Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk history will hinder voter turnout — but not the way Bernie Sanders thinks | Opinion

Hiram Rivera still has nightmares about being stopped and frisked by police. The 43-year-old executive director of the Community Resource Hub for Safety and Accountability was stopped for the first time as a young black teenager in Connecticut, and has lost count of how many times he’s been stopped since.

One stop stands out in his memory. In spring 2012, just a few months after he moved to Philadelphia, two plainclothes officers stopped him around 38th and Chestnut. “They jumped out of their car with guns," Rivera remembers, “I quickly stopped any and all movements. You kind of just breathe." They told him he fit a description of someone who robbed a nearby 7-Eleven. After a few minutes they got a message over the radio, said “sorry about the inconvenience,” and left. “I stood there in the same spot, I’d say, for another two minutes," Rivera says, “I teared up. My body was shaking.” It was the fifth time he had police draw a gun on him.

Stop-and-frisk, the proactive policing practice that became infamous due to New York City’s use of it on a massive scale during Michael Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor, is back in the news since Bloomberg announced his candidacy in the Democratic presidential primary. Still, the lasting impacts of the practice are largely ignored.

A major component of the stop-and-frisk experience is racial disparity. In Wednesday night’s Democratic debate, the first with Bloomberg on stage, Sen. Bernie Sanders connected stop-and-frisk to electability: “Mr. Bloomberg had policies in New York City of stop-and-frisk which went after African American and Latino people in an outrageous way. That is not a way you’re going to grow voter turnout.”

Social science research suggests that Sanders is right, but probably not in the way he thought. Sanders was trying to draw a contrast between himself and Bloomberg on who could bring out more black and Latino voters in the election — only time will tell if he’s right.

But when Bloomberg as mayor “put all the cops in minority neighborhoods" and instructed them to “throw [kids] up against the walls and frisk them," as he is heard saying in a 2015 tape, he already suppressed voter turnout by demonstrating to black and Latino New Yorkers that they are not a valued part of the community.

According to a 2017 study out of New York University, a high number of stops in a New York City neighborhood reduced turnout among the area’s registered voters in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections. The largest effect, unsurprisingly, was on black men. Suppressing turnout is just one of many negative impacts that stop-and-frisk has on civic life, and that are often neglected in discussion about the practice.

Stop-and-frisk is very much alive in Philadelphia. Mayor Jim Kenney promised in 2015 that if he were elected, “stop-and-frisk will end in Philadelphia, no question.” That firm position shifted once he took office. Last year Kenney told The Inquirer’s editorial board: “You are going to reduce the unconstitutional nature of [stop-and-frisk] and the aggregate number of it. You are not ever going to stop it as a police tool.”

While it’s true that the Philadelphia Police Department is stopping fewer pedestrians, and fewer of the stops are unconstitutional, the reach of the practice in Philadelphia is still shocking. In 2019, police stopped about 77,000 pedestrians in Philadelphia — 10 times more stops than the New York Police Department, even though Philly is roughly a sixth of New York City’s size. And as the overall number of stops declined, the racial breakdown remains the same, with about 70% of all stopped pedestrians every year being black. The number of vehicle stops — another form of stop-and-frisk — dramatically increased in recent years.

» READ MORE: As Philadelphia aims to curb racial disparities, why are police stops of black drivers skyrocketing?

Michael Nutter, former Philadelphia mayor and current Bloomberg campaign political cochair, is a proponent of stop-and-frisk. “If anyone was abused, mistreated, intimidated,” Nutter told The Inquirer, “I certainly would apologize to those citizens.” But, “when you’re the mayor,” Nutter says, “your responsibility is to use every legally available strategy, tactic to help ensure the safety of your citizens.”

Whether stop-and-frisk contributes to public safety is highly debatable — with good evidence suggesting it is not an effective way to prevent crime.

Nutter says he understands the stakes, considering he himself was stopped or pulled over by police many times — most recently about 15 months ago a few blocks from his Philadelphia home. “I remember virtually every encounter that I had with a police officer from the time I was 17 years old," Nutter says. "It is going to leave a mark with you.”

That’s a common sentiment shared among people who have been stopped.

“When you’ve been stopped, and when you’ve been part of an aggressive stop," Councilmember Isaiah Thomas told The Inquirer, “it stays on your mind long after that.” The newly elected millennial member of City Council says that he has been pulled over or stopped by police more than 20 times — three last year alone. Some of these incidents included invasive “underwear searches” that are illegal. Growing up as a black man in Philadelphia, Thomas says he thought that being stopped by police was normal. “If I wouldn’t have run for City Council, I would have never thought that stop-and-frisk is unjust. It’s just the norm."

» READ MORE: An untold part of stop-and-frisk: Underwear searches

Last year, Thomas, who coaches a high school basketball team, left practice with his assistant coach and his son, who was 6 at the time. Driving through Kensington, he was pulled over by police.

Even though the stop was after the primary and his de facto election to City Council, Thomas didn’t want to mention that next to his son. “I’m a black man, my son is a black man, unfortunately there is a chance that he will have to go through this. I don’t want him to think that you get out of these situations by saying ‘I’m a councilman’ or ‘My dad is a councilman.’ ”

Even after the officer wrote Thomas a ticket — for allegedly texting and driving — he held them there for 15 minutes. Thomas says it felt intentional. “That’s not how my son should learn to interact with police, by seeing his father being stopped for nothing.”

Thomas is right. Police stops affect the way children as well as adults figure out their relationship with institutions. Teenagers who were stopped by police, witnessed a stop, or knew people who were stopped were more likely to view law and law enforcement as illegitimate and problematic.

In 1968, when the Supreme Court formalized the practice of stop-and-frisk by ruling that police officers can stop individuals and pat them down to ensure that they don’t have a gun based only on reasonable suspicion, the justices recognized that being stopped and frisked is intrusive — but thought of it as a minimal intrusion.

Susan Bandes, professor emerita of law at DePaul University, explains that the court sought to “balance the minimalness of the intrusion with the importance of the police being able to do something in an unfolding situation.” However, Bandes says that the court “understated” the intrusiveness of a stop-and-frisk and “completely missed” the impact from “targeting entire groups and entire neighborhoods.”

» READ MORE: The solution to stopping stop-and-frisk problems in Philly: Abolish it | Opinion

Like Thomas, Rivera said these experiences skewed his relationship with the police and government in general. “You become distrusting of the people who enable them through laws, through contracts, through city budgets.” While he does vote, he feels that his impact on police tactics is limited: “My vote doesn’t ensure my safety, my vote doesn’t ensure my well-being. When it comes to policing, my vote means nothing.”

Thomas says he saw experiences like being stopped make people disengage with government, including choosing not to vote. Like Rivera, who dedicated his life to organizing, Thomas chose a different path. “When you become disengaged from government, you perpetuate the same problems that made you disengage in the first place,” Thomas explains. “Instead of saying all this is against me, I said I need to change some of this.”

The conversation about stop-and-frisk is inherently about citizenship and belonging. Instead of pandering to black and Latino voters every four years, politicians should end practices like stop-and-frisk that make people of color want to disengage with a system that views them as a threat.