first interact with somebody, you’re stopping them at the level where you have to be on guard — we all know that,” Mr. McCarthy said. “Once the level comes down, once you determine that there’s not a danger to yourself or the community by your interaction with this person, you’re going to explain to them why you did it.”

“You’re going to tell them what you did,” he said. “You’re going to tell them why you did it. You’re going to tell them how you did it, and 99 percent of the time those interactions are going to work O.K.”

In the crowd — it was the Citizens Crime Commission breakfast — was made up of people who could arguably be described as loving policing, and police forces, with such passion that they often find themselves facing the most controversial law enforcement issues head on.

Sitting there was William J. Bratton, the former New York City police commissioner. So, too, was Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, and Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney, among a host of other law enforcement officials and academics, including Jeremy Travis, the president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who were gathered by Richard M. Aborn, the commission’s president.

Mr. McCarthy continued, in a kind of policing stream of consciousness:

The point is, if we do it in the proper fashion, if we use procedural justice, if we concentrate on the concepts of police legitimacy, if we concentrate on the fact that those are interactions, and each one of them is a teachable moment, where we can learn something and they can learn something, the person who is stopped, and we walk away from those stops not cursing them, we walk away from those stops trying to come to some sort of a conclusion that people will understand why we’re doing what we’re doing, because the controversy that comes up revolves around the fact that we know any law enforcement person knows that stopping people who carry guns prevents people from getting shot. Not a very deep concept. And when people talk about the fact that only 10 to 15 percent of those stops result in an arrest, they say you have an 85 percent failure rate. Well, I’m not so sure of that, because if we weren’t stopping people, they’d carry more guns. They’d carry more guns. And I can tell you this, through the strategies that we’ve employed in Newark, we’ve been able to stop shootings of people who just happened to be carrying guns and get into an argument with somebody over a parking spot, or “the bump,” or “the stare,” when a gun is available and the guy pulls it out and shoots him.