



The officer must feel with sensitive fingers every portion of the prisoner’s body. A thorough search must be made of the prisoner’s arms and armpits, waistline and back, the groin and areas about the testicles, and entire surface of the legs down to the feet. – Police Manual, 1954

Here’s what happens when you are stopped and frisked. You are walking to work on a Monday morning. The cop car stops suddenly, two men with guns jump out, and they order you to face the building and put your hands up. They put their hands roughly all over your body, one squeezes something in your pocket and asks you, “What’s that?” You take out your asthma inhaler and show it to him. They pat you down one more time and then they just leave. They don’t apologize. Your neighbors are walking by, some looking at you sympathetically and others like they are wondering what crime you committed.

You feel humiliated.

Or you are going to visit your mom in the projects. The lock on the door to the lobby is always busted, and the buzzer to her apartment is broken too. You just hope the elevator is working because you don’t feel like walking up eight flights of stairs. Again.

You open the door and enter the lobby. Four cops are waiting. You recognize a couple of them from your previous visits to the neighborhood. One officer asks where you are going. “To visit my mom,” you say. “Put your hands against the wall,” another cop says. “Why? I’m just going to visit my mom.” “Trespass” is the answer. You tell them, “I’m not trespassing.” They surround you.

Now it’s a situation. You put your hands on the wall. They kick your feet to spread your legs wider. They make you take off your cap, they pat you up and down, they touch your private parts. Other people entering the building look away partly to preserve your dignity and partly because they hope that if they pretend not to notice the cops, the cops will pretend not to notice them.

Nobody coming inside the building uses a key – it would be ridiculous because the lock is broken. The cops write you up a citation for trespass. One of the officers you have seen before pulls you aside and says when you go to court just bring proof of your mother’s address and the judge will dismiss the case. Then they let you go. You hate them with every fiber of your being.

What does it mean when police go around touching people who are, in the eyes of the law, innocent? Stop-and-frisks are brutal assertions of police dominance of the streets, communicating to African American men through “three ways of feeling a black man” – sexual harassment, torture and even terrorism – that they are objects of disdain by the state.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Los Angeles police department gang unit officers stop and frisk a gang member. Photograph: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

The police had been conducting stop-and-frisks for decades before the supreme court got around to approving them in a case called Terry v Ohio. The practice began in the 1930s. When cops saw African Americans doing things they thought were suspicious – it could be driving an expensive car, socializing with white people or just hanging out on the corner – police would routinely make them show identification, search them and question them about where they worked and what they were doing.

Most stops did not lead to arrests, but that has never really been the purpose of stop-and-frisk. Rather, the benefit that police gained was a tool for “psychological warfare”, according to Orlando W Wilson, head of the Chicago police department from 1960-67 and one of the pioneers of modern policing. Stop-and-frisk is an effective law enforcement strategy, Wilson thought, because it creates the impression that the police are omnipresent.

Every supreme court case is a creature of its times. In 1968, the year Terry v Ohio was decided, the streets were wild. This was a new and troubling development, because for much of the early part of the century, at least since the Depression, crime had been relatively low. But between 1960 and 1970, the crime rate increased by 135%.

For violent crimes such as homicide and robbery, African American men were disproportionately the perpetrators and disproportionately the victims. There was a sense that the ghetto was out of control, and that the main culprits were black males. The police responded aggressively. James Baldwin, writing in 1962, observed:

The only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive ... The badge, the gun in the holster, and the swinging club make vivid what will happen should rebellion become overt ... He moves through Harlem, therefore, like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country, which is precisely what, and where he is, and is the reason he walks in twos and threes.

Of course, African Americans are not the only group that experiences group-based suspicion. Law enforcement agents have also relied on the Terry doctrine to profile Muslims and Arabs, particularly at airports. Latinos are the subject of special attention by Border Patrol agents. However, stop-and-frisk by local police officers disproportionately burdens African American men. It’s another example of the “chokehold” – the construction of every black man as a threat, and the resulting legal and social apparatus to put him down – at work.

In an eight-block area of Brooklyn, the police conducted almost 52,000 stop-and-frisks over a period of about four years

For African American men, stop-and-frisk is a form of government. It is the most visceral manifestation of the state in their lives. Most black men have never been convicted of a crime. About half of black men get arrested at some point during their lives. But virtually every African American man gets stopped-and-frisked. Of my black male friends and colleagues between the ages of 20 and 70, I don’t know one who hasn’t been.

Stop-and-frisk is a central source of inequality, discrimination and police abuse. It is a threat to democratic values. Yet stop-and-frisk has a strange prestige. It is the nation’s leading crime control policy – despite scant evidence that it actually works to make communities safer.

In an eight-block area of Brooklyn, New York, in a neighborhood called Brownsville, the police conducted almost 52,000 stop-and-frisks over a period of about four years, from 2006 to 2010. This was an average of one each year for every resident of this community.

But the stops were not distributed randomly. Virtually all the people stopped were young African American and Latino males. Men and boys aged 15-34 made up almost 70% of the stops. A young male citizen of Brownsville got seized and searched about five times a year.

Less than 1% of these police detentions resulted in arrests. In other words, thousands of men and boys in this neighborhood were grabbed by armed agents of the state and then subjected to “a careful exploration of the outer surfaces of a person’s clothing all over his or her body”, even though 99% of the time these people had committed no crime.

People who have been stopped-and-frisked use words such as “violated”, “invaded” and “chumped” to describe how it made them feel. It also may affect their actions: African American and Latino men, in particular, tell stories about the measures they take to avoid being stopped-and-frisked; these steps may range from decisions about clothing and hair style to the kinds of cars they drive or the neighborhoods in which they choose to live.

Abuse of African American men has often had a sexual component. Black male victims of lynching were frequently castrated, and then their penises were stuffed in their mouths. A New York police officer inserted a broom handle into the anus of Abner Louima. In 1970, Philadelphia cops raided three offices of the Black Panther Party, ordered the men to line up against a wall and strip, and then took photos of them. Police sometimes obtain confessions by warning male suspects if they don’t cooperate with the cops, they will be raped in prison.

Stop-and-frisk is also gendered, and sexual. Frisks are frisky. The police “cop” a feel. To “assume the position” is to make oneself submissive – one turns and offers his backside to another person. Often other cops participate, either as voyeurs or by doing another guy at the same time.

In African American neighborhoods, it is not uncommon to see a row of young men facing a wall, each waiting his turn to be patted down by one officer, or a group pat-down involving several officers and several young men. The journalist Richard Goldstein, writing about the assault of Abner Louima, observed:

Several false assumptions shape our obliviousness to the erotic element in police brutality: that men are rarely the victims of sexual assault, that straight men have no homosexual feelings, and that sexuality is limited to what we do in bed. The first perception allows police to force young black men to drop their pants – a common practice during street frisk – without risking charges of sexual harassment (imagine what would happen if black women were subject to this treatment); the second notion prevents us from imagining that cops who specialize in such tactics might find them exciting; and the third blinds us to the connection between sadism and racism.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Police frisk an African American man as other suspects lean against wall in Detroit, 1967. Photograph: American Stock Archive/Getty Images

The legal scholar Bernard Harcourt has also observed a sexual element in stop-and-frisk. He describes an encounter, recorded in the appendix of a study of police searches by the scholars Jon Gould and Stephen Mastrofski, between a white police officer and an African American male, both in their late twenties.

The black man, who had been riding a bike, was stopped-and-frisked by the police, who found no contraband. The cop then said to the black man: “I bet you are hiding [drugs] under your balls. If you have drugs under your balls, I am going to fuck your balls up.” As Harcourt relates, quoting from the study by Gould and Mastrofski, “The police officer then tells the young black suspect to ‘get behind the police car, and pull his pants down to his ankles’. The white police officer puts on some rubber gloves. He then begins ‘feeling around’ the black suspect’s testicles.”

The officer still found no contraband. He told the black man: “I bet you are holding them in the crack of your ass. You better not have them up your ass.” Harcourt writes: “The black man, at this point very compliant, ‘bent over, and spread his cheeks’. The white cop, still with his rubber gloves, then ‘put his hand up [the black man’s] rectum’.”

The police still found no evidence of a crime. They told the black man he could leave; he said “thank you” and rode off on his bike. Harcourt poses a series of questions, including: “What must have been going through the officer’s mind when he started putting on those rubber gloves? ... Did he feel embarrassed about being white and putting his hands up a black man’s rectum? Or did that excite him? Do you think he experienced some pleasure at the idea of penetrating a black man?”

It is difficult for some to understand sexuality between men when one or both men are perceived to be heterosexual. If I were describing a practice of police officers choosing, at will, which women they want to touch (and especially men of color choosing white women), the sexual element would seem obvious. Heteronormativity obscures what is going on between the police and black men.

Sometimes the police have literally tortured African American men. I grew up in an all-black neighborhood in Chicago. One day, when I was about 13, I rode my bike to the public library, which was in the white neighborhood a few miles away. When I got close to the library, a cop car pulled up next to me and an officer rolled down his window and asked if the bike I was riding belonged to me. “Yes,” I replied. “Does that car belong to you?” And I sped off.

When I got home I told my mother what I had done. She spanked me good. Didn’t I know what happened to black boys who talked to the police like that? I was lucky to be alive. It was one of those whoopings when the parent cries as much as the child.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Former Chicago police Lt Jon Burge, who was was convicted of obstruction of justice. Photograph: Charles Rex Arbogast/AP

It turns out that my mother was right about the police. During this time, Chicago police commander Jon Burge was overseeing the torture of 118 black men. He and his “midnight crew” of cops coerced confessions from suspects by methods that included sticking electrical devices up their rectums, pouring soda in their noses and burning them with curling irons.

Burge’s method of choice was the “black box”. This was an electrical device that would be attached to people who were shackled to tables or chairs. One wire from the box would be placed on their hands, and another on their ankles. An officer would then place a plastic bag over the suspect’s head and crank up the electricity.

Anthony Holmes, one of Burge’s victims, told prosecutors: “When he hit me with the voltage, that’s when I started gritting, crying, hollering ... It [felt] like a thousand needles going through my body. And then after that, it just [felt] like, you know – it [felt] like something just burning me from the inside, and, um, I shook, I gritted, I hollered, then I passed out.”

Chicago has now spent more than $100m investigating Burge’s midnight crew and compensating its victims. Some of the people tortured into confessing have been freed, while others are still in prison. In 2011, Burge himself was convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury and did four years in federal prison.

He still receives his pension from the Chicago police department.

Stop-and-frisk is not supposed to be punishment, but it feels that way to its victims. After the police have detained you, felt all over your body, and then let you go, you are supposed to go about your business as if nothing of consequence has happened.

Most citizens don’t take it personally when they are detained by a traffic light. Proponents of stop-and-frisk seem to feel that the Terry rule requiring you to submit, often spread eagle, and almost always in public, while the police physically investigate you to see if they can arrest you for a crime is somehow regulatory in the same sense as a traffic light. Except that the red light does not prefer to stop black men; the red light does not stop people as part of a performance that demonstrates its dominance and control; the red light engages in no kinky sexual violation while you’re waiting for it to turn green; and the red light derives no pleasure from the public spectacle of submission to its order. And the police do.

Stop-and-frisk gives the police the kind of authority over innocent people that they should not have in a democracy

Stop-and-frisks signal that the police control the streets, and they signal this in a way that is, as Foucault described torture, “public”, “spectacular”, “corporal” and “punitive”. When one sees a row of black men spread against a wall, one is witnessing what Foucault called “the very ceremonial of justice being expressed in all its force”.

Stop-and-frisk punishes black men, its most consistent repeat targets. It punishes them for being black and male. In 99 Problems, Jay-Z is asked by the officer who has stopped him:

“Son, do you know what I’m stopping you for?”

Jay-Z replies:



“Because I’m young and I’m black and my hat’s real low.”

The legal scholar Bennett Capers writes: “Stops are a dressing down, a public shaming, the very stigmatic harm that the [supreme] court has often, but not often enough, found troubling.”

During the 2013 Floyd trial in New York City, in which the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy was being challenged, a former police captain testified that Ray Kelly, then the city’s police commissioner, stated that stop-and-frisk focused on African American and Latino men because Kelly “wanted to instill fear in them, every time they leave their home they could be stopped by the police”.

An African American mother, writing on a blog about parenting, said this about her son’s experience growing up in New York City: “The saddest part of all of this is he’d begun to become ‘immune’ to being stopped. He, like too many other men of color in this city, had become desensitized to being treated criminally. They take it as par for the course; they shrug it off and most will laughingly share their war stories. But listen closely and you can hear anger co-mingled with humiliation and a weary, reluctant acceptance.”

One African American resident of Brooklyn told the New York Times, residents “fear the police because you can get stopped at any time”. The philosopher David Luban describes the torturer’s work as inflicting “pain one-on-one, deliberately, up close and personal, in order to break the spirit of the victim – in other words, to tyrannize and dominate the victim”.

The stories of many black men who are subject to seize-and-search are the stories of men who have had their spirits broken. They are afraid of the police. Stop-and-frisk demonstrates who is in charge, and the consequences of dissent. It gives the police the kind of authority over innocent people that they should not have in a democracy.

The country that African American men live in is not free.

Copyright © 2017 by Paul Butler. This excerpt originally appeared in Chokehold: Policing Black Men by Paul Butler, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.

Illustration by Joe Magee

