NCJ Number
206890
Journal
Criminology & Public Policy Volume: 3 Issue: 3 Dated: July 2004 Pages: 363-378
Date Published
July 2004
Length
15 pages
Annotation
This article is a response to the study "Suspect Searches: Assessing Police Behavior Under the United States Constitution."
Abstract
For the purpose of this article, the author assumes the validity of research design, data collection, findings, and conclusions of the Gould and Mastrofski study and goes on to examine field notes and the public policy debate of the study. Gould and Mastrofski documented astonishingly high rates of unconstitutional police searches in their study. By their conservative estimate, 30 percent of the 115 police searches that they studied, searches that were conducted by officers in a department ranked in the top 20 percent nationwide, that were systematically observed by trained field observers, and that were coded by Gould, Mastrofski, and a team including a State appellate judge, a former Federal prosecutor, and a government attorney, violated the fourth amendment prohibitions on searches and seizures. The majority of unconstitutional searches, 31 out of 34, were invisible to the courts, having resulted in no arrest, charge, or citation. In fact, the rate of unconstitutional searches was highest for suspects who were released, 44 percent versus 7 percent of arrested or cited suspects. When focusing exclusively on stop-and-frisk searches, 46 percent were unconstitutional. Moreover, 84 percent of the searches involved African-American suspects. The searches were conducted and observed in the early 1990’s in the middle of the ongoing war on drugs. The study creates a troubled picture of police practices. The goal of this essay is to reframe public policy debates that will occur based on the research found by the Gould and Mastrofski study, therefore making the debates more functional and more productive, and much less familiar. References