P O L I C Y E S S AY

S T O P , Q U E S T I O N , A N D F R I S K
P R A C T I C E S

On the Deterrent Effect of Stop, Question,

and Frisk
Robert Apel
Rutgers University

T
he study by David Weisburd, Alese Wooditch, Sarit Weisburd, and Sue-Ming
Yang (2016, this issue) on the effects of the New York City Police Department’s
(NYPD’s) policy of stop, question, and frisk (SQF) is a most timely one. Their
sophisticated analysis of the relationship between SQF and crime will be a model for
future evaluation efforts exploiting the spatiotemporal aspect of police interventions. The
approach seems well suited to the study of highly focused interventions that are thought to
yield effects that are isolated in space or time (Sherman, 1990).
The use of SQF in New York City, not without a good deal of controversy, has been
credited with sustained crime reductions that outpaced those of other large cities in the
United States.1 The claim considered by Weisburd and colleagues (2016) is whether the
volume of SQF is a significant deterrent to serious crime. Their study provides strong
evidence to support that contention. For example, they report that one additional SQF
reduces the probability of crime by approximately 0.02. In an analysis specific to the Bronx,
they also report that, in addition to the deterrent effect of SQF on crime in the targeted hot
spot, there is a short-lived “diffusion of benefits” (Clarke and Weisburd, 1994). Namely,
the SQF tactic exhibits crime prevention effects that extend for a short distance beyond the
hot spot, as well as extend for several days afterward within the hot spot itself.

The author is grateful for insightful comments provided by Anthony Braga, Rod Brunson, Richard Rosenfeld,
and Sara Wakefield. All errors of omission or commission are his alone. Direct correspondence to Robert Apel,
School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ 07102 (e-mail: robert.apel@rutgers.edu).
1. Implicit to this claim is that the “backing off” from SQF that has transpired in the last year by the NYPD
could presage a modest increase (or slowed decline) in crime.

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12175 C 2015 American Society of Criminology 57

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Policy Essay Stop, Question, and Frisk Practices

This policy essay seeks to engage in a broad discussion about evaluations of the deterrent
efficacy of SQF and similar kinds of police interventions on crime, and it is not intended to
be specifically critical of the analysis by Weisburd and colleagues (2016). Indeed, I regard
this study as one of the best examples of nonexperimental evaluation in policing research.
But to anticipate the primary conclusion of this essay, firm claims about the deterrent
efficacy of SQF are tenuous, in this study and others. There are two reasons for this claim:
(1) SQF is used as one component of a multipronged “regime” of crime control that
includes many other forms of proactive policing and surveillance, the specifics of which
are poorly articulated in nonexperimental evaluations; and (2) the reach of SQF possibly
extends well beyond the discouragement of potential offenders to the discouragement of
potential victims in ways that are not yet well understood but that have implications for
crime reporting and recording.
As will be explained in more detail, for these two reasons, the genuine deterrent effects
of SQF are impossible to pin down. Before turning attention to these issues, however, it
might help to provide some theoretical discussion of SQF accompanied by a description
of the criminal justice context that concerns us in the study by Weisburd and colleagues
(2016).

Some Context for Stop, Question, and Frisk

By way of background, SQF is a specific form of hot-spots policing that falls into the “high-
focus/low-diversity” cell of Weisburd and Eck’s (2004) tactical typology. A high-focus tactic
is one that is targeted at certain places (or against certain people) where certain kinds of
crime are known to be concentrated, whereas a low-diversity tactic is one that relies narrowly
on the coercive legal authority of the police (e.g., ticketing and arrests). Although manifold
strategies are simultaneously employed in crime hot spots by law enforcement—a point to
which I will return in the next section—SQF contrasts with other archetypal models of
policing such as problem-oriented policing (high focus/high diversity), community policing
(low focus/high diversity), and standard policing (low focus/low diversity).
The SQF tactic is more heavily deployed in crime hot spots (Weisburd, Telep, and
Lawton, 2014), but it tends to share elements in common with both problem-oriented
policing (high focus) and standard policing (low diversity). The former model has a growing
evidence base, whereas the latter tends to fare poorly in evaluations (Braga, Welsh, and
Schnell, 2015; Weisburd and Eck, 2004). How exactly SQF fits in this typology depends
on how it is deployed in hot spots, which also has implications for its efficacy. If used in an
indiscriminate manner in a generic crime hot spot—namely, “zero tolerance” of disorder
and low-level violations, á la Wilson and Kelling (1982)—the SQF tactic is more closely
aligned with the standard policing portfolio, and it shares its well-known weaknesses. On
the other hand, if used in a more focused way and as part of a broader strategy to specifically
combat violence in gun crime hot spots, for example, the tactic would seem to be suited

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 Apel

perfectly for the problem-oriented policing portfolio and the promise that these kinds of
tactics offer.2
It helps, next, to step back a bit and consider the crime-control rationale for SQF.
The tactic is clearly rooted in deterrence, specifically perceptual deterrence. This is an
implicit model of choice in which would-be offenders behave as if they weigh the potential
rewards of crime against the potential losses, balance this reward/risk ratio against noncrime
alternatives, and then “choose” the action that makes them as well off as possible under the
circumstances. Crime is said to be deterred when at least one of three sanction characteristics
lowers the net expected advantages from crime relative to the net expected advantages from
one or more noncriminal courses of action. As many criminal justice students can probably
recite unaided, these sanction properties include certainty (probability of detection), severity
(intensity of punishment), and celerity (swiftness of disposition). Theoretically, deterrence
is maximized by sanctions that are perceived as inexorable, burdensome, and expeditious.
Of the three deterrence concepts, SQF operates largely on certainty enhancement,
which research has consistently suggested is a more salient crime deterrent than sanction
severity or celerity (Apel and Nagin, 2011; Cook, 1980; Durlauf and Nagin, 2012). The
logic is simple. By performing aggressive field interrogations in high-crime neighborhoods,
police officers convince at least some would-be offenders that they should refrain from
criminal involvement in that vicinity and that they should possibly avoid the neighborhood
altogether if they have unpaid fines or warrants out for their arrest. The probability of
detection and apprehension would simply be too great to risk it.
An intentional by-product of the use of the SQF tactic is the removal of handguns
from the street. Indeed, an important legal justification for SQF is the personal safety of
police officers, who are authorized to perform a protective pat-down if they have “reasonable
suspicion” that a stopped person is engaged in criminal activity and could be armed and
dangerous (Terry v. Ohio, 1968). Aside from the illegality of carrying an unlicensed firearm,
law enforcement interest in the seizure of handguns and the deterrence of their possession is
also rooted in “weapon instrumentality.” According to the instrumentality thesis, handguns
have a unique capacity to transform otherwise nonlethal disputes into lethal ones. Thus,
although handgun removal might not prevent the occurrence of interpersonal disputes, it
undoubtedly reduces the lethality of these disputes (Cook, 1991; Ganpat, Minakoemarie,
van der Leun, and Nieuwbeerta, 2013; Wells and Horney, 2002).

2. To be sure, policing tactics (including SQF) for the suppression of gun violence are informed by much
evidence suggesting that gun-focused policing can indeed reduce gun violence (Braga, Apel, and
Welsh, 2014; Braga, Hureau, and Papachristos, 2014; Sherman and Rogan, 1995). But one important
characteristic of these successful prior efforts is that they have been explicitly concentrated in gun and
violent crime hot spots or else targeted at known gun offenders. The NYPD’s use of the SQF tactic is
more heavily concentrated in crime hot spots (Weisburd et al., 2014), but it is also widely employed
outside of hot spots in a way that can undermine its efficacy (Lum and Nagin, 2015).

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Policy Essay Stop, Question, and Frisk Practices

Let’s consider some facts about the criminal justice system in New York City that might
be helpful for putting the NYPD’s use of SQF into contemporary context. Crime in New
York City has declined fairly continuously since the early 2000s, and it is currently down by
approximately one third since that era. But two countervailing trends make the oft-touted
“New York miracle” even more miraculous than many observers probably realize (Zimring,
2011). First, New York City has been quietly downsizing its use of police and prisons for
the last 10 years. Police staffing is down from approximately 40,000 to 35,000, representing
around a 15% decline from its peak in the early 2000s. Second, the New York State prison
population has declined by around 20% during this same time period, with much of this
driven by a drop in new commitments for drug offenses committed in New York City. New
York City jails are comparably smaller over this period, as well.
Sustained crime reduction in the context of a shrinking criminal justice system is
remarkable in light of what is known from other deterrence research. There is now a well-
established body of recent research indicating that hiring more police officers can have
a deterrent impact on serious crime (Apel and Nagin, 2011). The consensus estimate is
that a 10% increase in sworn personnel yields an average reduction in total crime in the
neighborhood of 3%, with reductions in certain violent crimes around 5% and possibly as
high as 10%.3 In addition, the threat of incarceration might also have a modest deterrent
effect on crime (Apel and Nagin, 2011).4 Consequently, one might have predicted serious
crime in New York City to be higher today than it was about 10 years ago simply because of
the contraction of law enforcement and corrections. Instead, crime has been on a continuous
decline.
In sum, a deterrent impact of SQF on crime is at least theoretically plausible, operating
through the perceived certainty of apprehension for wrongdoing, or for unlawful possession
of contraband or weapons. In the context of larger metropolitan trends in law enforcement
and corrections, it is possible that pronounced growth in the SQF tactic even helped
compensate for the shortfall created by criminal justice budget cuts impacting New York
City. It is certainly worth considering whether the SQF tactic allowed the NYPD to achieve
more crime control (via deterrence) with fewer police officers on the street and fewer
offenders locked up in jail or prison. As we will see in the next two sections, for a variety of
reasons, it is not necessarily the case that the crime reductions observed following the use
of SQF are evidence of the deterrent effect of the tactic.

3. These estimates are admittedly crude because the consensus is also that how police departments
deploy their existing personnel matters more than how many police officers are employed (National
Research Council, 2004). The estimates provided here are averaged across highly heterogeneous police
departments, tactics, and communities. More recent efforts have devoted attention to single agencies;
in particular, to large changes in the street presence and activity of police (Apel and Nagin, 2011).
4. Widespread consensus does not yet exist about the deterrent efficacy of imprisonment. The deterrent
impact estimates vary widely, are highly context specific, and have shrunk in recent years as mass
incarceration has yielded “diminishing returns” (Apel and Nagin, 2011).

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Marginal Deterrent Effect of Stop, Question, and Frisk

The evaluation of a crime-control policy like SQF is driven by a deceptively simple
question—“does it deter crime?” It turns out that questions like this are overly vague
and poorly framed. Instead they are better formulated in a way that promotes conceptual
clarity about what is being evaluated—“does doing Y deter crime compared to doing X?” This
task is aided by an appreciation of the intricacies of counterfactual logic, causal relativity,
and construct inference (Holland, 1986; Shadish, Cook, and Campbell, 2002).
First, evaluation of a deterrence policy requires clear explication of the “ingredients” of
the policy itself—the intervention regime. It helps to remember that SQF involves much
more than a face-to-face confrontation between a police officer and a suspicious person.
It possibly includes the presence of a routine police patrol, visibility of one or two police
officers, a vigilant property owner who granted permission for police to be on the premises,
gathering of spectators during the encounter, and (possibly many) other elements. All of
these co-occurring elements are implicit to the intervention—they are taking place in the
background when an SQF transpires, and yet they are likely to be essential features of the
SQF intervention itself.5
Second, evaluation of a deterrence policy requires clear conceptualization of the absence
of the intervention—the status quo regime. It is imperative to know what the level of police
activity would have been in the absence of SQF. Bear in mind, in a crime hot spot, the
absence of SQF is hardly “zero police activity,” but instead it is some status quo level of
non-SQF police activity that requires articulation. It would be helpful to know what else
besides SQF the NYPD was doing in crime hot spots because this becomes the benchmark
against which the value added by SQF can be considered. For example, it would be helpful
to have information about the number of arrests and tickets that do not result from SQF,
the number of tickets for parking or moving violations, the number of officer-hours that
police spend in the hot spot, and the list goes ever on.
Let’s not forget that evaluation of the deterrent impact of SQF (or any crime-control
policy) is fundamentally concerned with what is known as “marginal deterrence.” This
refers to the value added by incremental growth in the volume of SQF—and all of the
implicit elements that the SQF intervention regime entails—with respect to crime, over
and above all other ongoing law enforcement activities that take place in the crime hot spot.
Without appreciation of these manifold police activities, evaluation efforts are doomed to
produce highly abstract estimates of the efficacy of SQF—namely, for a hypothetical law
enforcement regime in which SQF is the only enforcement tool available in a crime hot

5. Although discourse on deterrence has emphasized the role of police officers in the detection and
apprehension of offenders, Nagin (2013) considered police officers to be “sentinels” in addition to
“apprehension agents” (Lum and Nagin, 2015). In light of research findings on the effectiveness of
directed patrol, the prolonged presence of police in a crime hot spot might very well be the active
ingredient of SQF, as opposed to anything that the police were doing (Sherman and Weisburd, 1995).

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spot. But the estimates would not necessarily represent the deterrent impact of SQF on
crime because no such law enforcement regime exists.6
Bear in mind also that SQF and other law enforcement tools are not independent
of passive “policing” activities. For example, public and private surveillance has expanded
markedly during the time period considered in the study by Weisburd and colleagues (2016).
The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) has spent millions of dollars installing
security cameras, and it reportedly installed 3,500 cameras between 2003 and 2012. The
pace of camera installation by NYCHA has quickened even more during the tenure of the
city’s current mayor, who oversaw the installation of another 2,000 cameras in 2014 alone.
This complicates the deterrence question even more because public and private surveillance
is necessarily part of the intervention and status quo regimes.
In sum, analysts must devote careful consideration to the full array of enforcement
and surveillance activities that cloud estimates of the deterrent impact of SQF per se on
crime. It is imperative to remember that growth in SQF in a crime hot spot does not
occur in isolation from growth in other forms of police visibility and activity, as well as
in nonpolice forms of neighborhood surveillance. Consider the following question: If the
number of SQFs in a crime hot spot were to drop to zero, would the targeted neighborhood
be free of police scrutiny? If we can provide an affirmative answer to this question, then the
estimated impact does indeed represent the deterrent effect of SQF on crime. Unfortunately,
the honest answer to this question is “of course not,” which suggests that the efficacy of
the SQF tactic, at least from the standpoint of marginal deterrence, is considerably more
ambiguous than its advocates might like to admit.

Victim-Centered Considerations
Whatever the efficacy of SQF with respect to crime, it has apparently come at the expense
of people who were mostly innocent of any wrongdoing. For example, analysis of data
downloaded from the NYPD indicates that the 1,241 stops performed on an average day
between 2003 and 2013 yielded 73 daily arrests—less than a 6% “hit rate” for criminal
violations—including two daily arrests for unlawful gun possession.7 An advocate will
undoubtedly argue that the apparent inefficiency of all of these stops is, in fact, evidence
of the tactic’s effectiveness because many of these “suspicious people” would have been at

6. A similar argument was made by the National Research Council (2012) concerning the deterrent
efficacy of the death penalty relative to non-capital punishment. For deterrence, the salient question is
whether execution deters murder over and above the other sentencing options that a state has at its
disposal. In other words, the “counterfactual” punishment is not the absence of a punishment for
murder, as implied by existing research. Instead, non-capital punishments are already quite severe
sanctions, including a lengthy prison sentence or even life imprisonment without the possibility of
parole. For its failure to properly specify the non-capital punishment regime (among other reasons), the
National Research Council concluded that the evidence base on the deterrent effect of execution was
uninformative for policy making.
7. nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/analysis_and_planning/stop_question_and_frisk_report.shtml.

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imminent risk of criminal activity if not for a proactive SQF policy. On the other hand,
it is conceivable that the policy has had unintended consequences by unfairly targeting
innocents.
Let us suppose that a higher volume of SQF does indeed reduce serious crime and that
the effect is causal. Whose behavior is modified by the tactic? Is it the behavior of potential
offenders? Or could it be the behavior of potential victims? The standard explanation is
that potential offenders curtail their activity in crime hot spots for fear of being stopped by
police—this is the deterrence argument. But a plausible counterpoint says that aggressive
use of SQF can alter the behavior of potential victims. This explanation has two strands,
one invoking criminal opportunity structure via changes in the routine activities of potential
crime victims, and the other emphasizing crime data production via changes in the reporting
behavior of actual crime victims.
On the first point, one could imagine that residents and passersby in crime hot spots
are reluctant to be seen on the street for fear of being harassed by police for doing nothing
wrong. Therefore, some crime reduction might be because one necessary element for a
criminal event—the presence of a victim—has been eliminated from the equation. SQF
might alter the nature of street activity by driving more people indoors who would otherwise
be at risk for victimization, presenting fewer opportunities for gain to potential offenders.
On the second point, the aggressive use of SQF could erode citizens’ willingness to
report crime to, or to cooperate in investigation or intelligence gathering with, the police.
In a recent survey conducted by the Vera Institute of Justice, young respondents who were
stopped more frequently reported less willingness to report crimes even when they were
the crime victims (Fratello, Rengifo, and Trone, 2013). Although admittedly a nonrandom
survey, one cannot help but wonder whether SQF has had an unintended impact on the
production of official crime data as a result of reluctance to report criminal victimization to
the police in the first place.8
In sum, we might want to bear in mind that both offenders and victims are likely to
modify their behavior in response to SQF. Although speculative, declines in serious crime
might arise through means other than (or in addition to) deterrence. Two such implications
follow from the realization that the counting of official crimes requires (1) the existence
of a victim and (2) a report to the police on behalf of the victim. Overly enthusiastic use
of the SQF tactic might lower serious crime simply because residents avoid being in a hot
spot to forestall harassment from the police or because crime victims fail to report to the
police altogether on account of what is perceived to be illegitimate use of authority. In other
words, it is possible that the only thing which declines following growth in SQF is “official”

8. Also, testable, crime-specific predictions follow from this claim. For example, we would expect crimes
that are less sensitive to victim nonreporting (e.g., homicide) to be unaffected. My thanks go to Richard
Rosenfeld for bringing this point to my attention in personal communication about this policy essay
(September 2015).

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Policy Essay Stop, Question, and Frisk Practices

crime, or crime that is known to police. Absent a measure of crime that is independent of
the police, it cannot be definitively ruled out that any crime reductions following SQF are
measurement artifacts.

Conclusion
The study by Weisburd and colleagues (2016) is not the first word on the impact of SQF
on crime (Rosenfeld and Fornango, 2014), nor will it be the last word. Given the centrality
of deterrence as the proposed mechanism for any SQF-crime relationship, it is important
to carefully consider what this means for evaluation of the tactic. Deterrence is a behavioral
model whereby potential offenders alter their behavior for fear that they will be apprehended
by the police for wrongdoing. The implicit claim is that growth in the volume of SQF adds
crime-control value over and above normal police visibility and activity in crime hot spots.
This is the notion of “marginal deterrence.”
The claim of this policy essay is that conclusions about the deterrent efficacy of SQF
are, at present, ambiguous. The first concern is that the tactic is deployed in hot spots as one
part of a larger crime-control regime that includes many other forms of proactive policing
and surveillance, which calls into question the value added by SQF per se as opposed to
other elements of hot-spots policing. The second concern is that aggressive use of the SQF
tactic might discourage law-abiding residents, which could eliminate criminal opportunities
but also make victims reluctant to report crimes to the police.
Until we have a better sense of what SQF and non-SQF regimes look like in crime hot
spots, and are sure that the tactic only antagonizes offenders as opposed to innocents, the
question of its true deterrent effect will remain frustratingly unanswered. Consider this my
challenge to future evaluation efforts.

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Case Cited
Terry v. Ohio, 392 US 1 (1968).

Robert Apel is an associate professor of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, Newark,

NJ. His research interests include the economy, crime-control policy, and the life course.

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