Spencer Wolff Interrogates the NYPD's "Stop and Frisk" Program in 2014 Documentary Stop

STOP

(Spencer Wolff, 2014, USA, not rated, 87 minutes)

To the New York Police Department, "stop and frisk" was designed to keep the city's citizens safe. To critics, however, the proactive policing technique operated as a form of racial bias that targeted Black men. 

Director Spencer Wolff, a human rights attorney who spent a year working in South Africa, presents a convincing argument that it's a form of American apartheid. He constructs his documentary around the case of Floyd v. City of New York, filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights in 2008 to prove that "stop, question and frisk," the policy's full name, is unconstitutional. 

Darius Charney, the organization's senior staff attorney, notes that the policy resulted in a 500% increase in stops over the course of four years. Under Mayor Rudy Giuliani (1994-2001), more aggressive policing famously led to the death of 23-year-old Amadou Diallo. While reaching for his wallet, officers shot the Guinean immigrant 41 times. All four were acquitted. 

Wolff focuses on 20-year-old David Ourlicht, one of four defendants in the lawsuit. He also interviews members of Ourlicht's family, including his grandfather, Boris, a man of Russian-Jewish descent who fell in love with and married a woman of color in the 1940s (Michal Goldman profiled the couple in his 2008 documentary At Home in Utopia). 

For David, a biracial law student who lives on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, stops had become routine. At 17, officers even strip-searched and held him overnight in the course of their search for a 27-year-old robbery suspect. 

Wolff also speaks with Frantz Jerome, a Black South Bronx art educator who recounts the many times cops have stopped him over the years. Officer Adhyl Polanco, who bravely testified against stop and frisk, tells Wolff that he felt pressure to meet quotas, particularly once Mike Bloomberg, "a numbers man," became mayor. Bloomberg needed to justify New York's outsized police force, so he promoted a method to make officers more productive than ever--at the expense of the city's Black population. 

Wolff speaks to a few dissenting voices, as well, like former chief Stephen McAllister of the New York City Transit Police and Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute who dispute his findings. If anything, Mac Donald argues, Black citizens are "under-stopped" relative to the number of crimes committed by people of color. The judge in the case disagrees, ruling that the NYPD carried out stop and frisk in a racially discriminatory manner. Her ruling doesn't stop the policy, but rather imposes a series of reforms, which Bloomberg proceeds to resist through appeals and other processes. 

If stop and frisk decreased under Bloomberg's successor, Bill de Blasio (2014-2021), the killing of unarmed Black men, like Eric Garner, continued. Though there's no doubt the case made a difference, there's also no doubt that the struggle for police accountability continues--in NYC and beyond. 

Though made eight years ago, Stop remains uncomfortably relevant.  

Stop is available on DVD from Kino Lorber, on streaming through the usual pay operators, or for free through Vudu. Images from the Kickstarter page and Wikipedia / The Dallas Weekly News (Amadou Diallo, 1992).