3 June 2020
The police tactic of stop and frisk is most closely associated with New York City in the 1990s and early 2000s under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg, but it is decades older and from its inception has been used a means to target and harass people of color. A Harvard Law Review article from December 1964 describes the tactic:
The New York "stop-and-frisk" law clarifies and significantly broadens statutory police powers to stop and search suspects, although present police practices may well exceed the new law's limits. Under the law, effective July 1, I964, a police officer may "stop" any person abroad in a public place who he "reasonably suspects" is committing, has committed, or is about to commit a felony or serious misdemeanor, and may demand his name, address, and an explanation of his actions. In addition, a policeman who "reasonably suspects" that he is in "danger of life or limb" may search the suspect for a dangerous weapon.
Such searches are also known as Terry stops, after the U.S. Supreme Court case Terry v. Ohio (1968) that found the tactic to be constitutional.
In New York City, the stop and frisk tactic was used more aggressively in the 1990s under the leadership of then Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton, and it was taken to new heights under Giuliani’s successor, Michael Bloomberg. It was used alongside the longer-term strategy of broken windows policing, the idea that fixing broken windows, erasing graffiti, and cracking down on misdemeanors would deter felonies. But the tactic was harshly criticized for disproportionately targeting people of color, as a tactic for oppressing minorities, and for disrupting minority communities by imprisoning large numbers of young men. Since the 1990s, the strategy of broken windows policing has also been shown to be ineffective at reducing serious crime.
While stop and frisk came to the fore in the 1990s, the date of the Harvard Law Review article quoted above shows the tactic is much older. It came into being during the Civil Rights era, and while such searches were ostensibly intended to protect police officers, they were often used as a means to shut down dissent by giving the police a pretext for arresting demonstrators.
The earliest use of the co-location of the words stop and frisk that I have found is from the New York Times of 15 January 1964:
Rodriguez and Solero were arrested for disorderly conduct on West End Avenue near 93d Street and were being driven to the 100th Street Station when, according to the police, Rodriguez began moving around in the back seat. The police said the patrolmen decided to stop and frisk Rodriguez.
As the car halted under an overpass at Riverside Drive and 96th Street, the police said, Rodriguez pulled a revolver and fired a shot that hit the dashboard. After a brief struggle, the police said, Patrolman Edmondson fired four times, killing both prisoners.
Note this is not a use of the phrase as we know it today. The suspect was already detained when the police stopped their police cruiser to frisk the suspect. But it is significant in that incidents like this one would create the political will to implement the stop and frisk law, as prior to that the police did not have authority to search a suspect until they had been formally arrested. Also of note is that the suspect was Puerto Rican, and the shooting was considered unjustified by the LatinX community.
And two weeks later stop and frisk, in the form and sense we know today, appears in the New York Daily News of 4 February 1964:
Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy yesterday urged support of the “stop and frisk bill” and the “knock-knock [sic] bill” now before the Legislature. The measures would allow cops to search persons suspected of criminal activity and permit police with search warrants to enter a home without knocking.
Those laws would be passed and signed by the governor the following month. And at the time the stop and frisk law was widely criticized by minority communities for being a tool of racist oppression. Here is an example from the Nation of Islam’s newspaper Muhammad Speaks of 27 March 1964. The rhetoric is over the top, but the underlying sentiment was widely shared:
Two notorious so-called anti-crime bills were signed into law by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, setting up a “police state” atmosphere, with Negroes and Puerto Ricans—traditional targets of harassment by law-enforcement agents in America undoubtedly scheduled to be the chief victims
The iniquitous bills, commonly referred to as “stop-and-frisk” and “no-knock” laws, are thought by many authorities to set up the machinery to rival Torquemada and his Star Chambers Proceedings and Hitlers Gestapo.
The tactic of stop and frisk may date to 1964, but the individual words that constitute the phrase are, of course, much older.
Stop is a curious word because it appears much later than we might expect. One would think that such a basic verb would go back to Old English, but that language only has the verb forstoppian, meaning to block or obstruct, which only appears once in the extant literature in the context of a medical text as part of a cure for an earache (don’t try this at home):
eft wið þon ilcan genim grenne æscenne stæf, lege on fyr, genim þonne þæt seaw þe him of gæþ, do on þa ilcan wulle, wring on eare & mid þære ilcan wulle forstoppa þæt eare
(again for the same, take a green ash staff, lay it on a fire, then take the sap that comes from it, put it on the same wool, wring it into the ear, and stop up the ear with the same wool)
The form *stoppian may have existed, but if so, it does not survive in any text we know today. Instead, it appears during the Middle English period, coming from either the unattested *stoppian or as a borrowing from another Germanic language. The relevant sense of stop appears c.1440 in the English-Latin dictionary Promptorium parvulorum sive clericorum:
Stoppyn’, or wythe stondynge a beest of goynge or rennyge. Sisto, Cath. obsto, Ug. (obsisto, P.)
(Stopping, or preventing an animal from going or running. Sisto, Cath. obsto, Ug. (obsisto, P.))
The Latin verbs being glossed mean to stop, oppose, resist, and stand in the way,
Frisk, on the other hand, is an early modern borrowing from French, originally meaning to move briskly, to frolic. It appears in John Rastell’s 1520 A New Iuterlude [sic], in a song about dancing:
So merely let vs daunce ey
And I can daunce it gyngerly
And I can fote it by & by
And I can pranke it [pro]pperly
And I can countenaunse comely
And I can kroke it curtesly
And I can lepe it lustly
And I can torn it trymly
And I can fryske it freshly
And I can loke it lordly
I can the thanke sensuall apetyte
That is þ[e] best daunce with out a pype
The connection to the adjective frisky can be seen in the above quotation.
The sense of searching a body arises out of the brisk movement of the searcher’s hands during a quick search. It appears in the c.1789 work Life’s Painter by George Parker:
Frisk’d. A knowing term used among traps, scouts and runners, when they take a person up on suspicion. They frisk him, that is, search him to find pawn-brokers, duplicates, writings, or property, that may tend to discovery.
[I’ve edited the original post to reflect the fact that stop and frisk in New York City reached its height under the leadership of Mayor Bloomberg, not Giuliani.]
Sources:
Cockayne, Oswald. Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England (1864–66), vol. 2 of 2. Wiesbaden: Kraus Reprint, 1965, 42–43. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Kaplan, Samuel. “Police Move to Win Puerto Rican Amity.” New York Times, 15 January 1964, 1, 21. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Leaks, Sylvester. “N.Y.s’ New No Knock Law.” Muhammad Speaks., 27 March 1964, 22. JSTOR.
“Murf Backs Bills For Quick Search.” Daily News (New York), 4 February 1964, 37. ProQuest.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. stop, v., frisk, v., frisk, adj.
Galfridus, Anglicus. Promptorium parvulorum sive clericorum, vol 3 of 3. Albert Way, ed. London: Camden Society, 1865, 477. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Parker, George. Life’s Painter of Variegated Characters in Public and Private Life. Dublin[?]: c. 1790, 136. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Rastell, John. A New Iuterlude. London: J. Rastell, 1520. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
“Recent Statute: Criminal Law—New York Authorizes Police To “Stop-And-Frisk” on Reasonable Suspicion.” Harvard Law Review, 78.2, December 1964, 473. JSTOR.
