2 Unpublished Studies Say Stop-and-Frisk Doesn't Work

The question of whether stop-and-frisk is constitutional has (for now) been settled. Whether the policy works to reduce violent crime is another question entirely. Mayor Michael Bloomberg's strongest argument for the efficacy of stop-and-frisk is that crime has fallen concurrent with the NYPD performing millions of stops in minority neighborhoods. That argument might carry water if stop-and-frisk was the only thing the NYPD was doing to combat crime, but it's not.

That's why researchers are trying to control for as many factors as possible to judge stop-and-frisk as policy. It's no easy feat, but New York magazine's Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes that two researchers are in the process of doing so, and that their preliminary findings will come as an unpleasant surprise for Mayor Bloomberg.