Previous
PredPol
“Stop and frisk” is a New York City Police Department practice of stopping, detaining, questioning, and frisking or searching civilians on the street—especially in low-income, high-crime neighborhoods. In the early 2010s, the NYPD reported stopping and frisking over 684,000 New Yorkers in one year. Nine out of ten people subjected to stop and frisk during that time period were found innocent—and 87 percent of those targeted were Black or Latinx.
Stop and Frisk Quotes in Weapons of Math Destruction
The Weapons of Math Destruction quotes below are all either spoken by Stop and Frisk or refer to Stop and Frisk. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 5: Civilian Casualties
Quotes
These types of low-level crimes populate their models with more and more dots, and the models send the cops back to the same neighborhood.
This creates a pernicious feedback loop. The policing itself spawns new data, which justifies more policing. And our prisons fill up with hundreds of thousands of people found guilty of victimless crimes. Most of them come from impoverished neighborhoods, and most are black or Hispanic. So even if a model is color blind, the result of it is anything but. In our largely segregated cities, geography is a highly effective proxy for race.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Weapons of Math Destruction LitChart as a printable PDF.
Stop and Frisk Term Timeline in Weapons of Math Destruction
The timeline below shows where the term Stop and Frisk appears in Weapons of Math Destruction. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: Bomb Parts
...and Latino youths, for instance, who are regularly targeted by police forces through programs like stop and frisk ). They also examine whether one’s friends or families have criminal records—again, something that’s statistically...
(full context)
Chapter 5: Civilian Casualties
Human programs like stop and frisk (a program in which NYPD offers were given the go-ahead to stop, search, and frisk...
(full context)
...Civil Liberties Union worked to break out important data on the NYPD’s controversial and harmful stop and frisk program. Data was driving police to stop, search, and frisk more and more people—mostly Black...
(full context)
Stop and frisk , O’Neil suggests, will soon be a thing of the past. Facial recognition software is...
(full context)
