This is how I am alive, or, better, how I am not. –I don’t mean anything supernatural, but just that it is possible to die in an everyday kind of way. Life transfigured into something else just as an ordinary course of events. I feel smudged out, not really dead but some state that makes you ask if this is life, after all. Like a title that stays on the screen for so long that when you close your eyes you can still see it, vibrating on the underside of your lids. I walk around earth, taking in the end that won’t end.
— Ava Tomasula y Garcia, “Vidoteca Fin Del Mundo,” in press
INTRODUCTION
The New York Police Department’s (NYPD) Street Crimes Unit, a commando force of several hundred officers that patrolled at night and in plainclothes, believed that “they owned the night” (Center for Constitutional Rights n.d.-a). In the mid- to late-1990s, this unit stopped and searched tens of thousands of primarily Black men, the overwhelming majority of whom were not arrested for any crime. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a class action lawsuit, Daniels, et al. v. The City of New York, et al. against the NYPD in 1999, contesting the constitutionality of the voluminous, and racially disparate stops. In February of that year, officers from the Street Crimes Unit mistook the wallet that Amadou Diallo held for a gun, and fired upon him forty-one times, killing the unarmed African immigrant where he stood. Although the officers were indicted, they were acquitted of all charges. In the wake of significant community mobilization and protest, and with the lawsuit still pending, the NYPD disbanded the Street Crime Unit and settled the case in 2003. The NYPD was required to make a number of reforms, including a written anti-racial profiling policy, and audits of police officers and their stops (Center for Constitutional Rights n.d.-a).
And yet even as Daniels was settled, Stop and Frisk continued on, increasing unabated year over year. The NYPD defines “Stop, Question, and Frisk” (commonly referred to as “Stop and Frisk”) as follows: “When a police officer reasonably suspects that a person has committed, is committing or is about to commit a felony or a Penal Law misdemeanor, the officer is authorized by New York State Criminal Procedure law 140.50 to stop, question, and possibly frisk that individual.” In plain language, officers patrolling city streets and other spaces are free to stop and search people whom they perceive to be up to no good. In 2003, the police force made 97,296 stops. A year later, stops increased by 65% to 160,851. Three years later stops more than tripled to 506,491. They continued inexorably upward until reaching the high mark in 2012. By then, New York City’s denizens were stopped, questioned, and/or frisked by the NYPD a staggering 685,724 times (New York Civil Liberties Union 2012) and Black and Latino citizens bore the overwhelming majority of this burden. To illustrate the extent of the inequity, we cite only a few statistics: Black and Latino people comprised 86.6% of stops, although they were only 33.2% of the population; the number of stops of young Black men aged fourteen to twenty-four (168,126) exceeded their number in the population (158,406); and though Black and Latino individuals were more likely to be frisked, they were less likely to have weapons (New York Civil Liberties Union 2012). Stops have long been correlated with race and area poverty (Fagan et al., Reference Fagan, Geller, Davies, West, Rice and White2010), and despite claims that police stops reflect racial patterning in criminal activity, stops are disproportionate to estimated rates of crime by race and ethnicity, including violent crime (Gelman et al., Reference Gelman, Fagan and Kiss2007). In fact, more than half of all stops were not for discrete acts with clear criminal intent—they were for “furtive movements,” a vague descriptor that has little predictive utility in assessing an impending felony or misdemeanor. It is therefore unsurprising that 88% of stops did not result in an arrest or summons at all (New York Civil Liberties Union 2012). The racial disparity as well as the dearth of arrests suggests that the policy may be less concerned with crime prevention than with the control and management of the city’s populations of color.
The dramatic increase in Stop and Frisk’s scope, and significant non-compliance with other aspects of the 2003 settlement resulted in CCR filing a new class-action lawsuit in May of 2012—Floyd et al. v. The City of New York, et al. Again the lawsuit challenged the constitutionality of the NYPD’s policies and practices, predicated on the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment violations for stops without reasonable suspicion, or with excessive force, and racial and national origin profiling, respectively. The lawsuit also contested inadequate training of police officers and the city’s and NYPD leadership’s official approval of unconstitutional stops (Center for Constitutional Rights n.d.-b).
The U.S. District Court ruled in August 2013 that the City’s Stop and frisk procedures were unconstitutional (United States District Court 2013). Notably, Floyd prohibited discriminatory police stops that violate individuals’ constitutional rights; it did not outlaw Stop and Frisk altogether. For that reason, stops fell substantially (there were 191,558 in 2013, and 46,235 in 2014 (New York Civil Liberties Union n.d.)), but did not go to zero, making assertions that “Today, ‘stop-and-frisk’ as New York City knew it is over” (Goldstein 2014) premature. Moreover, racial inequities persist, and these data do not include motorist stops, which continue to plague Black drivers in NYC, neighboring New Jersey, and elsewhere (American Civil Liberties Union 2016; Lamberth Reference Lamberth, Rice and White2010; Warren et al., 2010).
In this paper we argue that Stop and Frisk not only violates the constitutional rights of primarily Black and brown men, but should be considered a public health problem. Drawing on, and extending the concept of necropower, we contend that contrary to biopolitical projects, which aim to produce bodies that are docile, healthy and able to take their place in the formal economic system, Stop and Frisk works with other Black spatial practices to produce bodies that are harassed, stressed and resource deprived, if not altogether dead. Stop and Frisk does not serve to foster life but instead, in ways we outline below, works to move that life inexorably towards death. Stop and Frisk’s impact on individual and community health and well-being functions to set Black lives on a trajectory of debility, and therefore should be considered an environmental health hazard. Here, citing the account of how power operates that Nancy Hirschmann (Reference Hirschmann2003) presents in her feminist revisions to theories of freedom, we want to emphasize the environmental character and impact of the practice, in order to liken it to a toxin, where one need not be present at the point of release to experience its effects. This characteristic facilitates the diffusion of necropower in Black space. Even those who are not stopped fear being stopped, fear death, and thus also find themselves in the grip of this form of necropower.
Achille Mbembe (Reference Mbembe2003) coined necropolitics as something of a corrective complement to Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower, where modern power concerned itself with fostering and regulating the life and health of a given population in the service of economic productivity. Foucault observed a transition from older theocracies to what he called modern “somatocracies,” where subjects were ruled “by and through the flesh.” Here he says “One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (Foucault cited in Mendieta Reference Mendieta, Lawlor and Nale2014, p. 40 ). Biopower is deployed at two levels, both to the individual body, through disciplinary power, and at the level of the collective, focusing on the “species body, imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births, mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary” (Foucault cited in Mendieta Reference Mendieta, Lawlor and Nale2014, p. 40). Somatocracies are characterized by the medicalization of state power and what Eduoard Mendieta describes as the emergence of a “political economy of health,” with the primary aim of maximizing economic output. Reminding us that this power is not benevolent nor is it deployed for its own sake, Mendieta goes on to say that “it is important to underscore that biopolitics refers to the ways in which capitalism disciplines both individual and collective bodies in order to maximize their subjugation and exploitation with the least cost of expenditure power…Disease, morbidity and infirmity became pathologies that had to be prevented, cured, managed lest individuals and populations become unproductive, underproductive, too much of a drain and liability.” (p. 39–40).
By contrast, Mbembe’s starting point is that under necropolitics the sovereign is he who decides who lives or dies, and Mbembe is most concerned with “those figures of sovereignty whose central project is…the material destruction of human bodies and populations” (2003, p. 14). He argues that the concept of biopower did not account adequately for “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” (p. 39). Mbembe is also attuned to superfluity and how power is deployed against bodies in waiting because “capitalism does not need them anymore” (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2009). In order to make evident the operation of modern necropower Mbembe turned from White to Black space: the plantation and the colony.
Here we want to make two points. First, it is important to note that necropower’s applicability does not preclude the operation of biopower in Black communities. The two power formations, biopower and necropower, are not mutually exclusive, as both are deployed to varying degrees in Black space. For example, the longstanding concern with Black births, birth control use, abortions, sex, marriage, and drug rates stand as evidence of the operation of biopower in Black space, though to what end is up for debate.
We think there is considerable evidence, however, that necropolitics is the more significant power formation in Black space within the United States, and that Stop and Frisk functions necropolitically and not biopolitically. First, although modern and contemporary Black space, like its White spatial counterpart, has been and is characterized by the medicalization of power, there is a long-standing dearth of medical care in Black space, calling into question any objective goal of fostering Black life. This is evident in the far greater job the state and its medical apparatus has done in fostering White life as compared to Black life, apparent in life expectancy statistics. Further, Black neighborhood themselves have been marked as “pathogenic” environments, environments that produce “excess death,” and state officials are not without blame for the existence of these risks. Black unemployment rates also belie the existence any power deployed in the interest of maximizing productivity. It is far more likely that any operating power functions to make the body more docile only in preparation for warehousing within the expanding carceral state. Third, if biopower aims at the least expenditure of resources, the operation of state power in Black communities fails that test. Black communities are overpoliced and Stop and Frisk, specifically, is a labor-intensive practice.
Second, we want to point out that to name Stop and Frisk as an instance of state necropower is not to imply a homogenous and complete state apparatus or state power formation. Indeed, Foucault rejected the notion of a coherent, calculating state, and instead conceived of the state as “an ensemble of institutions, procedures, tactics, calculations, knowledges and technologies, which together comprise the particular direction that government has taken” (Johnson Reference Johnson, Gane and Johnson1993, p. 140). The medicalization of power operates along one axis and those empowered—or at least not prevented—from stopping and frisking operate along another axis. Both forms of power intersect with the Black body and neither reports to a centralized authority or command.
DYING FAST: POLICE ENCOUNTERS AND BLACK DEATH
Mbembe makes a convincing case, and his concept certainly applies in the U.S. context. Part of the concept’s relevance is all too straightforward. In the Black space that concerns us too many encounters between Black bodies and state agents are fatal and are therefore easily comprehensible as part of a state politics of death.
Black citizens have met their death at the hands of police, and in the past several years, video-documented encounters have allowed viewers to be privy to the ghastly expiration of Black life in real time. After two highly publicized incidents in immediate succession—Eric Garner, a Staten Island resident, killed in a chokehold, and Michael Brown, a teenage resident of Ferguson, Missouri, shot by a police officer—Ta-Nehisi Coates (Reference Coates2015) commented:
The police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction of your body was an overreaction. It does not matter if the destruction of your body resulted from a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction of your body springs from foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers of your body will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions (p. 9).
Death by law enforcement officers is the third leading cause of violence-related deaths reported in the National Violent Death Reporting System, and recent data suggests that Black males are twenty-one times more likely to die in this manner (Gilbert and Ray, Reference Gilbert and Ray2016). Police records in Denver reveal that between 1983 and 2012, unarmed Black and Latino Denver residents who were not engaged in any criminal activity were shot in manifold settings: cars, the streets, and their homes (Durán Reference Durán2016). Indeed, repeated encounters across the United States between Black residents and police and agents of the criminal justice system have provoked activists to decry the disproportionate use of force against Black bodies, to challenge the legitimacy of the operation of state necropower, and to struggle with state agents over the meaning of the Black bodies slain within the American state. On the latter point, are we to interpret police killings within the discursive logic of the War on Drugs and the Law and Order state? That is, have the executions of these “thugs” helped to restore the moral order of the nation? Or, as those within the Black Lives Matter Movement assert, should we see these deaths as an illegitimate exercise of state power, as the theft of the life of innocent children gone too soon (Threadcraft 2017; Wright Reference Wright2011)?
DYING SLOW: THE NECROPOLITICS OF STOP AND FRISK
Whether the state or activists prevail in assigning meaning is a central question deserving of considerable scholarly attention and remains unresolved. We want, however, to examine the corporal byproducts of police control beyond its considerable efforts to produce the slain body, what might properly be called the embodied dead (the “thug”). Living under the constant threat of violent death transforms those who are not slain into the as-yet slain, but unmistakably closer to death—the constantly harassed, stressed, and unduly constrained slain-in-waiting. Roxane Gay (Reference Gay2015) writes, “As a black woman in America, I do not feel alive. I feel like I am not yet dead.” For that reason it calls into question how we should conceive of the totality of environmental health hazards in Black communities and all that makes residential segregation a fundamental cause of health disparities (Williams and Collins, Reference Williams and Collins2001). As one New Yorker argued, “We feel that we live in an occupied zone patrolled by law enforcement. It’s a very containing feeling. It almost feels like you’re in an outside prison” (Center for Constitutional Rights 2012, p. 19). When the street becomes a prison outside, Stop and Frisk is best understood as part of an array of necropolitical forces that operate in Black space, an important and rarely remarked instance of the operation of “necropower” as a whole within Black space.
We emphasize that all Blacks are exposed to necropower even when they are not slain; we want to shift the focus of analysis of necropower from the bodies of the slain. While the most severe instances of police violence (i.e., cases of brutality and killings) are easily interpretable as necropolitical, Stop and Frisk even at its most benign inflicts racial injury and moves the body towards death. A stop may last only a few minutes and may fail to inflict any physical injury, but still causes significant harm to which Whites are not exposed. Beyond compromising discrete constitutional rights, the necropolitics of Stop and Frisk inheres in its undermining of Black chances to live to the end of a normal life or to live a life at its full potential. Police destruction of Black bodies is the limit form of necropower, but we hold that it operates as well in the form of friskings, detainings, and humiliations (Coates Reference Coates2015). These practices should be seen on a continuum of necropower, where death is the limit, yet in no way the only manifestation. Rather, necropower also produces degraded forms of Black life. In the parlance of the Ministry of Truth’s Newspeak (Orwell [1949] 1984), Stop and Frisk could be said to produce unlife. Indeed, Mbembe closes his essay by arguing that necropower produces not only maximum destruction of persons, but also “death-worlds, which are conditions of life that make the population into living dead” (2003, p. 40, emphasis in original).
Our intervention, building on Foucault’s trenchant analysis of the role of the prison in the management and regulation of populations, and extending Mbembe’s discussion, is to define the contours of the death world by situating Stop and Frisk as one aspect of it; and to extend Mbembe’s concept of living dead to argue that Stop and Frisk produces a slow death, by which we mean unlife—illness, underdevelopment, and the muting of unconditional freedom. We focus on Stop and Frisk not because we believe that it is the sole manifestation of necropower, but because of its unique position and impact on Black lives. It is a form of state power that targets Black life most pointedly. Stop and Frisk is but one policy in law enforcement, which itself is broadly necropolitical in Black space. An analysis of the totality of the institution of law enforcement is beyond the scope of this article, but in any case our goal is very specific: we want to show the quotidian workings of necropower beyond the spectacular displays that now spark widely publicized protests. In many ways, the American state has already answered the question of who must die; and for Black bodies the question is rather one of when, or at what pace. Thus, our contribution is to expand the construct of necropower beyond summary execution and immediate death to think about the broader environment of Black space and to expand the scope of current formulations about the negative impact of Stop and Frisk.
We should note here that although we focus on New York City, our arguments about aggressive policing as necropower reach beyond the city’s borders. Police departments across the United States deploy stop and frisk practices, though most of the largest departments do not collect or make available data on the stops they make (Harris Reference Harris2013). In addition, many of these municipalities do so in ways that violate the constitution. The Department of Justice published the results of its recent investigations of the Ferguson, Missouri Police Department, and the Baltimore Police Department, both of which routinely stopped people on city streets without reasonable suspicion of criminal activity (United States Department of Justice 2015, 2016). Beyond the country’s borders, stop and frisk policies subject racial and ethnic minorities to discriminatory treatment. Internationally, police in several European cities have unfairly targeted individuals of color for street stops, questioning, and searches. In some instances, legal challenges are underway (Open Society Institute 2009, 2013; Open Society Justice Initative 2013a, 2013b). Finally, although our discussion is about a city police department, in many other places, public safety has been privatized and frequent abuses can go unchecked (Newman Reference Newman2015). Thus, our arguments about the liminality Stop and Frisk imposes upon Black lives are relevant across a number of geographic and juridical contexts.
CONTOURS OF THE DEATH WORLD
Empirical studies have begun to show Stop and Frisk’s stress-mediated health decrements among African Americans, and we seek to extend current analytic frameworks to consider more expansively the ways in which the policing strategy may inflict harms on the health of Black populations. We do so by tracing the components of the death world as they operate through Stop and Frisk. First, as we have articulated, space is central to necropower. Within the death world, Stop and Frisk uses urban space to enfeeble Blacks by restricting physical access to the outside world, making domestic space more dangerous, and creating an aesthetic of occupation in the built environment. Second, Stop and Frisk induces perceptual dysfunctions in multiple ways, all of which functions to move the black body towards death: 1) how the state sees the Other (Black bodies); 2) how Black people perceive the possibilities for engagement with the state; and 3) how Black people perceive themselves. By producing the perceptual meaning of blackness, it does considerable work in creating narratives that make blackness a metonym for crime and disorder. In this narrative, the Black body is always the proper subject—in fact the object—to be slain by any and all those who would restore the moral order of the polity, whether or not they are state agents, as in the case with Trayvon Martin. Third, Stop and Frisk depletes economic and civic resources by inciting mistrust and reducing the likelihood that Blacks will lobby for their share of the ‘prophylactic’ resources of the state (Iton Reference Iton2008). And fourth, the practice becomes embodied, it imprints on the black body, both physically and mentally. Embodied stress, fear and trauma is unsurprising when the subject knows that any encounter may well end in death—and moreover, that the death may go unpunished.
Spatial Praxis
The spatial aesthetic of the death world is one that anticipates police actions like Stop and Frisk. Mbembe (Reference Mbembe2003) argues that each stage of imperialism has deployed different technologies to meet its aims, whether gunboat, quinine, or railroads. The spatial technology of the death world in occupied territories reflects “states of siege,” and manifests as “fortified structures, military posts…buildings that bring back painful memories of humiliation, interrogations, and beatings” (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2003, p. 39). Public health literature has also characterized the ghetto streetscapes as a “siege ready environment” (Cannuscio et al., Reference Cannuscio, Weiss, Frunchtman, Schroeder, Weiner and Asch2009). Fortified and bunker-like buildings, bulletproof glass, barbed/razor wire, windowless facades, and other characteristics (Vergara Reference Vergara1997) festoon residential spaces with the architecture of carceral corridors. The harms are at least twofold: the bleak landscape of the fortified ghetto formalizes Black space as a place where aggressive policing is not only appropriate but necessary; and siege-ready environments suggest that community residents are dangerous, feared, and devalued (Cannuscio et al., Reference Cannuscio, Weiss, Frunchtman, Schroeder, Weiner and Asch2009), which has implications for health—humans experience stress not only in response to incidents but also to ideas (Massey Reference Massey2004).
At best, Stop and Frisk is agnostic as to whether Black city residents may use urban space freely without facing police surveillance or punitive measures. In this, it could be said to reflect the settled expectations of the broader White populace. Elijah Anderson’s (2015) explication of White space holds that Black individuals in White space are perceptual anomalies that elicit concern and outrage among White residents, and empirical studies have shown that Whites are sensitive to the prevalence of Black neighbors. For example, all else being equal, the more Black people that live in a block group, the more that White residents perceive disorder (Sampson and Raudenbush, Reference Sampson and Raudenbush2004). It is instructive that the NYPD gives summonses more frequently to Black residents for infractions that commonly operationalize disorder, e.g., littering (Ryley et al., Reference Ryley, Bult and Gregorian2014). Because disorder is racialized, it is as if Black bodies are themselves a low level offense. At worst, Black bodies are forcibly banished from city streets, as in Baltimore: “This police got out of the car and told everyone standing on the sidewalk, sitting on their stoops to get into their houses because this was his street and nobody was allowed outside” (Gomez Reference Gomez2016, p. 162).
The NYPD’s Street Crimes Unit claimed to own the night, therefore seizing control not only over the spatiality of city streets but also over temporality. Indeed, some New Yorkers described weekends as “Safari night” and explained that family members were reluctant to visit them given the high levels of police attention (Center for Constitutional Rights 2013). If the police own the night then Black residents may exist in public space only in daytime, making New York City a sundown town. Moreover, police claims of owning the night relegate Black people to the margins of humanity inasmuch as Whites are constructed as “masters of their own time, as against those mastered by time” ((Mills Reference Mills2014, p. 31); and people of African descent are seen as “shorn of human time, not to mention humanity” (Hanchard Reference Hanchard1999, p. 250).
We must also point out that in outdoor urban space, Stop and Frisk disproportionately affects men, but Black women are not exempt. For example, in New York City, the charge “loitering for the purposes of prostitution,” (statute 240.37) disproportionately targets Black, East Asian, and trans women and serves to regulate their behavior in urban public space. The statute unfairly targets women of color overall; in 2012 they were 89% of defendants in Brooklyn and 87% of defendants in Queens. In Brooklyn, 69% of those arrested were Black. The Urban Justice Center’s Sex Worker’s Project states that “The statute allows police to interpret behaviors such as repeatedly attempting to stop a vehicle or repeatedly waving to a vehicle, or attempting to talk to other individuals on the street, as having a purpose of engaging in prostitution.” (Urban Justice Project Center Sex Worker’s Project 2016). The project notes that analysis of police records show that police use manner of dress, a woman’s presence in an area known for prostitution and even possessing condoms as an indication that she is about to engage in prostitution.
Additionally, while police seem to draw an offensive perimeter around Black men on the street, Black women are more likely than Black men or Whites of either gender to be surveilled in private spaces (Kwate and Threadcraft, Reference Kwate and Threadcraft2015). This is especially troubling because Black women are disproportionately affected by other methods of crime control and interpersonal violence that reach beyond public spheres and into domestic space. For example, in third party policing, nuisance ordinances function by leveraging fines, license revocations, and jail time to conscript third parties such as landlords into crime control (Desmond and Valdez, Reference Desmond and Valdez2012). In this framework, properties that generate an “excessive” number of service calls to 911 may be deemed a nuisance and receive citations that must be abated by the landlord. At least fifty-eight jurisdictions across the country, including large cities such as Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago deploy these ordinances. In Milwaukee, properties in Black neighborhoods were disproportionately deemed nuisances and landlords often responded to nuisance citations by discouraging tenants from calling 911 and by initiating or threatening eviction. For Black women, this creates the untenable situation of enlisting the police to seek protection from violence, or keeping their residence (Desmond & Valdez, Reference Desmond and Valdez2012). And according to the Violence Against Women Survey, 25% of Black women have experienced intimate partner violence. Black women are also disproportionately represented among those severely battered by intimate partners, as the Bureau of Justice statistics reports that Black women are four times more likely to be murdered by a boyfriend or girlfriend than White women (Richie Reference Richie2012). In Ferguson, women who called the police to report domestic disturbances with male partners were arrested and jailed or given summons for housing occupancy permit violations. One of these proclaimed that she would never call the police again, “even if she [were] being killed” (United States Department of Justice 2015, p. 126).
This inversion of the purported sanctity of the home has always been a liability in Black women’s lives. Far from liberal myths that the private sphere is free from invasive state regulation, Black women’s sexuality, child rearing and relationship building enjoy no privacy (Threadcraft Reference Threadcraft2015). Thus, an analysis focused solely on public space as a site where women incur risks to safety and well-being is incomplete. Mbembe’s original account of necropower did not attend to the ways in which gender is implicated in the production of the properly embodied dead and remained silent on the contexts and ways in which the politics of death intersected with the politics of gender as it acted on the female body.
Michelle Wright (Reference Wright2011) illuminated how gender and the public/private divide are often crucial to the operation and, critically, the subsequent discursive legitimation of necropower. She argued that the Mexican state, when tasked with providing an explanation for the large number of female dead within its borders, sought to construct the private sphere—a place feminists have long pointed out can be quite unsafe for women—as safe space. Therefore, the state held, all female bodies that remained in private space would be safe. Good women stayed at home and out of the public space, including the workforce, which was constructed as masculine, and therefore remained alive. All dead bodies belonged to women who had ventured into unsafe—and tacitly male—public space. These bad women had ventured into the male world; they were labeled public women and sex workers, and their deaths were not tragedies to be mourned but instead represented a kind of cleansing, which helped to restore the moral order of the Mexican nation. Wright’s critique cautions us against an unqualified casting of public space as the primary locus of necropower. By contrast, Black American women’s experiences with the carceral state demonstrate that should they ask the state to intervene to protect them from interpersonal violence in domestic space, they risk being ejected from said space altogether. Yet if they fail to ask they are at acute risk of death. Here we can think of necropower as operating through state inaction and exposure to death. Taken together, the spatial dimensions of the death world are not restricted to public streets. We acknowledge that the force of the state is refracted through gender in ways that vary the experience of necropower for Black women and men.
The routinization of police surveillance and detainment makes for circumspect use of public space by both black men and women and circumspect use of private space by black women. Faced with the intrusion of police stops, individuals may alter their routines, or become less likely to go outside and move freely in the city. As one city resident explained, “You shouldn’t be held up in your apartment, if you have one. You shouldn’t be afraid to come outside and go to the store to get a soda for fear that the police are going to stop you” (Center for Constitutional Rights 2012). When people censor their movements or perceive that they must carefully mete out their participation in public space, the most concrete health risks stem from increased sedentary behavior. More broadly, censored movements put communities at risk of losing a vibrant street life, in which case both individuals and communities suffer loss of optimal use of communal space. Here, we must be concerned with disrupted social networks, a flexible resource that is fundamental in shaping health (Link and Phelan, Reference Link and Phelan1995), reduced collective efficacy, which a corpus of studies show to be associated with violence, asthma, birth weight, self-rated health and heat wave deaths (Sampson Reference Sampson2012), and loneliness, with effects ranging from increased blood pressure to increased mortality risk (Cacioppo and Cacioppo, Reference Cacioppo and Cacioppo2014). Black New Yorkers assert that often, the only respite from police stops is to stay home (Dressner and Martinez, Reference Dressner and Martinez2012). These New Yorkers question the ways in which Stop and Frisk makes residential amenities illegitimate: “If I can’t sit on the bench that’s in front of my building, why is the bench there?” (Center for Constitutional Rights 2012).
Residents’ reported response to implicit restrictions on the use of urban space demonstrate that Stop and Frisk can impede the subject’s freedom beyond the moment of any specific encounter and/or subsequent arrest and help to illuminate the environmental character of this form of necropower, such that its reach, its impact on freedom as well as any deleterious health impact extends beyond any specific stop. To understand why, it is instructive to look to Hirschmann’s (2003) feminist formulation of freedom in which she argues that mainstream freedom theorists are most concerned with identifiable agents of constraint—police officer B who stops Black person A—who would then prevent Black person A from acting as he willed, going to a store, sitting on a bench, etc. Freedom theorists, she continues, have therefore typically conceived of free action as according to the following formula: person A is free to do X because person or institution B does not prevent him from doing X. She cautions that theorists have given considerably less attention to cultural and contextual barriers that shape person A’s desires. Mainstream liberty theorists can see police officer B as limiting person A’s freedom, just as they have no problem seeing how a sexual harasser, an abusive partner, or a rapist impinges on a woman’s freedom; but Hirschmann holds that the contexts in which officers, harassers, and abusive partners are unpunished and allowed to act with impunity, create a climate of fear that functions just as effectively to limit freedom of action. In her example, she says that if women do not go out at night because they are dissuaded from doing so by fear of being raped, they are constrained because of a general power that limits their freedom of action and they are no less constrained because the power that restrains them is not attributable to a particular agent. The subjects of routine police stops face a comparable situation. Hirshmann’s’ theory helps us to understand the diffusion of necropower beyond the discrete police encounter, as Stop and Frisk creates the debilitating climate of fear that alters the body in two ways: restricting its movements, both externally and internally by causing the subject to regulate its behavior; and by harming its health. All residents may change their behavior, coerced to do so by the fear the practice creates. The term “climate of fear” is particularly apt and helps to illustrate the environmental nature of Stop and Frisk and how the environmental character facilitates said power’s diffusion, enabling it spread throughout a community.
Perceptual Dysfunction
In 2012, The New York Times conducted street interviews with NYC residents, querying their ideas about the New York Police Department Stop and Frisk policy. The Times’ questioning of one White woman elicited the following response: “I highly believe in the stop and frisk. I don’t care what color you are. We hear the African American and Spanish society complaining about it. The White people don’t complain! If you stop me, you stop me, give me a ticket, frisk me, do what you gotta do… I’m sure there’s a lot of White teenagers that get pulled over and stopped–they just don’t make the big public nuisance that other people do” (The New York Times 2012). She is sure, but she is wrong; as we recounted earlier, White youth simply do not face the same level of police intervention.
Stop and Frisk is necropolitical in part because it produces perceptual distortions such as those advanced by the Times interviewee, and is codified in narratives about the specter of Black criminality and skepticism about Black humanity. Television news disproportionately represents Black people as offenders and White people as defenders of the law (Dixon and Linz, Reference Dixon and Linz2005); New York residents need only go outside to see Black people in the hands of police in instances numbering in the hundreds of thousands per year. Michelle Alexander (Reference Alexander2009) argues that the mass incarceration of Black people functions as a new Jim Crow, relegating people to a permanent undercaste with drastically diminished legal rights, social resources, and public regard. Stop and Frisk propels subordination and social control far beyond those who are incarcerated. When hundreds of thousands of Black people are subjected to law enforcement procedures, skin color and criminality are further rendered coextensive in the public imaginary, providing fodder for the perpetuation and implementation of policies that subordinate Black people and harm health. This is particularly true because the ideology of the American Creed strongly reinforces the essential fairness of institutions, policies, and social outcomes (Geronimus and Thompson, 2004).
Other perceptual dysfunctions inhere in the burden Black people carry to anticipate stops and attempt to stave them off. Black residents perceive their environment to be punitive in the same ways as apartheid South Africa: “To be African is to know that your access to the city will be severely policed, and that the slightest violation of the rules of segregation will result in dramatic measures of police harassment” (Enwezor and Bester, Reference Enwezor and Bester2013, p. 25). Black New Yorkers therefore attempt prophylactic measures, whether through physical appearance (e.g., hair or clothing styles), or through documentation (e.g., carrying identification cards, pay stubs, library receipts, and mail) in order to legitimize their existence in the eyes of the state (Center for Constitutional Rights 2012; Kwate & Goodman, Reference Kwate and Goodman2015). Acting as a kind of twenty-first-century American passbook, Black New Yorkers use these documents to proactively attempt to affirm their right to appear in and make use of public space and to be legible as a legitimate body in that space. And while this kind of preemptive effort may shore up an individual’s sense of order and control, it in fact erodes health. Vigilance and anticipatory stress and the repeated cognitive engagement of stressors is associated with a number of outcomes including depressive symptoms, sleep difficulties, hypertension, and poor psychological health (Lewis et al., Reference Lewis, Cogburn and Williams2015).
Loic Wacquant (Reference Wacquant2001) sees the carceral institution as a technological innovation of caste control and subordination of Black people, only secondary to the obsolescence of the ghetto as a mechanism for keeping African Americans abject in a physical, social, and symbolic space. In his formulation, a “deadly symbiosis” has emerged whereby the ghetto has been remade to be more like prison, even as the prison has become more like the ghetto. In so doing, the carceral state takes its place within four major institutions in the United States which have served to confine and control Black populations: slavery, Jim Crow, the urban ghetto, and the hyperghetto, within which the carceral system is enacted (Wacquant, Reference Wacquant2001). Importantly, Wacquant contends that the carceral system does not merely process existing racial hierarchies, but is a “race-making institution”: “Among the manifold effects of the wedding of ghetto and prison into an extended carceral mesh, perhaps the most consequential is the practical revivification and official solidification of the centuries-old association of blackness with criminality and devious violence” (p. 117, emphasis in original). Further, equating blackness with criminality “thus reactivates ‘race’ by giving a legitimate outlet to the expression of anti-Black animus in the form of the public vituperation of criminals and prisoners” (p. 118).
We see how Stop and Frisk operates as a race-making project because it defines and interprets the meaning of death for Black bodies. For example, Representative Peter King of New York lay blame for Eric Garner’s death at his personal medical conditions and physical characteristics, interpreting these as evidence of the legitimacy of his death (Gaber and Wright, Reference Gaber and Wright2016). Fundamental to necropower is a proliferation of sites of violence; and these are not confined to interpersonal conflicts; for Stop and Frisk, the battleground extends to the realm of individual cognitive reality-testing and the public imaginary. Recasting Garner’s death as evidence of his moral failing to maintain the right body seems to query whether the polity in fact is in the throes of a collective psychosis. Not only does necropower dictate “who may live and who must die” (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2003, p. 11), but also who will assert whether the dead are really dead or why they died.
Finally, dysfunction operates in police perceptions of the very bodies they stop. In a qualitative study, one respondent indicated that she was frequently stopped by police because she was perceived to be a man (Gomez Reference Gomez2016). This is indicative of empirical studies documenting the tendency for observers to misidentify the gender of Black women (Goff et al., Reference Goff, Thomas and Jackson2008). Gay (Reference Gay2015) explains, “As a larger, very tall woman, I am sometimes mistaken for a man. I don’t want to be ‘accidentally’ killed for being a black man. I hate that such a thought even crosses my mind.” Quantitative analyses of twelve years of publicly available NYPD Stop and Frisk data showed that Black women’s bodies were always more likely to be perceived as “heavy” than White counterparts, after accounting for BMI derived from height and weight, age, and other factors (Kwate and Threadcraft, Reference Kwate and Threadcraft2015). Black women are not accurately “seen” by police officers, and may endure disparate disciplinary projects as a result.
Resource Depletion
Stop and Frisk engenders loss of use of economic and civic resources that are critical for health. Police stops are used to extract money from Black communities and fuel the operation of a repressive state and are therefore part of a racialized redistribution mechanism. In NYC, since 1999, summonses for “broken windows” infractions numbered over half a million each year; and between 2001 and 2013, 81% of those met with a summonses were Black or Latino (Ryley et al., Reference Ryley, Bult and Gregorian2014). Infractions include such violations as littering, loitering, unreasonable noise, and riding a bicycle on the sidewalk. While some fines (e.g., consuming alcohol ($25) or urinating in public ($50)) are payable by check, all others require a court visit, under threat of an arrest warrant. Summons enriched criminal court coffers by $8.7 million in 2013 alone (Ryley et al., Reference Ryley, Bult and Gregorian2014). And if time is money, then Stop and Frisk foments the loss of economic resources because in a very basic way, police stops waste African American New Yorker’s time.
African Americans in other U.S. cities confront the same loss of use. In Tampa, over the past twelve years, the police issued more than 10,000 tickets for bicycle-related violations, the targets of which were overwhelmingly Black (79%), though they comprise only 25% of the city’s population. Tickets and fines totaling $50 or more were levied for numerous infractions ranging from: riding with no light, riding with a friend on the handlebars, riding without touching the handlebars to riding too slowly (Zayas and Stanley Reference Zayas and Stanley2015). On its face, Ferguson, Missouri, seems to represent the nadir of economic loss driven by police stops. However, it is worth noting that the city’s practices only came to light after the police killing of Mike Brown; it is of course possible that unbeknownst to the general public, municipalities elsewhere in the country are engaged in similarly extortionate policies. But maximizing revenue, rather than public safety, has been Ferguson’s highest priority for law enforcement. Police officers issue citations during unconstitutional stops, often several at a time, even competing with each other for the number of citations per stop (United States Department of Justice 2015). The economic costs for African Americans extend beyond immediate monetary losses. As we have outlined, police stops often initiate a cascade of negative outcomes including felony charges—which induce scarcity of several resources—, and lost wages and jobs when detention on the street or at police precincts result in tardiness or missed work (Center for Constitutional Rights 2012).
Stop and Frisk also depletes civic resources. Stop and Frisk dampens trust in the state and discourages participation in public life, and decreases, for example, the likelihood of petitioning for what Richard Iton (Reference Iton2008) calls the prophylactic functions of the state—or even the minimal Hobbesian state—where the state’s main function is simply as a violence prevention mechanism. National surveys show that Black youth have the highest rates of police harassment, are much less likely than White and Latino counterparts to report trusting the police and their protective capacities, or even to trust that they are full and equal citizens under the law (Rogowski and Cohen, Reference Rogowski and Cohen2014).
Aggressive policing alters communities’ collective agency, increasing fragmentation and disrupting community cohesion and social networks (Gomez Reference Gomez2016). In New York, police stops are often opaque, particularly with regard to the rationale for the stop (e.g. “fits the description”). In such cases, residents are more likely to file complaints with the Civilian Complaint Review Board (Rengifo and Fowler, Reference Rengifo and Fowler2016). In turn, perceptions of the police as hostile or untrustworthy may generalize to the dominant view of the state; police stops have been shown to be associated with political alienation and withdrawal and a reduction in civic engagement (Lerman and Weaver, Reference Lerman and Weaver2014). According to these authors, aggressive policing in the form of Stop and Frisk alters communities’ collective agency because perceptions of the police as hostile or untrustworthy may generalize to the dominant view of the state, leading to political alienation and withdrawal. Amy Lerman and Vesla Weaver (2014) studied associations between per capita stop and frisk rates and citizen engagement and civic life, as measured by calls to NYC’s 311 line—an administrative service that allows city residents to make non-emergency municipal service requests or queries. Results suggested that when the police are experienced as fair and responsive, a positive halo extends to the state more broadly. But this effect was halved in low-income neighborhoods and those with low percentages of White residents. Additionally, residents made fewer calls to 311 that were specifically related to crime and safety issues when a greater proportion of stops included searches, the use of force, or did not result in an arrest (Lerman and Weaver, Reference Lerman and Weaver2014).
For both Black men and women, Stop and Frisk makes policing too prevalent and aggressive. But Black communities also continue to live under conditions of state neglect, or what Lisa Miller (Reference Miller2015) has termed racialized state failure. For example, two of the minimal justifications of the modern state are the prevention of interpersonal violence and rationalizing and securing the natural human activity of economic contract and exchange; such conditions have never been realized within Black communities. Alexandra Natapoff (Reference Natapoff2006) argues that scholarly concerns about systematic unfairness in the criminal system tend to center on harshness and over application rather than laxity—but that Black communities also experience underenforcement, whereby the state routinely fails to enforce and protect vulnerable citizens; we saw this with Black victims of intimate partner violence. In 2000, Bronx residents experienced excessive police violence—physical, psychological, and sexual—and contended with police neglect when seeking assistance for civilian-on-civilian violence (Cooper et al., Reference Cooper, Moore, Gruskin and Krieger2004). Similarly, Baltimore residents were stressed both by denigrating and excessive police action and by slowdowns and refusals to enter neighborhoods to address criminal activity following the death of Freddie Gray (Gomez Reference Gomez2016). Both Miller (Reference Miller2015) and Natapoff (Reference Natapoff2006) have shown that bodies within Black territories are disproportionately exposed to death and rendered vulnerable to a variety of harms to which White bodies are not subject, not least of which is through racially patterned abdication by law enforcement.
Embodiment
Paul Butler (Reference Butler2014) argues that Stop and Frisk is a violent assertion of police dominance, one that casts Black men as a population embodying degraded citizenship and state disdain. Further, he contends that the violence of Stop and Frisk warrants a comparison to torture, or more specifically, to “torture-lite,” a threat or enactment of violence and/or cruelty that seems less severe than what is traditionally understood to constitute torture and that does not leave physical marks on the body. Commonalities between Stop and Frisk and torture-lite include intrusive practices that the target can do little to avoid, that inspire terror, humiliation, and learned helplessness, and that communicate and indicate the subordination and social control of the target (Butler Reference Butler2014). The language of torture emerges in New Yorkers’ telling of police stops. Laverne, interviewed by the CCR described herself as someone well aware of her rights, but still she “feels like under torment, torture” (Center for Constitutional Rights 2013).
Terror lives in the kind of “phantomlike world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity” that Mbembe (2003, p. 21) sees as the permanent “state of injury” (emphasis in original) that characterized the life of enslaved persons. We see this starkly in a surreptitious phone recording of an NYPD police stop (Tuttle and Schneider, 2012). Alvin, a Latino teenager and Harlem resident stopped in 2011 by three plainclothes officers, endured physical aggression and racial epithets; his recording gave a rarely seen, and chilling insight into necropower. It was viewed over 3,848,622 times on YouTube and was a flashpoint for critiques of NYPD practices.
The recording begins with a short burst from a siren, as Alvin is accosted by two officers, while a third remains in an unmarked car. Alvin asserts that he was just stopped two blocks ago, and an officer attributes this to Alvin’s reportedly suspicious demeanor. Over the sounds of a physical struggle, we hear an officer say, “You fuckin’ hear me, you fuckin’ piece of shit! Shut your fuckin’ mouth before I slap you.” The police contend that Alvin appears suspicious because he looked repeatedly back at the officers as they approached: “Our job is to look for suspicious behavior. When you keep lookin’ at us like that, looking back…” (Alvin interjects to opine that the police continually stopping him produces the very behavior to which they now look askance) and the officer continues, “Because you keep doing that shit! Listen to me. When you were walking up the block with your hood up and you keep looking back at us like that…” (Another officer challenges Alvin, asking “Why do you have a fuckin’ empty bookbag?”). The encounter continues to escalate, with the officers becoming more and more agitated at Alvin’s failure to assume a deferential pose. We hear the following exchange:
Officer: You wanna go to jail? Shut your fuckin mouth!
Alvin: What am I getting arrested for?
Officer: For being a fuckin’ mutt!
Alvin: That’s a law? Being a mutt?
Officer: Shut your fuckin’ mouth! Have some fuckin’ respect! I will break your fuckin’ arm off right now. Then I’m gonna punch you in your fuckin’ face.
In light of the raft of killings by police officers, it is reasonable to argue that Alvin was lucky to come out of the encounter alive. Again, however, we insist that it is not death alone that instantiates necropower. Pervasive disrespect, humiliation, and physical aggression constitutes a necropolitical project that may leave Black bodies living, but tenuously, awaiting death under a ubiquitous and racially denigrating regime of police surveillance and punishment. Alvin’s experience is unlike most in that it was revealed to the citizenry, while most suffer in a state of invisibility: “No witnesses there to see what was going on. I just wish someone was there to witness it…I couldn’t tell anyone. I kept it in till now… I still am scared” (Center for Constitutional Rights 2012).
At issue here are the wounds inscribed in still living bodies, the state of injury. In social epidemiology, the construct of embodiment refers to the ways in which human bodies, which are at once social beings and biologic organisms, literally incorporate social influences into physio-anatomic characteristics (Krieger and Smith, Reference Krieger and Smith2004). Of these influences, most relevant for our discussion are living in a particular historical period, political and legal systems, social relations of class, race, gender, and other social divisions of power, and the ability to meet consumption needs for a socially meaningful life (Krieger and Smith, Reference Krieger and Smith2004). A Baltimore resident explained that police behavior “affects me, all of us…it makes us angry…we have so much anger inside…pushed down…because they keep treating us all like criminals” (Gomez Reference Gomez2016, p. 162). These feelings of anger, exhaustion and withdrawal triggered in response to racially hostile environments are common (Smith et al., Reference Smith, Allen and Danley2007). Stereotyping Black bodies as illegitimate often means that they “fit the description” of criminal or otherwise displaced and disreputable individuals. A short documentary by Julie Dressner and Edwin Martinez (2012) followed Tyquan Brehon, a young Black Brooklyn resident. He explained, “Most of the times when I get stopped, I’m walking down the block...when you’re young and you’re Black, no matter how you look you fit the description.” Rankine (Reference Rankine2014) echoes his sentiment: “And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description” (p. 105). The cumulative impact of these kinds of racialized stressors is the dysregulation of cardiovascular, endocrine, and other bodily processes.
Evidence is building to show how Stop and Frisk is embodied in New York City. One study (Geller et al., Reference Geller, Fagan, Tyler and Link2014) assessed associations between frequency of police stops, perceptions of police intrusion and procedural fairness, and (PTSD), anxiety, and distress among men aged eighteen to twenty-six. Results suggested that more police contact was associated with higher anxiety and trauma, a correlation further potentiated by high intrusiveness. Other analyses (Sewell and Jefferson, Reference Sewell and Jefferson2016) suggest that stop rates and invasiveness (frisks) were associated with several health outcomes ranging from self-reported general health to prior diagnoses of diabetes. Importantly, some associations were negative for Black and Latino residents, but were not evident, or were positive for Whites, suggesting an unremarked and diffuse way the White body can benefit from the control and management of Black and Brown bodies, and the ways in which Whites can rely on and benefit from an aggressive policing system.
Stress unequivocally is deleterious to health (Segerstrom and Miller, Reference Segerstrom and Miller2004), and is a challenge to which Black people are more highly exposed (Sternthal et al., Reference Sternthal, Slopen and Williams2011). Exposure to racism is a racialized stressor, which has been substantially documented in the literature to take a significant toll on health (e.g., mortality, cardiovascular disease, inflammation, low birth weight, depression, anxiety) and health behaviors (e.g., substance use) (see Cuffee et al., Reference Cuffee, Hargraves and Allison2012; Lewis et al., Reference Lewis, Cogburn and Williams2015; Mays et al., Reference Mays, Cochran and Barnes2007; Paradies Reference Paradies2006; Paradies et al., Reference Paradies, Ben, Denson, Elias, Priest, Pieterse, Gupta, Kelaher and Gee2015; Pascoe and Smart Richman, 2009; Williams and Mohammed, Reference Williams and Mohammed2008). Therefore, to the extent that a detainee perceives a police stop as a manifestation of racism, the stop is likely to compromise mental and physical health even in the absence of abuse. Because of the widely publicized disproportionate implementation of Stop and Frisk, Blacks and Latinos interpret it as a racist practice, and it emerges repeatedly in qualitative accounts of experiences with racism in New York City. As one respondent explained, “They don’t stop the White people” (Kwate and Goodman, Reference Kwate and Goodman2015).
Day-to-day acts of racism can induce rumination, redirecting attention to dissecting these events and behaviors. More generally: “What did he just say? Did she really just say that? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? The moment stinks” (Rankine Reference Rankine2014, p. 9). In relation to policing: “Every single day. Do I have to go through this every single day?” (Center for Constitutional Rights., 2012). Repeated encounters with racism are thought to undergird premature health deterioration and high illness morbidity among African Americans. Arline Geronimus (Reference Geronimus1992) coined “weathering” to define the cumulative impact of, and exposure to, and coping with stressors. Through middle age, Black people have a high probability of death or disability long before old age (Geronimus and Thompson, 2004). Empirical studies have demonstrated that Black women endure accelerated aging at the chromosomal level (Geronimus et al., Reference Geronimus, Hicken, Pearson, Seashols, Brown and Cruz2010). Frequent police stops could act as a cumulative exposure to stress that precipitates weathering. Then, stress responses apply not only to those who are subjected to Stop and Frisk, but also to family and members of social networks. For example, parents may worry that their child will be stopped by police, and that it will escalate into something more severe.
It is clear that the kinds of racial intrusions with which Black psyches must contend are impositions on using the body and mind as desired. Stop and Frisk induces loss of use of the self by usurping cognitive energy and triggering ruminative thoughts about how the individual should exist in the world. Richard Wright ([1945] 1966) was chastised by another Black youth for failing to comport himself appropriately: “When you’re in front of White people, think before you act, think before you speak. Your way of doing things is all right among our people, but not for White people. They won’t stand for it.” Wright noted, “What Griggs was saying was true, but it was simply utterly impossible for me to calculate, to scheme, to act, to plot all the time. I would remember to dissemble for short periods, then I would forget and act straight and human again, not with the desire to harm anybody, but merely forgetting the artificial status of race and class” (p. 160–161). Here, perhaps the appropriate theorist is Foucault and not Mbembe, as the subject enters into a useless and time wasting disciplinary project for the state gaze; Stop and Frisk does not allow forgetfulness about being human. To be sure, even the most earnest and purposeful attention to respectable behavior is no safeguard against police control; but anything that falls short of the criteria for acceptability in the eyes of the White dominated state invites sanction. However, we might also think of something akin to zombification, where the anxieties of White supremacy and the sanctions it invites takes over the body, animating the body’s very movements.
CONCLUSION
We sought to expand the conceptual boundaries of necropower by considering the ways in which state power—through the operation of Stop and Frisk—can, though stopping short of initiating death, produce a lived experience and social status that obstructs Black lives and invites illness and disability. As a necropolitical project, police stops create and perpetuate racial environmental inequities regarding who may live a healthy life and who may not. As we noted at the outset, Stop and Frisk is but one tool in a policing arsenal, and if not a centuries-long history, then the last few years have made plain that there are significant law enforcement conduct problems in this country. Even as Butler (Reference Butler2014) likens Stop and Frisk to torture-lite, recent evidence substantiates charges Black communities in Chicago have made for years—that the police engage in systemic, state-sanctioned torture. Communities are engaged in combating the extensive problems that characterize American law enforcement, most of which extend beyond Stop and Frisk.
As it relates to reforming Stop and Frisk itself, reform has centered on the policy’s legal parameters. Although police stops in New York City have declined significantly since 2012, the policy may also simply take shape under a different guise. Manning Marable (Reference Marable2000) states that a racist/capitalist state relies on “the omnipresence of coercion” to address problems within the Black community (p. 108). Indeed, the NYPD now deploys “Omnipresence,” a new strategy wherein police officers stand guard on street corners and park squad cars on sidewalks with roof lights flashing, for hours on end, surveilling and confronting young men (Goldstein 2014). Residents alter their social interactions and use of urban space, because even handshakes invite detention for possible “hand to hand transactions.” And while the Street Crimes Unit is no longer, and thus its claim on ownership of the night has expired, merely appearing outside after dark creates a higher likelihood of a stop (Goldstein 2014). The new policing strategy could not be more aptly named, other than to be called “Panopticon.”
It remains to be seen whether stops will fall in line with constitutional protections, and whether the NYPD will successfully implement the reforms articulated in the court ruling (e.g., revised training and revised UF-250 forms that officers use to record information about the stop, changes to supervision and monitoring, and body worn cameras (United States District Court 2013)). Community-driven policy change, such as the initiation of a Civilian Complaint Review Board in Newark after decades-long advocacy, in the face of political opposition (McGregor Reference McGregor2016) is heartening for the possibility of significant change. CCRBs and independent monitors can oversee and respond to legal parameters, and address the kinds of perverse incentives and reward structures that make the abrogation of rights central to daily policing practice. But also needed is an explicit extension to a health perspective. To where does our formulation of Stop and Frisk lead regarding a public health agenda?
In the most basic way, conceptualizing Stop and Frisk as necropolitical supports a different way of thinking about health risk. Environmental health hazards research has traditionally focused on discrete instances of toxic exposure such as highways, industrial facilities or sewage treatment plants, but recent work has expanded to include the broader role of place, throwing into sharp relief other excess exposures including health-deleterious retail outlets and underexposure to health-supportive amenities (Morello-Frosch et al., Reference Morello-Frosch, Zuk, Jerrett, Shamasunder and Kyle2011). Such framings are useful for policing strategies such as Stop and Frisk. More practically, we suggest at least three possible means of bringing policing under the purview of health authorities.
First, citywide health surveys conducted by the health department should include surveillance questions about Stop and Frisk encounters, querying frequency of occurrence, detailed information about how the stop was conducted, and the individual’s understanding of the reason for the stop. Data could be used to assess concordance with police reports, track the spatiality of stops, and investigate associations with a number of health outcomes. Second, the city should accept anonymous, confidentially held reports of traumatic stops within twenty-four hour of the incident, as it does with rat bites. What is missed in quantitative counts of police stops is that many of them may inflict the state of injury experienced by Alvin in Harlem. These two strategies appear to pit the state against itself, inasmuch as the health department would be asked to monitor the police department and evaluate its policies as a population health pathogen. But as we noted, the power deployed by these two departments operate along distinct axes, and dissembling the state apparatus is necessary in confronting the necropolitical project. Relatedly, communities should continue to be empowered to contest necropower.
Community groups have mobilized against unjust police practices, informing citizens about their rights, organizing in response to police violence, and participating in the litigation of cases brought to trial. Thus, a third means would be to institute a registry to which residents would report encounters with police. Much like crowd-sourced registries to report bedbug infestations, a Stop and Frisk registry would empower residents to confront the state, and make visible encounters that are not generally available to public knowledge. And, as with a city health survey, these reports could be tracked spatially, to identify “hot spots” that require additional community supports.
Taken together, such strategies could be useful first steps in New York City (and elsewhere) to shift conversations about Stop and Frisk to encompass the broader risks borne by targeted communities. But as the United States’ new presidential administration calls for a resurgence of the policy in New York City—despite its already having been ruled unconstitutional—and also employs rhetoric that suggests nationalizing Stop and Frisk, it is clear that much work will be needed going forward.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We would like to acknowledge participants of the Center on Health Risk and Society seminar at American University for constructive feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript. Some of the ideas in this manuscript grew out of research supported by NIH Director’s New Innovator Award Program, Award Number DP2 OD006513 from the Office Of The Director, National Institutes Of Health and the National Institute Of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Office of The Director, National Institutes Of Health or the National Institutes of Health.
